Google Wave Has Hit My Shores

2009/11/09

Last week I got my Google Wave (GW) invite, and we were able to get a group of friends, roughly ~10 people also invited within a few days. This is fortunate, because it allows me to actually use GW to communicate and collaborate with a common set of people. The short story is: Google Wave has rocked our world, we produced a high number of waves and blips within a few days (blips are the actual comments in GW terminology), much more than we would have using email in the same time period. I estimate the volume of communication increased 2-5x. Aside from volume, GW also changed the nature of communication: this group did not use IM before, but several instances of real-time chatting occured within GW. Also, GW opened new channels between people, eg. I chatted with a person I usually only talk to in real-life (and rarely). Overall, the "synchronous and asynchronous" nature of GW is a real killer feature. Even the characters-in-real-time feature (meaning you can see the other's keystrokes in real-time, which is sometimes annoying and too much) is overall a good feature, because it engages the parties. GW is such a pleasant communication platform that even the alpha-as-in-buggy-as-hell web interface, uncharacteristic of Google, has not deterred us from using it. Overall I think GW is a game-changer: this group has not exchanged a single email since we all got on GW. I'm trying to get other groups onto GW as soon as possible.

Based on these experiences, GW definitely qualifies as a disruptive technology. It's pretty clear that GW is going to decrease the importance of email and IM. Also, several use-cases which required special web-based software for convenience will move to GW, such as: event planning, todos, reminders, bookmarking, notetaking, collaborative draft editing, online meetings, mini-blogs. These are all use-cases which are pretty much possible with the default GW web interface, or require little additinal functionality.

Google Wave is a product which will markedly increase the productivity of large corporations. Novell is already working on a product dubbed Google Wave for the Enterprise, called Novell Pulse. I watched their video presentation, and it looks good. Also look at the SAP presentation on the bottom of this page, which is a bit more enterprisey, but still pretty nice. I wonder what Microsoft's answer will be. I hope they don't come up with an incompatible-but-equivalent implementation.

In conclusion, Google Wave is still relatively young and immature (even Google's client sucks), lots of space for movement and innovation, it will be interesting to see how the ecosystem and monetization game unfolds.

- Marton Trencseni