Google Wave first impressions

Almost five months ago, I wrote here about the newly-announced Google Wave.

Yesterday morning, I received my invitation. I have spent a couple of hours since then exploring Wave’s capabilities.

The first problem I encountered was that I didn’t have anyone with whom to start a wave. Google was kind enough to give me eight invitations to share with others though, and before long, several of my more tech-savvy friends were online too.

Wave is both more complex and more capable than I realized. Some increase in the complexity of the user interface is an unavoidable consequence of the large number of features Google is trying to cram into Wave. This complexity can be a bit daunting at first. It’s also not immediately clear what Wave is for. I can think of several potential uses for it; but I haven’t run into them myself yet.

Farhad Manjoo writes that with Wave, Google is attempting to fix problems that don’t need fixing. He also opines that it’s not clear why one should go through the trouble of learning how to use Wave. I imagine that the same sort of comment was heard when the telegraph was introduced. “Who wants to learn Morse code just to be able to send a letter?” New methods of communications always require a bit of learning; and the more groundbreaking the advancement, the more adjustment people will require before they understand and accept the change.

I have a vague, and hard to describe feeling of anticipation when I use Wave. My gut tells me that Wave is the beginning of a new revolution in online communications and that what we see now is just the tip of the iceberg.

Google Wave

At the Google I/O conference this week, Google gave a preview of Google Wave, a new communication and collaboration platform planned for release later this year. Google intends for the platform to be open-source, and is encouraging developers to contribute to the platform through a set of APIs. Those developers who are interested can sign up for access to a sandbox environment, where they can get their feet wet and where they can test their creations.

With Google Wave, Google appears to have reimagined email, instant messaging, and a host of related online communication media. Why allow email to be constrained by the limitations of SMTP or IMAP? Why should email and instant messaging even be considered separate concepts? In Google Wave, messages are called waves, and a wave can contain all kinds of content from any number of participants. A wave could be a conversation, a document on which several people collaborate, a poll, a bug report, or a photo gallery.

Google’s engineers admit that during the development of Google Wave, even they found it difficult to step beyond their preconceived notions of email and instant messaging. Each of these means of communication has its limitations, and each has applications to which it is well suited. Google Wave is envisioned to be a superset of many of the communication media that preceded it. Some potential uses of Google Wave weren’t apparent to the developers until they had been using the platform for a while.

I’d argue that most of the potential applications have not yet been envisioned. By open-sourcing the platform, Google seems to want to attract the same kind of participation from third-party developers as with the mobile Android platform.

In my eyes, Google Wave could be a potential long-term threat to Facebook. Google’s social networking platform Orkut never gained much of a following (outside of Brazil). Google Wave no only integrates with Orkut, but stands to make it mostly obsolete. With extensions, Google Wave could provide all the capability of Facebook and more. Heck, developers could even provide Facebook-originated content inside of waves. If Google Wave catches on, the next few years will be very interesting ones.

Update 2009-06-01 05:32 UCT—The Google Wave team appear to be fans of the short-lived but excellent Firefly television series. See the Google Wave Wikipedia article for details. Lisa A. brought this my attention. Thanks, Lisa!