I don't know what market intelligence the designers of Google Wave used, if any at all, but from everything I've read about the product I'm desperately struggling to see the benefits. If it's successful (which it's sure to be now I've jumped in at the deep end) then I will not only eat my hat, but will proceed to feast on my entire wardrobe.
Let's look at two of the new features:
- Online, real time communication, allowing viewers to see what someone else is typing and speed up conversation.
- A playback allowing anyone to rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
Why on earth would anybody feel they can benefit from these features? The designers argue that real time conversation allows people to interrupt before you've finished your sentence... Who enjoys it when that happens in real life? It's possibly one of the most annoying things a person can do!
And just why would you want everyone to see what's already been said? Sometimes a dialogue is between two people who may wish to discuss something before someone else is present, who would appreciate a saved conversation allowing newcomers to track back and basically spy?
Another advantage they are trying to sell is the simplicity of uploading photos and videos. That should scare Facebook who only allow you to...simply upload photos and videos.
Again if I'm proved wrong then I shall in fact be full of clothes but seriously who did the research on this project? Were they living on the moon?
1 comments:
It can't be compared directly to email. Wave is something bigger than that.
Sure, you can see the characters appearing as they are typed and start replying immediately that’s just the underlying tech being demonstrated as a simple email/IM feature. Some of the things they show are just there as demo porn. Email/IM is just a simple use of the technology. If you don’t want each character sent as you type it, so it behaves more like IM, don’t use that feature.
It’s not just the other users that get to see each character any installed “robots” can also see them. So... instant translation, instant spell/grammar checking correction, instant recognition of keywords that might do something... For example an Artesian robot could spot some topic, as it’s typed, and show some news.
Once robots can see what you’re doing all sorts of capabilities are possible (admittedly some of these capabilities could be scary).
What about being able to collaborate on documents? Similar to OneNote but being able to integrate related conversations (other Waves) and not just in the office but across organisations too.
The Wave replay feature comes in very handy if you want to see how the conversation/document/support ticket/whatever developed. Much easier them trying to collect together all the various threads of an email conversation.
Just because Facebook is the current cool kid doesn’t mean it will last (anyone remember MySpace?). There are many photo/video sharing sites some with active communities because they are better or more private or more convenient or whatever for those people. Would you want to put internal training videos or anything company confidential on FB? If you had an internal Wave server (just like you’ve got an email server) all sorts of automatic linking and augmentation of conversations and documents becomes possible.
The smart thing about Wave is the creation of a new technology. Just as people couldn’t originally see the point of email or IM or SMS or Business Intelligence or Internet Surveillance, once people get their hands on Wave and start to see how it can add value to lots of different types of conversation I think we’ll begin to wonder how we coped without it and the applications it enables.
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