After having spent several weeks using Google Wave, and after all the hype surrounding it has ceased, I think I’m in the mood of writing my own opinion on this product.
Just in case you have living under a rock for the last few months, Wave is an instant messaging and distributed editing in real time application that uses only your browser for working. If you want to learn how to use it, check this interesting on-line book.
When I first saw the Google Wave preview video for developers in May I was totally stunned. It really seemed like a true revolution, and an e-mail killer on his own right. I longed for weeks for a chance to grab my hands on it, but no luck. Finally I get an invitation approved by Google a couple of months ago or so. Several friends and colleagues have Wave access to, so I can test it well with them all through these weeks.
My first advice to you would be: Just don't believe all the hype around Wave.
Sure, it’s a great product for collaborating, an impressive piece of programming, and a good mix between email, chat and so on. But in my opinion it’s not definitely a “killer application” neither the “e-mail killer” nor “e-mail if it was invented today”, as you may probably have heard. It is also no related at all to social Web, and has nothing to do with Facebook, twitter and the like.
Almost everyone I know that had the chance to test-drive it has the same opinion as me.
I find Wave as a good tool for collaborating in real time and keep track of everything that was written and even reproduce it whenever you want. But you can get almost the same today with a lot of other tools. Sure, you have Wave agents and bots that can check your spelling, translate your text on the fly, and so on, which are pretty interesting to have, but everything with added value in Wave is related to real time collaboration or interaction.
Real time typing is interesting, but is also dangerous, and I think that a “draft mode” or something like this will be very useful too. Probably it will have this feature in the near future, and in fact it lacks several important ones that are still to be incorporated
For me the real issue with Wave is that it is chaotic. This leads to difficulties when working with several people at once writing in a wave. And is difficult too to find the new snippets as long as anyone can write and add information in any place she wants. In a long wave this leads to confusion and, in my opinion, makes wave very unproductive at this scale.
Another limitation is that you can’t control what people makes in a wave although you have initiated it, so if you pretend to use it with lots of people (like customers, for example) prepare to have a real chaos. Upon this anyone can start a wave with you, although you don’t know her or have authorized her to do it.
From the e-mail marketer perspective I think that Wave in its current state is not suitable for the kind of communication we expect with customers and stakeholders. Maybe it’s suitable for product support or specific "few to one" communications, but definitely not for massive ones. In that case traditional e-mail marketing and social tools like Twitter or Facebook are much better.
What do you think?