Why Google Wave may not make waves after all

This week was an important one for the Google Wave team. The company finally removed the invitation-only beta status from the product, meaning that anyone can use it. It also made the feature usable from within Google Apps, whereas it was only previously usable in individual Google accounts. The problem is that it may be a bit too late for this innovative product to make a dent in the way that people communicate.

Google Wave was announced a year ago at the company's I/O developer conference. It promised to revolutionise the way that people talked to each other online. It could be seen as an evolved version of instant messaging, with dramatically improved functionality. People could talk to each other in synchronous real time conversations, but could also revisit these conversations, known as Waves, over time. They could include other people in conversations at any time, and allow those people to replay the conversations chronologically to see how they had developed. People could insert comments at any point in a conversation, and could see each other typing. Waves could be embedded as objects, and accessed in different places.



The problem is that Google didn't do the best job of explaining the service to people, admitted Lars Rasmussen, one of the people who developed Wave. The product was daunting to use in its raw form. Rasmussen said this week that the team had failed to explain in the hour-long demo of the product what people might actually want to do with it.

The other big problem for Wave is one of critical mass. The service is designed to replace email, and it's about time that someone did. The first email was sent 40 years ago, and while it might have worked well then, it hasn't worked very well lately. Spam, excessive CCing, formatting issues, the difficulty of bringing someone into an email conversation that's been going on for a while - all of these problems make it a hindrance rather than a help for many.

But everyone uses email. Unless you're very important to someone, sending them an invitation to a Google Wave that could possibly require them to set up an account before they can even use it is going to be time prohibitive, and will probably mean you don't get a response at all, other than, "just mail me, will you?"

Then there's the availability problem. Yes, Google opened up access to Waves in Google Apps this week, but only in the Premier edition, which means that if you're a small business wanting to get into Wave communications, you'll have to pay for it.

Isn't this a bit backwards? Surely, if you're trying to persuade people to use a product that you've already admitted has been badly marketed and which few of them understand, you're going to want to give them a free ride?

I have a free Google Apps account, and a personal Google account that I use only because there isn't a Google Apps version of Google's Reader RSS aggregator. All of my contacts are in my Google Apps address book, rather than my personal one, and while I live on the Google Apps version of Gmail, I never check my personal Gmail account. I've tried using Wave in the personal version, and it's such a pain to log in and log out again, or to access each account using separate browsers, that I rarely bother.

This leaves enterprise users to take the open source Wave service and run instances of it in their own organisations, but as we know, enteprises tend to be a little conservative, especially in areas such as communication, which are often beset by regulatory constraints.

In short, it's going to take Wave a little longer to get off the ground than Google may have hoped, if indeed it makes it into the mainstream at all. And that's a real shame, because the concept initially showed a lot of promise.