Last year when I first saw the Google Wave developer’s preview video from Google I/O, I was absolutely blown away. I could not wait to get myself an invite so I could get in there and start mucking about. Finally, I got my invite, signed up and logged on in. This is going to be awesome!!
When I first logged in I made a couple of new Waves to share some information with the handful of people I knew who also had Wave accounts. But really, none of these were all that useful. We were just testing it out and trying to figure out what we could do with it. In those early days, the answer was “Not Much”, but that was partially due to the lack of other people already on there using it. Once again, the curse of being an early adopter.
I wasn’t ready to write of Wave just yet. I remember when Gmail first came out, it definitely wasn’t feature-rich. I saw no real reason to dump my other email accounts or email clients in order to use Gmail. But, it didn’t take very long for that to change. I was fully expecting Wave to follow the same sort of curve.
Fast forward a year. Tons of people have Wave accounts now. My contact list in Wave has grown substantially. And still, I only have about 20 waves in my account. Let me break down the content of those Waves:
- “How does this work / Testing” – 6 Waves
- “Let’s get this wave started” – 2 Waves with a combined total of 5 messages
- “groups of friends talking about a specific topic/event” – 3 Waves
- “Client projects” – 7 Waves, 5 of which have 1 or 2 messages only
- The rest of the them are completely random or empty Waves that I haven’t bothered deleting.
Only the groups of friends and client projects Waves have any value at all, so let’s break those down.
Groups of friends talking about a specific topic/event
When I was thinking how Wave would be used outside of a business setting, it seemed to me that if you were planning an event with a group of friends, Wave would be a great place to do it. Everybody could add their thoughts on locations, activities, travel arrangements, etc. Then, when it was all said and done, the Wave would be great for adding your photos to share with the group. In theory, this plan rocks! In practice, not so much.
Here is how those 3 waves break down:
Wave #1
7 members, 1 message, zero replies
Wave #2
9 members, 10 messages
Of those 10 messages, half pertain to the actual planning of the event. The other half are completely random.
Wave #3
22 members, 38 messages (covering roughly 2 months)
When I saw this one in the list and was ready to review it I thought, “Sweet, 38 messages! Now we’re talking!” But, again roughly half the messages pertain to the topic. However, the messages that were on topic had some real value. One post included an embedded Map showing the location for an event, and another had an embedded menu from a potential event location. This Wave has potential for being pretty useful. Unfortunately it hasn’t been touched in nearly 5 months.
What I’ve noticed most with non-business Waves is that people tend to leave messages as if they were chatting on Instant Messenger. Posts that just say “Nice” or “Yay” make for a cluttered Wave. The other issue being, Wave isn’t exactly a household product yet. And, even if your friends have an account, it’s unlikely that they are logging in to Wave on a regular basis so it’s very easy for a Wave to go stale.
In my opinion, all 3 of these Waves would have been better served as Facebook groups or events. Obviously there are a lot more people using Facebook on a daily basis than using Wave, so the chance that people would see updates and be reminded to update would be that much greater. For this type of Wave, out of sight = out of mind and that is bad news for Wave.
Client Projects
I think this is where the bread and butter is for Google Wave. The ability to post and track project information, updates, examples, progress, thoughts and whatever else about a client’s project, it would seem the perfect fit. But from my (albeit limited) experience, once again, not so much.
Of the 7 Waves dealing with client projects, 5 are from the same guy. He is really trying to make Wave work. I’d really be interested in seeing a post from him on his view of Google Wave, and if he does, I’ll be sure to link it here.
The client related Waves fall in to two categories; Initial information only and active projects.
In the initial information only Waves, they start off with a description of the project and sometimes they include an attached file containing assets for the project. The idea being, if/when the project gets kicked off, there’s one location to go and locate what you need. Again, in theory, this is brilliant. Unfortunately, what I’m finding is that more often than not, finding the information for this project is taking me twice as long because when I need the information, I follow my normal course of action; open my email client and search, not find what I’m looking for, remember that it’s in Wave, go get the info.
My experience with an active project is a little different. By the time I got involved with the project, there were already 50+ messages in the Wave. A large number of those are already taken care of and are completely irrelevant to me. So, to find what I’m looking for I either need to re-watch the entire Wave (the playback option is really a cool feature), or, I need to have somebody create a “current status” post inside the Wave. So, I either need to spend time sifting through historical data, or, I need somebody familiar with the project write me a “current status” update. If that’s the case, how is that more useful than having somebody just send me that data via email?
Google Wave, as a project manager, suffers from the same “Garbage in/Garbage out” issue. If you don’t have people who are actively updating the project management tool (be that Wave or BaseCamp or even a simple email), then it just isn’t going to be useful anyway.
With Wave, all the information was basically one long page. This made finding specific information in the project time consuming. Looking through Wave I seed that there is a Task Tracking Wave type. This wasn’t used for the project I’m dealing with, so this is likely a big part of the frustration I’m having with Wave. Using the tool the right way would probably help out a bunch. But, when you are joining something that’s already in progress, that’s not exactly an option. Not exactly Wave’s fault there, but does point out that people aren’t familiar enough with Wave to know how to use it correctly for the type of Wave they are starting.
My overall take on Google Wave is that it just hasn’t reached a maturity level and saturation level sufficient to make it a really useful tool. Of course, for it to reach that level it’s going to take using it on a regular basis. I’m not a big fan of the interface and none of my experiences with Wave to this point have been positive. Add this up and it makes it unlikely that I’ll use it often enough to get over that hurdle.
Sorry Google, I’m going to just have to take a pass on Google Wave. For now, anyway.
