(Personal note: wow, 2 weeks since I blogged something. Can you tell I’ve been in refactoring mode, not writing new code for work projects and finishing off my simball league season. (Go MAD!))
The intertubes have been all clogged-up with news about Google opening up limited access to Google Wave, and I am not too proud to admit that I attempted to get an invite by following certain people on Twitter. They never came through with that invite though. Oh well.
As cool as Google Wave appears to be, at it’s very core I believe that it is a solution look for a problem. The solution as far as I can tell is a real-time mailing list where you can imbed all sorts of things into it. I imagine the technology behind it is very impressive (even noticed my friend Marc Grabanski commenting on Twitter that it appears to be using some of his open-sourced jQuery code) but I can’t help but wonder what problem is this solving?
Is it a competitor for things like IRC or Campfire. I look at Google Wave and think to myself “wait until the spammers figure out how to exploit this”. Perhaps a very cynical view, but I think it’s a realistic one. But most of all, what problem is this solving that already exists?
As software developers, we all have lots of ego. It’s what allows us to ignore mountains of code that provides solutions to the problems we face and instead plow ahead recreating those solutions because we are convinced that our problem is unique and existing solutions are unsuited for the task. Sometimes this is even true, and I tip my hat to those developers who create these kind of solutions. What category Wave belongs in depends on factors that are totally out of Google’s control.
Before you get all “you are nothing but a hater, you old curmudgeon” I understand that technologies spring forth that end up being revolutionary. They often solve existing problems in very subtle ways and then some sort of tipping-point-event happens that shows how useful it is. Twitter is like that, having become a microblogging service that many people have figured out how to take advantage off (including myself). Until I can figure out the tipping-point-event for Wave, I remain convinced that it is a solution looking for a problem to solve. With any broadcast method on the net, the spammers WILL figure out a way to exploit it unless you can prevent people from having to hear their messages. Twitter is great for that because you can just ignore the spammers (which a lot of them don’t seem to understand or even care about).
Google Wave reminds me of IRC with a prettier wrapper around it via a web-based interface. Is that really that earth-shattering? Not to me it isn’t, but I am thinking that I am not the person that Google Wave is being aimed at.
If you care to, let me know in the comments why I should take a second look at Google Wave.
Tags: curmudgeon, google wave
I personally don’t see Google Wave as an earth-shattering product. It’s mostly, from what I can tell, a melding of many different technologies in to a single unified interface. It was bound to happen, and I think has happened in different iterations before, but without the name “Google” behind it. That being said, I never saw the allure to Twitter. Now that the network is as expansive as it is, there’s much more knowledge and communication to be had. So, originally, I think my idea about Twitter was correct – it was more or less worthless. However, in its growth and expanse, it has created its own worth through growth.
One can only wait and see if a similar thing can happen with Google Wave (and I imagine it *could* depending on how it’s handled).
I, personally, see the wave protocol (layered over XMPP) as the real “product” here. The google client that everyone’s using is just…fluff that the average user equates to “wave”.
Lots of navel-gazing goes on at Google. I imagine it may solve an *internal* problem of theirs and not necessarily a global software need.
We sort of expect Google products to make us happy, but really they just do whatever they want and most of the world goes ga-ga over it.
My 2c
My take on it is that it’s an attempt to bring all your conversations into one central location. Blog comments, collaborative editing, IM, & email are all conversations. It *would* be nice if I only had to go to one place to participate, archive, & search all of that. So, I think it will find a userbase.
But damn, you gotta learn lots of APIs to code for Wave… so I’m not sure we’ll find many Wavelets/extensions until the userbase has grown by an order of magnitude or two.