Google Wave is Nothing Special

In the past, I’ve done a fair bit of work on Jifty with Jesse Vincent by way of my previous job. He had some Google Wave invites and I begged one off of him. After waiting a week, it came through and splat. Google Wave is a wasteland of nothing. Playing with some posts to myself led to about 10 minutes of use and then I hung up.

A colleague of mine, who (last I knew) does not have a Google Wave account had come across a LifeHacker post describe the “with:public” search that provides at least some content for Google Wave. However, that content is mostly just a dearth of “What can I do?” and “Anybody else here from Canada?” and “What happens if I post porn?” It was initially interesting, but I got about another 10 minutes and hung up again.

Okay, so there’s not much to do, but it’s brand spanking new. Thus, criticizing it now is like calling a bridge useless when the engineers have only just finished putting up the supports. There are couple things I’d like to note, though.

First, there’s not just a whole lot new here. Google Wave is merely a new combination of social networking, email, wiki, forums, chat, document and image sharing, and widgetry. If you’ve used a Wiki, Twitter, IM, and Email before, you have a good idea what Google Wave is already. They’ve just taken the next step and attempted to combine things in a way that will be challenging to scale, but I think Google is up to the task.

Second, that all said there is something I hope that can be achieved here, if not by Wave, by something like it. They consider Google Wave to be a reinvention of email. They have the idea that they might be able to replace email with it. Maybe. I think email has already been replaced by SMS, Twitter, and Facebook for many people. I end up using Facebook to send messages to folks much more often than Email these days and would probably use SMS if I weren’t so cheap and had someone other than my wife that I communicated with regularly via cell phone.

Problem: Services like Twitter and Facebook have a very significant problem. They’ve taken the Internet backwards by providing a single hosted service in the cloud. Email has an important advantage in that if my email provider has an outage, everyone else on the Internet is probably fine. If my email provider goes out of business or provides terrible service, I have the alternative to go somewhere else. Twitter and Facebook have competitors, but unless you can convince all your family and friends to move with you, you can’t leave them unless you’re willing to sever your ability to communicate with them.

Solution: Something like Google Wave or Twitter or a consortium of social networking sites needs to come up with a new decentralized mechanism for communicating between people. Whether that means you can switch services but they have hooks between one another to send messages and share friend lists or Google Wave provides some sort of decentralized platform for doing this independent of the social networking sites, something needs to happen here.

There are other dangers here to privacy and such that I haven’t even touched on either. Something like Google Wave (assuming Google Wave can become decentralized like email) should happen if social networking is going to continue to develop. That’s my thought anyway.

Cheers.