The picture shows the “I’m down for maintenance” screen that I got when in the middle of talking with a mate, it stopped syncing waves, feel a little undue similarity to the “Fail Whale” for Twitter. Text reads “Surf’s out, dude. Google Wave is down for maintenance. Time to chillax.”
When I first got the invite to Google Wave I was all excited about it. It gave me some status, and I derived more status by dishing out invites to people I knew from my degree and others over twitter. “It’s from Google and it’s by invite only, so it must be good”. After that initial excitement and hype, I find that I hardly use it, I have no need to. There is nothing in my life which fits in with it. People contact me over email, instant messaging, phoning or sms. There’s no reason for me to keep a wave tab open.
Since twitter’s become harder to use as a native app in China, my use of that has stopped, as it’s a black hole for time usage, but that’s another thing entirely, it’s just an illustration about the fact that we have all this Web 2.0 technology and we still use email as a fundamental web app. Unless you’re prepared to/want to devote time and energy to using it, or are required to by your office or work environment, there’s really little point, email is too prevalent.
I understand the functionality of Wave vastly improves on email, and I desperately want it to replace email, but I don’t see how Google can achieve that paradigm shift. Google have achieved a big shift twice before, and these were by no means small innovations and I’m greatly appreciative to Google for this. Firstly of course in search, they trounced Altavista, askjeeves and all the other search engines around when they first came out. Secondly they really shook things up when they released Gmail, 1GB of storage, by the standards of hotmail at the time 2MB, 1GB seemed unbelievable. Now we think nothing of it, and we have over 7GB freely available through gmail now. Incredible.
However, if we look to some of the other products that Google offers us now and in the past: Image hosting at Picasaweb, video hosting at Google Video, and social networking at Orkut, they have repeatedly failed to create a core community of fan and power users for these very social web functions. Google Code and Google Groups provide very specific uses that are great, but not really mainstream. The fact is the technology behind these things is very powerful. The integration of Picasa and Picasaweb is fantastic. When you consider Google Video vs Youtube, GVideo was superior, and when it comes to Orkut, well I don’t know much about it, everybody I know uses Facebook, and that’s the thing.
Unless others become regular users of Google Wave, I just don’t see it becoming worthwhile. Federation might be good for business, but who’s going to want to sign up to a non-Google federation of Google Wave as Google are going to be the ones who will drive the technology forward, be the most up-to-date and the most integrated. One of the initial uses of wave seem to be a combination of new kind of instant messaging, and email style messaging, making it like an dually asynchronous and synchronous system similar to twitter. Another seems to be collaborative forum style thing. But we have forum boards for that, and they’re much more effective. The final use-case I’ve seen is a collaborative document style tool, either for arranging events, or projects, and this seems to have already been available through a combination of services like Google docs, email and calenders on Facebook or whatever, and this works because people keep checking their email all the time. I guess that’s all I’m saying, that because we already have such prevalence of email, it’s so engrained, that it’s going to take a while for it to gather enough momentum. The only way I see it happening is that if corporations start using it, then people will have to check it more often, and it becomes more common place, as frankly I believe that Google doesn’t have enough social web pulling power to take it past the hype.
More From AlastairClark
- My Impressions Of Google Wave
- Motivation to Achieve a Personal Goal Version 2
- Google Saying No To Censorship
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