Why Google Wave is Dangerous

Time to talk about Google Wave – or the Google Tsunami in a different way. By no means get us wrong, there is a point to it. Even a good one. What did scare us, especially our marketing people — How deep does Google dig?

Consequently:

“Why Google Wave is dangerous”

IF you are fortune enough to get a “Google Wave Invite” – you face the following:

• You don’t know what to do with it – Resolved. Click here
• You will be worried instantly – Once ‘activated’ – you look at accounts you haven’t seen in years. Old contacts, superseded relationships, oh dear – where is Panic Button (or ‘where is the delete button?’)
• You consider changing your email account from Google (They know too much)
• You switch your computer and your phone off. – Just in case.

So what is all the Google Tsunami or Google Wave all about?

Google Wave, announced at Google’s I/O Developer conference in San Francisco, is a hybridized email system – (Ha, ha – you google this) that will fundamentally change the way we think about electronic messaging. This is foreboding for at least five reasons. (Below, a Google Wave or Google Tsunami in action.) Joke aside, this is how it loks like and works:

1) Participating in a Wave is a little like an email chain, and a little like instant messaging; you can embed documents, Google Web Elements, photos and other multimedia, all is presented as one stream of conversation. People can jump in or jump out at any time, and they can track back to see how a conversation got started.

The advantage, Google says, is “rich formatting.” But this “formatting” is also a lot like instant message formatting. We all know what that will mean: short, declarative sentences; loss of all punctuation, greetings, and email signatures (with important info like phone numbers??); and conversations that are much longer than they should be.

2) “With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.” That’s what Google says. Are we are the only ones who write an email, then revise it for tone and clarity? It’s creepy enough that other people know when we are typing on Gtalk. Now they can see what we are thinking as we try out sentences?

whytwitter google wave gadgets

3) Every college student is familiar with the next liability. Email chains–the closest thing to waves at this point–are all fun and games until someone CC’s the wrong person, like a parent, relative, boss or overly-sensitive co-worker. “Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process,” Google says. That’ll make keeping track of participants a lot harder. Subtract the aforementioned opportunities to self-edit, and you have a social “train-wreck” ready and waiting.

4) Google Wave, like all fun new toys on the Internet these days, has its own API, aspiring to be a platform as well as a tool. It has “robots” that enable live functions like searching, linking and translation, and a wave can be embedded in a site to make things more “collaborative,” according to Google.

Leaving aside spam for a second–which we believe is no trifle – what is it with platforms? How many of these things can we have before we all join hands across Europe, US and Asia? Any company with moderately ambitious developers is already trying to handle smartphone apps, Facebook’s API, Twitter, widgets, and who knows how many other endeavors. Do we really need to throw another silo of communication on the pile? Yes. But it can’t be controlled by a company who can “change and manipulate”.

5) The worst thing about Google Wave: We will all try it anyway! Google’s apps are roundly excellent, with the exception of maybe Picasa, which is shamed by Flickr. Why? We are curious how the Google Wave – we call it Google Tsunami now –  survived amidst a new, post-recession Google that cuts funding for pie-in-the-sky projects; obviously, Google really believes in it’s Wave, and the search engine.

Sometimes even the giant can be wrong.

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