I’ve been playing with Google Wave for a couple of weeks now and am very impressed with the engineering feat they’ve delivered on. It is quite a rich application on a very extensible platform which will be interesting to watch grow. There are however some things I feel that need to happen before this can become truly mainstream.

It’s so right now

After playing with Google Wave for a bit, a friend of mine remarked that it was more like Instant Messaging than email or wiki. The penny immediately dropped for me. Wave encourages increased expectations for an instant response. As I played with Google Wave, the times I saw my colleagues typing along with me was really fun and engaging. I suddenly became anxious however when they had moved onto other things and I contributed to a Wave. I had kept the same expectation that they were there waiting for me. I even found myself getting a little disillusioned when they didn’t respond to my little blips after a couple minutes.

We already grapple with this problem when sending emails. Many people have come to expect a quick response to an email. In this highly connected world we are developing, that expectation is spreading. I can no longer count the number of times I have seen people playing on their Blackberries during meetings. Yes, our meetings need to be more productive but that is no excuse for not being present.

Will Google Wave contribute to this expectation epidemic? What happens when people are left waiting for a response? Will that cause the “wave effect” to dissipate and lead to people jumping off the platform?

As an email replacement

I would like to see a gateway of sorts between Google Wave and the current email system. Something like this would really assist organisations and individuals wanting to move exclusively to waves but still be able to interact with the rest of the world. With the open platform that Google has provided, hopefully some smart folks will create this.

Until then, complete transition may just be too difficult for some. Google risks Wave becoming something extra rather than a replacement for something fundamental. I already have two email clients open all day (Outlook and GMail) and if I want to engage heavily in Google Wave, then I will also need to keep that open. The Google Wave Add-on for Firefox helps by giving users alerts as things change. Google Gears might also be useful here as well. But neither of those go far enough. One next logical step to increase adoption would be a fully fledged gateway between EMail and Waves, at least for the messaging components.

There is an alternative … That is to gain enough traction on Google Wave that the network effect takes over. The Gone Google campaign may help. As more organisations move from Microsoft Exchange to GMail, a further transition to Google Wave might be easier.

As a platform

Many commentators have focused on the current Wave client provided by Google themselves. Google Wave is much more than this client. It has an API but it is much more than that too. Google have worked quite hard to deliver a new protocol called Wave Protocol. Will Google Wave however suffer a similar perception problem that Lotus Notes faced in its prime? Lotus Notes was always viewed as an Email platform but infact it was significantly more than that. I wonder if Google Wave will be perceived as a “replacement for email” platform and nothing more?

Hopefully, developers and organisations out there will build on the protocol itself and find new and exciting ways to use it. The Google Wave client is only one way to breath life into this protocol.

Where will I use it?

To be honest, I’m not yet sure. I had heightened expectations from watching the various videos out there. Now I am beginning to realise that the real time nature isn’t the reality for Google Wave.

• Group work, perhaps on discrete documents, strategies, projects
• Potential replacement for a wiki
• Organising a camping trip

EMail? No, not for me. Not yet anyway.

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