If you’ve been on Twitter this past week you’ve likely noticed “googlewave” in the trending topics.
Google Wave, an open source collaboration software suite previewed at Google I/O, is being touted by Google as a communication tool that may revolutionize how we share information online. Wave is largely counting on developers to dream up and build plugins necessary to expand their site, much in the same way FireFox has expanded their browser.
Buzz kicked up this week as Google began large scale distribution of invites to trusted users of their community. Google is launching Wave the same way it rolled out Gmail, by invitation only.
This ‘invite only’ approach is creating some choas on Twitter as users are self promoting themselves with posts such as: “@AaronNeale Latest: 87 GoogleWave Invites to send out at random over the next 45mins! Follow me and RT if you want one!”. As more questions are asked, new folks are try to gain authority as “gurus” by providing questionable answers and unverified information.
All the commotion and truth seekers have kept ‘googlewave’ on Twitter’s trending topics list for the past 5 days. This is the type of viral traction companies dream about.
Google Wave Presention from Google I/O 2009
For now, the discussions revolving around Google Wave are more about the questions than the answers. How can Wave be used to enhance existing websites? How will Wave combine all the separate social networking elements (facebook, myspace, blogs you follow, etc), search and communication methods into one application that runs in any browser, etc? Stay tuned ..
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I’m sorry but I personally think that Google Wave (while being pretty neat and obviously slick) is a crock. I’ve been playing with it here and there for the past couple months but it feels kind of like when Microsoft started touting itself as a web company even though it’s CEO had bashed the internet years earlier saying that it wouldn’t go anywhere.
Social networking is new and trendy and I honestly think that it’s going places but I think that Google should have tucked it’s tail and hidden when it saw it’s failure with Orkut. A company of Google’s magnitude is foolish to dabble in witchcraft. I think Google should know it’s place and stick to analysing the internet that is out there rather than trying to mess with the new creations of the web.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that Google Wave is Google’s attempt to bring together something that in this point in time is best left disparate. And the value of some of the features added is naive almost as if Google hasn’t been watching twitter users since they realised it was up and coming.
What Google is doing with Wave is technology that has been around since ’99 but they put it into the browser. I just don’t know how long they can keep up the veil of being a start-up when they are one of the most well known companies in the world. I think that’s my rant.