It is safe to say that when we saw the Google Wave Developer Preview last June, our jaws were on the floor. So when I received my invite on October 5th, there is no doubt that I was biting at the bit to start Waving with my internet marketing buddies. I do not have to tell you that Google Wave is in its most infantile of stages, but here is my first review, as it will be nice to look back with our grandkids and say, “Ahh young lad, I remember when Wave didn’t even have email federation!”
As an introduction, it might be beneficial to know what Google Wave actually is, if that is possible. If we look into the echo chamber blogosphere, we could gather that ‘Google Wave is the future of communication’ and that ‘It is real-time web fully realized.’ However, I think it would be best to point you to a definitive source, Google’s What is Wave page for the answers.
With that said, here’s my impressions on Google Wave and its effect on the future of internet marketing.
There is definitely a learning curve. It is not by chance that my first Wave was titled “Okay, how do we do this?” It doesn’t seem to be a particularly intuitive program, especially in regards to search functionality. Users must type in cryptic notations to search through waves, such as “onlywith:name” or “is:unfiled.” Luckily, they have provided us with this cheat sheet of all the possible search terms.
Secondly, dependability seems to be a large issue. In the age of Twitter and MySpace, it is expected that our favorite web-apps will have peaks and valleys in terms of reliability. Google Wave is no exception. There were a number of times in which Wave seemed to fall off of a cliff with no warning or error message. I cannot imagine the load that real time chat puts on a server but if anyone can handle it, it has to be Google.
Despite it’s bugs, Google Wave is clearly a step towards the future in real-time technology. This leads to the burning question on everyone’s mind, ‘How will this advance internet marketing?’ It may be too early to tell the full ramifications of Google Wave on social media, but at this point, I would say that it isn’t a game changer. Google Wave is advanced email and collaboration, not advanced social networking. It will make communicating with clients and co-workers easier but can still exist in parallel with Facebook and Twitter as they are all separate services with separate uses. In fact, I strongly believe that Wave is the biggest threat to the software collaboration company, 37signals. Google also seems to be in competition with themself, as Wave takes a direct aim at Gmail, Gchat and Gdocs all at once.
Whatever the future of Google Wave may be, it has to first grow (and scale, for that matter). Key features that I hold out hope for are email integration, product integration, revision control and a more stable experience all around. I also believe that we will see the same trend we saw with Twitter, in that many uses will come from third-party application developers, via the Google Wave Federation Protocol and the easily embeddable Google Wave plugins.
To judge Google Wave in it’s current state would be like judging a new Radiohead CD by it’s live recordings; it is just too young to be so critical.
What do you think of the future of Wave holds? How will it effect internet marketing? and more importantly, what would you like to see the future of Wave hold?
Oh and real time chat really is as cool as it sounds.