Wednesday, September 16, 2009

I've been closely watching the buzz on Google's nearing release of Wave and speculating aloud at just how it may be received.

It seems right now that it is both very exciting and - surprisingly as yet unnoticed by the world at large. But for how long is anyone's guess.

On Twitter today a number of people retweeted today's article by Ben Parr of Mashable which questioned whether or not the current beta is close enough for them to really succeed with their scheduled release two weeks from now.

My own prediction for this one is that it's going to be a real sleeper. On release it's going to get the most attention from the truly geek-at-heart. This crowd will all bandy their praise and criticisms and bug complaints and generally flog the blogosphere.

Give that a few weeks while it makes the rounds of all the computing user magazines and technical reviews on computing advice websites.

Next will be some initial notice among moderately alert ( as Google will no doubt have created introductory links and pages to introduce Wave as they've done with other Google Labs releases in the past with their products such as Gmail and Picasa ).

Twitter spent a little time being just sort of an in-thing amongst campuses before it finally reached publications like Time & Newsweek. A surprisingly large number of people I know right now are still at: "Twitter, yeah, I've heard about it. - Uh, what is it ??" ! But e-mail, yeah, they know email. So I'll give it a little more time.

Meanwhile - ( I'm going to call this The Mozilla Factor ) is the in-between part where Google's brilliance in keeping this project open-source is taking effect -- developers with great imagination continue to create applications for use in the Wave and begin to get a feel for what works, how it works and how to use the Wave. Just look at the Mozilla project, the GNU project, the Open Source Initiative, OpenOffice - and get the idea of the creativity that's out there.

The really useful ones are going to make the rounds in widening circles and create their own applications to somewhat automate the creation of their mashups.

The number and variety of applications will increase to a point where several are not only stable but of obviously high value and at that point we'll see the larger effect. But -- unlike Twitter, which still seems to be seeking the grail of how to really monetize itself, I believe Google's Wave is going to find it's groove at a much faster rate.

Why ? Because Wave is about communication & collaboration, and while Twitter has been described variously as sort of a haiku and poetry - very popular and engaging - it's not ESSENTIAL. The Wave facilitates doingness. It brings together the use of tools people already use and understand the value of.

When I can use The Wave to live chat with a client (or multiple clients) on a project, retain a running record of how it develops over time, exchange thumbnail sketches on a shared whiteboard in real-time, I'll have a tool that effectively simplifies and refines what I already do.
I'm no ultra-geek, but that's obviously going to be possible and I can see it will get there.

Get there it will. A few days following Google's spring IO conference where they gave the presentation and demonstration someone blogged that Wave will be a Tsunami. That's my take on it as well.