Be afraid of Google Wave!
We’re not saying that Google Wave doesn’t bring anything new to the online table, but as the early reviews are pointing out, it probably brings more problems then solutions, not to mention the security and privacy issues, which is something that undoubtedly more people will be talking about as they get a chance to test Google Wave.
The consensus so far seems to be that Google Wave lacks elegance and simplicity of use; unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other applications, Google Wave it’ s way to complicated to be a widely used platform. In addition, besides making it easier to focus on work at hand, Google Wave so far proves to be more distracting that all other web applications combined.
As Steve Rubel of Forbes points out:
The basic conclusion I came to is that, for all of its wonders, Wave is a mess. What Google Wave ignores is what Google watcher Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do? calls the power of “elegant organization.”
History was invented to be rewritten. However, we need to learn from it. Every single online advance over the last decade that stuck leveraged “elegant organization.” They were simple, linear and solved common problems.
Info World also pans Google Wave, and among other things it talks about the privacy and security issues related to Google Wave:
We strongly suspect that the challenges will outweigh the rewards, especially in the early days, as Google tries to get the platform off the ground and into the marketplace. This was underscored by a comment left by a developer on our earlier story, “Selling Google Wave to Joe Q. Public.” The reader noted:
“Doing UI for Wave services is clearly not trivial — not least because of privacy/security considerations that make Wave ‘terminals’ into their own Social [Cross-Site Request Forgery] hotspots by blending semi-private and private and public data in active threads …”
Anil Dash looks at whether Google Wave will become a standard communication platform:
While it’s definitely too complex to live up to the “this will replace email!” hype that greeted its launch, it certainly has some cool features. So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.
Robert Scoble’s review is pretty much summed up in his article title: Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype. He goes on to say:
This service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.
See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave.
That’s really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.
But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people.
It also ignores the productivity gains that we’ve gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
What do I mean by that?
It is noisy, but the noise often happens way down in a wave deep in your inbox.
This is far far worse than email. (New email always shows up at the top of my inbox, where Google Wave can bring me new stuff deep down at the bottom of my inbox).
It’s far far worse than Twitter (where new stuff ALWAYS shows up at top). It’s even far worse than FriendFeed, which my friends always said was too noisy. At least there when you write a comment on an item it pops to the top of the page.
And, worse, when I look at my Google Wave page I see dozens of people all typing to me in real time. I don’t know where to look and keeping up with this real time noise is less like email, which is like tennis (hit one ball at a time) and more like dodging a machine gun of tennis balls. Much more mentally challenging.
See, Google Wave was oversold as something you’d use with the public, or at least with large groups of friends, like you use Twitter, email, or Facebook.
