Is Google Wave really so waving?
It has now been a while since Google Wave has sent out their first invites to a selected few. Since then the wave has been spreading, invites have been rolling out and the blogosphere is alive with reviews and suggestions for optimisation.
Just yesterday Mashable reported on Wave’s new feature, the Twitter-like option to follow and unfollow certain waves. The reason for this being the general critique that Wave can get quite hectic and difficult to keep up with if many people edit many different Waves all the time.
This brings me to a question I got from a friend after I finally received my own invitation.
“So, is Wave like Facebook 2.0? Or more like e-mail?”
I think the biggest reason for all that noise on Wave is that it’s trying to be the 2.0 version of pretty much every communication platform out there.
- You can send messages to people’s wave addresses much like E-Mail
- You can edit your messages after they have been sent and those of others like a Wiki
- You can use it to chat to individuals or whole groups like you can on Skype
- As previously mentioned, you can now follow and unfollow Waves like you can on Twitter
- Even though available extensions are currently limited, the Wave Sandbox developers are busy creating more and more practical and fun extensions which are starting to remind me a lot of the applications you get on Facebook
- You can upload/attach images on which your friends can comment like Flickr
- And most importantly these days… everything is happening in Real Time!
Considering the above, it is not surprising at all that most of the critique and optimisation efforts go towards the issue of ‘drowning out the noise’. Admittedly, the noise is not that big these days, as most people are still waiting for their invite. So reality is very much like this image found on the web illustrates.
But once Wave goes public we will be flooded with Waves, extensions, comments, amends, polls, pictures and maps that it will be impossible to keep up with everything. Unless Google gets is under control that is.
Until then, at least we can use it to solve the most fundamental issues of the Universe:
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