Google Wave: not the best thing since sliced bread

If you believe the hype, Google Wave is the biggest thing since sliced bread. The “reinvention of email” service remains in closed beta with invites slowly becoming available, and I managed to get my hands on one over the weekend.

Our own Steven Hodson has an extensive review of Google Wave here: Google Wave Review, but after several days trying to work Google Wave out, I had to chime in, because to put in bluntly: I don’t get the hype surrounding it either.

I get that Google Wave is about online collaboration, and once it opens up to the public it will probably become a moderately popular collaboration tool. What I don’t get is why it’s apparently so damn wonderful, and more importantly why this should be treated as something better than email.

If you haven’t tried Wave yet, I can’t help you with Google Wave invites, but I can break down the basics. Google Wave is basically threaded email with the ability to insert things, like Google Maps or polls. It’s set up so you can easily share a “wave” (basically a thread) with groups, so you have one stream of correspondence neatly merged into the one view, as opposed to separate emails which I guess can become messy. Updates are also delivered live, so it hits the sweet spot with Silicon Valley’s current obsession: the “real time web.”

The features are all very well and good, but why can’t these features be built into an existing Google product, one that many already use….like Gmail. There’s no massive reinvention of email in Wave, it’s just email with some neat collaboration tools added.

The flaw though is that it’s not compatible with Gmail, or any other email platform, so you can only share a Wave with others on the system. That might be fine for work group collaboration, but is it strong enough to be a stand alone product that people will use instead of email, or I suppose more likely alongside traditional email?

The Google Australia team should be congratulated for coming up with the idea, and products such as Wave do help drive thought about better ways of doing business. However there’s far too much kool aid being drunk, because although it’s clever at times, Google Wave isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, end of story.