Thoughts On Google Wave
Google Wave, we hardly knew thee. Literally.
I was once excited by Google Wave’s potential. But after receiving a then highly coveted invite, well… let’s just say I was underwhelmed, and fully intended to write a post regarding those first impressions.
And looking back at old blog posts, it seems I never got around to writing said post. Now that’s uninspiring.
My feelings can be summed up in one phrase: Google Wave felt like a classically bad technology product designed by engineers; for engineers, and as a result, never had a prayer of moving beyond early adopters. Sure there were some interesting ideas, but everything else from features to user interface design and evangelism left a lot to be desired.
I gave Wave a semi-serious shot as a live chat room with several participants during an Apple event. As the conversation dissolved into chaos, my computer slowed to a crawl, struggling to keep up with the pointlessness of real-time typing (an “innovation” as useful as OS X dock magnification) else. Also frustrating was the opaque method of adding widgets to a wave (import them from a list first), or the nonsense ability of editing other people’s words.
So let’s just talk about the bigger implications. It’s entirely possible that Google is culturally unable to understand social media. One personal observation: most people use social sites to be wholly unproductive — to waste time. Meanwhile, Google is obsessed with productivity. Read the origin story of Foursquare for more insight. Maybe Google need to round up the folks who spend their 20% time on completely unproductive things.
Other than that, perhaps Google’s remaining option is to write an obscenely huge check — one that makes YouTube’s look like peanuts — to a particular M. Zuckerberg. Why toy around with Slide and “Google Me” — everyone knows what the whole enchilada is.