anticipating Google Wave

Waves beyond Google: a perfect wave? September 30, 2009

The best waves will have not yet shown themselves.

Google Wave will be the one attracting the most attention for starters, and will contain enough catchy extras to, they would hope, remain one of the most popular Wave providers.

They will also have some constraints which will mean that their wave may not be the best one for you to use.

• Being the first, people are still very much in the mindset of email etc, and so Google Wave needs to be able to look and feel as familiar as email to get people to adopt it.  But Wave being a transformative idea, the ‘sort of like email’ notion might not be the best metaphor for an ideal Wave interface.
• Their Wave, being the first, will come under the most performance pressure scrutiny. They may therefore not to adopt features that would mean  improved usability for you, unless they can make it also work for a billion other people doing the same thing.
• In order to convince people to adopt Wave the protocol, their Wave has to show off as many of the new features of Wave as possible.  This may make their interface more complex than you need.

Who will make the best Wave interface?  We don’t yet know.  It may come from a familiar software company, incorporating Wave features into an application you already use and are familiar with.  It may continue as present, with each person using many applications that implement Wave in different ways, or one interface may render word processors, email programs, even webpages obsolete. It may come from an unknown, who clicks on to the best way to use this technology.  It may come from Google.  Any way, the race is on to be the one that works the best.  The development community have had 6 months to imagine, and produce their vision of a perfect wave.