Google Wave

Flight of the Concorde?

28/9/2009

Google Wave

28/9/2009

Google Wave

Concorde was a triumph of engineering. It dramatically slashed transatlantic flight times, offering

people great service to those who could afford to pay. But today Concorde is no more. While the

technology involved in its development can still be found in contemporary airliners, the needle-

nosed jet is grounded for good.¹

In many ways Google Wave could turn out to be a similar example of hubris. With a project of

daunting ambition, it would appear Google is seeking to provide an alternative to a swathe of

‘productivity tools’ that much of the developed world use on a daily basis: from word processing

and spread-sheets, to instant messenger and email; from project management systems and the

attaching of documents for amendments to VOIP services and conference calls; from apps, and

wikis to blogs and forums; even from your browser to your entire operating system.

All of these services are available through Wave. They have developed a whole new nomenclature

for these new activities, (blips, wavelets, and robots?) along with countless innovations that many

people even those with years of digital or technical experience, have found hard to grasp.

Taking as their premise ‘What would email look like if it was invented today?’ the developers who

brought you Google Maps have been locked in an office for several years trying to reinvent one of

the fundamental, and most popular, functions of the internet. And unlike the majority of

developments we have seen in the web’s brief history, this is a radical departure from existing

conventions, rather than a gentle evolution. However, whilst Google is not short of funds to

develop this software questions have been asked about the business case for such a venture when

the only apparent revenue stream to date is that created by users willing to pay for invites to the

closed beta version of the service.

All the components of Wave can, in theory by embedded across the rest of the internet, including

apps, and Google has recently confirmed the imminent launch of an App Store soon, which will aim

to emulate the success of Apple’s iPhone version. But whilst Apple shipped over 7 million iPhones in

the three months up to September, it remains to be seen whether Wave will manage such

widespread adoption, especially when the simplicity of the iPhone is compared to Wave’s

complexity.

Wave’s interface has been described as an inbox on steroids, featuring many of the services

previously listed, and is all presented in the Google aesthetic – blue and white, stripped down, not

trying to impress: however there’s only so far you can strip down a product as complex as Wave.

And indeed it didn’t take long for other criticisms to rain in: that the service acted like a

‘productivity sink’, presenting a bewildering level of interactivity across all of the tools offered.

Some of this is undoubtedly due to the novelty of the system, and people who adopt the service will

learn to manage their inputs to allow them to use the tool effectively.

A more serious criticism of the service derives from this difficulty of use however. Enthusiastic

users have even created a user guide to speed people through the steep learning curve Wave

demands. But other major developments in the web have been simple to use, reducing barriers to

entry. Most people didn’t need a manual for search, email, IM, Twitter or Facebook (apart from the

privacy settings) – so why do we need one for Wave? If it is to gain critical mass, Wave is going to

need to get a lot of people using the system and using it comfortably.

The internet to date has been inherently disaggregated, anarchic, and full of innovation from small

start-ups (step forward Wikipedia, Google, Skype, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et

al) which were then acquired by bigger players and catapulted into the wider public’s

consciousness. Attempts from the big corporate of today to redefine the internet by developing

their own offering (MSN Spaces, Yahoo TV, Bing, Google Talk) have not found similar levels of

28/9/2009

Google Wave

success, despite the financial and intellectual resource that has been thrown at them, for reasons

that are not entirely clear.

As Microsoft was once the fresh faced challenger to IBM, so Apple became to Microsoft as they

grew, and so Google is now taking on the mantle of the large corporation that is struggling to

maintain its brand and its pre-eminence in the ever expanding digital world. Many of these new

entrants can be seen to have succeed through a ‘flocking’ behaviour – once a small number of

people have come on board, the surrounding social groups of people converge on the web property

to be with likeminded people. The problem with Wave could be that that it doesn’t have a big

enough perch, the complexity being off-putting to too many people for it to gain critical mass. It

could, in other words, turn out to be for the birds.

But let’s for a moment imagine where Wave could take us. Thinking back to the Concorde analogy,

what elements of Wave might become adopted in the mainstream of internet usage in the coming

years?

The idea of collaboration has been shown to work well through Wikipedia. But collaboration on

individual projects is still a complicated business – ensuring changes to documents can be easily

made by multiple participants and tracked back and amended further seems like a good thing.

Seeing the development process could be more interesting still, allowing a brand to better

understand how opinions have transmitted from individuals to groups. Allowing interested parties

to participate in the presentation of a brand is an area many marketers are looking at – and again

Wave can provide services that could allow this.

Wave also seeks to break down barriers to working across multiple services, meaning your Google

login works across lots of different sites that do different things. It’s been tried before with

Microsoft Passport, as well as the non-profit OpenID organisation. It’s also currently being

aggressively pushed by Facebook with Connect. But as yet a universal login hasn’t really taken off.

But it could, and that would allow a great deal more data to be collected on users through a single

source. This would have implications for the targeting options media buyers have – reaching people

in their inboxes, messenger tools, social networks, online newspapers and web TV stations, and

possibly even when they are working on documents.

If users are prepared to trade this privacy for faster and better services, there could be a powerful

opportunity here, but it seems unlikely that they will do so without some protest and avoidance of

the service.

For now, Google Wave remains in very limited access beta, and the final form of the service is still

being worked on. Digital opinion, from bloggers, tweeters & the like, ranges from admiration at the

scale of the project, to disgust at the ‘breathtaking arrogance’² of this ‘vanity exercise’³. Google is

already facing criticism of its ambitious book cataloguing project, and has failed in other areas

before.

It’s really too early to say whether this project will fly, the components used in less ambitious

projects, or be broken down for scrap, but it will undoubtedly influence people’s internet behaviour

in the future, and is one to watch with interest.

Author: Richard Dance

¹Adapted from comment on Om Malik’s post: http://bit.ly/8yYjn by E. Khodabakchian; ² http://bit.ly/1aBNek; ³

http://bit.ly/9ZKaN