What is Google Wave?
By now you've heard of Google Wave through one or more ways:
- You've tried it out with one of the 100,000 beta invites that Google has distributed;
- You've read one or more articles about it;
- You've heard one or more of your friends whine to all their friends asking for a Google Wave invite; or
- You've seen this awesome website named EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com.
Let me gloss over all the hype and detail for a minute. The hype is silly, and the detail makes things more complicated. Let me boil it down for you.
Google Wave is just a Threaded Conversation
(and soylent green is people)
Everyone who has tried Wave, including myself, is wincing at this over simplification, but ultimately that's the bottom line. You already understand Threaded Conversations. They kind of exist in Gmail, but without the nice indenting that you expect:
You also probably recognize them from Outlook:
And of course Facebook, where every status message, shared link or video spawns its own conversation:
The perfect example of a threaded conversation is seen on the Yahoo! Groups message board for web analytics enthusiasts and looks like this. When its indented, it's called a "hierarchical threaded conversation":
Note how the indenting makes it instantly easy to see who replied to whom.
Threaded conversation are conversations in which messages are grouped together to make it easy to follow (or ignore) a discussion topic.
What is not a threaded conversation? TWITTER. Unless you're using some kind twitter client that joins messages together, every message is not easily linkable with every other message.
So do I care?
I'll explain why this is great in a second, but in the meantime, do you care?
Yes. What we've learned over the life of the Internet is that we love to talk. What the Internet does best is carry conversations. It's like the First Amendment on steroids. So a tool that facilitates faster, better, and more conversation will be incredibly important.
Just not yet.
Much like the beginnings of MySpace, Facebook, the Web, and Twitter, you don't care yet. There's simply not enough users on Google Wave that you're missing out on an audience from a marketing or public relations perspective.
Even for developers, you have to wonder, is there functionality in Google Wave that is awesome? The answer is YES, but since there aren't very many users around to take advantage of those features yet, you probably will prioritize something else if you have scarce development resources.
Give it time. My rule of thumb with anything is once there are 25 million users doing something, you have to pay attention from a mass market point of view. Note that this rule doesn't apply to microniches. If you're a nonprofit in the business of saving civil war era battlefields from becoming strip malls, 100 people on a civil war history message board is a big deal to you.
Google Wave has, at best, 100,000 users. That's practically nothing. If you're a developer you might integrate the product if it gives you significantly awesome functionality that will drive people to try your product, but otherwise you can wait.
If that's all you wanted to know, check out. Glad I could help. If you want to more though, keep reading.
So why is this great?
Threaded conversations are significantly easier for readers and participants to follow, and so all things being equal, you want to integrate them into any website that intends to foster community discussion. Originally this meant finding a programmer to integrate a message board application into your website. This became easier and easier over time, and now products like Disqus Comments make it almost trivial to add to a website.
However to have a major player like Google come to the table with a easily pluggable conversation module for websites means a couple of amazing things:
The power of Google's user base
The footprint of Google means that you don't have to ask your visitors to register, they probably already have a google account for the purposes of using gmail or some other task. Much like when you add Facebook Connect to your website, suddenly you have hundreds of million registered users.
The vision of Google's developers
Whatever your critiques of Google's products, they're adding significant features for free. Google Analytics has singlehandedly introduced web analytics to an entire swath of the web that never would have been able to afford an analytics product before, and it's featureset continues to set the bar ever higher for subscription analytics products.
Google Wave is like a discussion technology taken two iterations beyond the current state of the art. With features like real-time discussions that update simultaneously across multiple websites, a single interface to bring all your conversations together, and the ability to let a single conversation bridge multiple channels (message boards, instant messenger, and email), Google Wave puts incredible power into a free product that most of the Internet already has a login for.
The ability to push Google Wave into existing user behavior
It's no small surprise that the way Gmail users think of Instant Messenger has changed because of the way Google has integrated it into Gmail's environment. Once you start chatting through a Google product, you become used to the fact that those conversations are archived and searchable, just like you expect email to be. In fact if you search Gmail for a word or phrase that appears in a chat and an old email thread, the results for both will be displayed.
Google can take the power of it's Gmail user base and start integrating Google Wave into its functionality. If they do it well, nobody will even notice until they get the delight of the product doing something helpful for them without asking.
If you need to know more about the blow-by-blow features of Google Wave, head over to Lifehacker and check out their highlight reel of Google Wave features.
In the meantime, chill. Unless you're a publisher of web-based discussion software, in which case you should get the hammer and break the glass. Your business just got one-upped by the 800 lb gorilla.
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