Wasted innovation: Google Wave
October 31st, 2009 . by Daniel Hölbling![wavelogo[1]](http://www.tigraine.at/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/wavelogo1.png "wavelogo[1]")
It was pretty inevitable that Google Wave would fail after being hailed as the solution to all our problems. Still, looking at a defeat gives me a feeling of malicious joy.
Let’s start at the beginning: I got my invite almost 3 weeks ago, and after an initial: wow cool. I found out that nobody I care about had Wave.
After another week or so I finally got 20 invites to give out (if you want one send me an email, I’ve got 13 left) and finally managed to get the most important people I communicate to into Wave.
And, we had a lot of fun watching each other’s cursor spit out text live on the screen. Unfortunately, that was the only thing we found useful, and it was only funny for about 20 minutes. After that, we went back to our lives and that’s it. I’m still waiting for a reply to a Wave I sent Kristof almost 2 weeks ago.
So, what’s the problem? Wave technology is revolutionary, the idea is just not. It’s at heart:
Awesome technology looking for a problem to solve
Wave fails in most/all of it’s goals:
Replace Email: Ok, so Email is everywhere and it works (thanks to GMail). I get mails pushed to my Android phone, and all in all: It does everything I want flawlessly and most importantly: EVERYWHERE.
Wave on the other hand: Only inside my browser, no notification tool whatsoever. Pretty much equally useless as Facebook Messaging.
Replace Chat: Instant typing is funny, but using the tool for IM just does not cut it usability wise. Live and Skype are great at that too, and even ICQ had that instant typing thing going some versions back (nobody wanted it). Wave once again misses all the major points here: No mobile client, no notifications, no desktop client.
Replace Message Boards: Try running a public community off Wave: It’s impossible. Since you have to add people to the wave one by one, there is no way to spawn a new thread unless your community is really really small. Public viewing (the main purpose of most messaging boards) is impossible, thus the whole thing is not suited to replace a message board.
Replace Wiki: Again, who cares about a wiki if it’s not publicly available? I know really few people who have a wiki for <5 people, and even those few won’t care for Wave’s wacky and really laggy Playback feature.
Be a collaboration tool: Well, Wave does that pretty well. Only that I don’t really see any online collaboration happening anytime soon, since most people are just too used to sending Word documents or Excel sheets around, they won’t dumb down to using a Wave just because they see each other’s cursors.
Well, and that’s about it. Wave tries to do a thousand things, and succeeds at not one of them. It’s totally useless without having any sort of desktop integration and mobile device integration. And once it has all of that, I still see myself sending more “Hey check your wave” emails than receiving a answer through wave.
What I want now? I want Google to use the awesome technology they created with Wave and bring it over to GMail. I want to be able to drag&drop files to my GMail and have them be attached to my mails. I want this incredible spellchecker inside GMail and I want it now. That’s all. I don’t care for your revolutionary shiny thingy that does everything but nothing.
Hey Daniel, Ill take a wave invite if you've some left. I know, I know… I DID read your post, I just want the 20 minutes novelty of seeing other peoples cursors move around
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Sure no problem. Just send me your Gmail account by Email or Skype. (It only works with google accounts)
Oh, and I strongly encourage you to look at it
those 20 minutes are great 
greetings Daniel
For me personally Wave is primarily a collaboration tool and I've already participated in at least one really good one through Wave. That said, Wave in its current state is definitely over-hyped. Too many things are still very half-baked (if even remotely close to an oven.
Well, after trying out wave, I must agree that it does seem interesting, there are good ideas in this, but it fails to work for me right now.
Problem 01: as you said, it does a lot of things, but it does it with very little structure. Maybe I'm not used to it quite yet, but I got lost in my first wave with 3 participants after missing 20 blips, and that sucked – honestly, in an email, it would have been similar, but I would have got it splitted up.
Problem 02: Simultanously writing with a lot of people actually messed up the communication – who is answering to what blip and what does he mean? I'm missing titling and structure, micro-conversations between 2 participiants quickly messed up a whole wave.
Problem 03: Strangely Wave isn't working well in Chrome, so I have to use Firefox – as I only use FF for developing (with all the plugins I use it tend to get too “heavy” for surfing), I didn't check my waves a lot (so that's why your still waiting for your answer
- So I could imagine Wave for in-house communication in the office. But that's managable quite well with ICQ, the Fileserver and just going to the other room and talking.
- For communication with clients it's definitely not good, because it make you expect an answer RIGHT NOW.
- And for everything else, wave will be interesting in a year or two, where you can expect more people to use it. Until then, a lot of those usability inconvenience will be fixed, i hope.
So for now, it's what it is: a very early beta – let's see how it developes
I tend to agree with your remarks but let's see how it develops further, all technologies need some time to become important tools in our day to day lives, wave could prove more useful than u think . I'm curious about it, can u give me an invite, please
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An invite should arrive during the coming week.
I agree that the technology has still way to go and mature, but at the moment I just feel like it tries really hard to replace email, while email already hat like 20 years to develop exactly into the tool we need it to be.
I've still got 4 invites to spare if anyone is interested.
I agree that wave isn't very useful when only very few people use it, and the lack of tools. However I don't agree with your “Replace message boards” and “Replace wiki” comments. There are lots of ways already to make waves public (well public for people with invites so far), like:
- public to anyone (search for with:public to find them, add the contact easypublic@appspot.com to make it fully public)
- search for group:<some google group@googlegroups.com> (public when you're a member of this group, hidden to others)
- embed in a blog. You get auto-added somehow when you interact with the embedded wave. See http://sander.rijken.info/2009/10/16/wave-test/
Well Sander,
what I meant by replace a message board is that one wave is hardly enough to replace a message board. There is no way in Wave at the moment to have multiple waves be somehow grouped to people. By making it public anyone can participate (something I found out only yesterday..), but how do you allow people to start a new topic inside a community of let's say 50 people?
That's where I see the problem.
greetings Daniel
Hello Daniel,
Just a long shot – have you got any invites left ? (michael.inniss@gmail.com)
Thanks
This is definitely the best post I’ve read since the Wave hype began. It’s being promoted as a must have for everyone, but I see absolutely no purpose for my needs… Or the needs of most people for that matter.
Maybe in a few years it’ll be relevant, but not now. Google is always a step ahead, but this time I think they went further than they should have.
I expected much from Wave and i am dissapointed. Like you said, the only feature that i can see is live typing and i am not able to uderstand how to make use of it …
I expected much from Wave and i am dissapointed. Like you said, the only feature that i can see is live typing and i am not able to uderstand how to make use of it …