Dec
11
Google Wave – worst adoption model in web history?
Have you ever been invited to a party, only to find you’re the only person there, apart from the geeky fellow that invited you? No?
Then you’ve never used Google Wave.
For all the genius that exists at the googleplex, you have to wonder what the marketing department was thinking. Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. Put another way, if you’re the only person in the world with a telephone, it’s completely effin’ useless.
So, let’s say you’ve just invented the telephone and you’re trying to market it. My guess is that your not going to restrict sales of your new invention to a select group of friends who receive the opportunity to buy it by special invitation, like it’s a Coco Chanel dress or the Vermeer you’ve just had stolen from the Met. The reason you wouldn’t do that is because – as we’ve already noted – its value is proportional to its ubiquity.
Yet that’s exactly what google are doing.
Here’s what happens. One day you receive an invite to use Google Wave. You create an account and login. At that point, presuming you can invest the energy to figure out what the hell it is you’re looking at, you gamely click on ‘New Wave’ and attempt to send a message to someone you know. But you can only send it to one of your Google Wave contacts. And the only Google Wave contact you have is the person that invited you.
Exhibit A
Let’s hope you like them. Let’s say you do. You send them a message.
But unless they log into Wave, they’ll never know it. As far as I can tell, Wave won’t ping other systems to inform you that something’s arrived. So it becomes just another system you don’t log into and soon thereafter, forget about entirely.
Of course it’s entirely possible that some of your other friends are already on Google Wave. Unfortunately, there’s no way to find that out either, unless they happen to mention it to you over canapés at the club. Which they probably won’t, since they just had the same experience as you: invited – logged in – perplexed – frustrated – never returned.
The sad thing is, Google Wave rocks. At a technology level it’s an ideal remedy for rambling, circuitous group email discussions, old school threaded news groups (usenet) etc. By providing the capacity to interact with existing content (inline, attributed commenting), those impossible to analyze ten-thousand line email threads that repeat every message every time, with chevrons galore, are a thing of the past, replaced with neat, maintainable nuggets of knowledge.
But for this to be realized, two things will have to happen:
1. google need to drop the walled garden and accept that Wave will have to live in parallel with other messaging systems (e.g. existing corporate and personal email, and RSS and twitter streams too) for some considerable time to come.
2. invitations must die, to be replaced with a facebook-style “invite anyone you like from your address book” approach.
Further Reading