We said before that we really liked the concept of Google Wave and that it had the possibility of becoming huge. The idea is that people communicate through one medium, which is highly customisable and flexes to your every needs. Waves are essentially strings of communication in the google sphere, where two people can add and remove people to any particular wave. This wave can be used for any purpose and can be augmented with a plethora of extensions and gadgets.
In this pure form, Google Wave sounds awesome. In practice though, Google have gone a bit too far with the Wave ideology. The interface is nice, but for some reasons you manage your invites, settings and profile through waves themselves. There is no "core" to Google Wave, nothing which you can differentiate as your preferences. This feels really alien and most people won't get it. Contact management also feels clunky. The current invite system lets you invite 20 people to Google Wave, but once they get invited the flawed integration with Google Contacts means that your contacts list will often screw up...simply put.
The use of www.appstore.com as the centre for google extensions feels a bit...odd. You would think that Google would integrate it directly, maybe make a special extensions page within Google Wave itself. The ideas of robots are cool too, they are effectively pieces of code that you can add to a wave for a certain function, such as translation. Unfortunately, you have to add these robots directly to your contacts list, instead of a separate list for robots and extensions.
A lack of email integration at the moment means that people can't use it full time. Once it becomes "backwards compatible" with e-mail, people and companies can start using Google Wave as a new communication tool. A lot of problems have to be sorted out before Google can say it's finished and some ways I feel that they have opened up the Preview way too early. I can understand that they want us to give feedback and build the future of Google Wave with us, but the hype was so high that people were expecting something close to being polished. People were expecting to help make tweaks, as opposed to suggesting massive changes to the whole system.
Final Thought Byte : In essence, Google Wave is a nice idea, but it's badly implemented so far. There is a complete lack of manageability. I can understand that Google is trying to explore and exploit the Wave ideology, but there is a limit to how far you go. We will keep a very close eye on Google Wave and keep everyone updated.
Tags : Google, Wave, E-mail
