A Wave of Frustration

A while ago I posted about Google Wave, a project I'm very excited about. Wave has the potential to augment (if not replace) nearly every single form of electronic web-based communication we use today. It encapsulates all of them without depreciating any of them. Email, IM, wikis, blogs, collaborative office documents, social networks - it does it all, and transitions seamlessly from one to the other, such that the boundaries between all these different forms of communication start to break down.

On Wednesday, Google started handing out "preview release" invitations to the general public. They were only giving out 100,000, but people that receive those invitations can invite 8 more people to try it out. Google said the first invites were going to the people who'd already been involved in testing, some were going to Google Docs customers, and the rest were going to "the first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com."

Now I fall squarely in to that last category, but since I heard about Wave a little later than other people, it's very possible that I didn't sign up early enough to be counted among the "first." I'm okay with that.

However, as these invitations have been going out, I've been scouring the web to see what people's impressions are, and some of the results have really frustrated me. A lot of these people just don't seem to "get" it. There are too many bloggers that have met Wave with a yawn and said, "so what's the big deal?" - which is fine, everyone's entitled to their opinion - yet when you read what they have to say about it, it's apparent that they either misunderstood what Wave is intended to do, or they incorrectly assumed that the interface was the product, which is not the case - the product is the technology.

The reason this frustrates me is that I get the sense from many of these people that they kind of went, "Meh," and have no intention of continuing to try it out. These people likely signed up for invites not because they thought the technology was impressive, but because they'd heard it was the "next big thing" and they wanted to check it out even though they didn't know what it was. So if they've already decided it's not worth their time, then Google wasted an invitation as far as I'm concerned. How many of these invites have reached their lucky recipient only to be cast aside because said recipient never intended to actually do anything with it (other than write a scathing review, which people like to do just because it makes them look tough).

So I'm not bitter or frustrated that I didn't get an invite, but I am bitter and frustrated that the invitation I could have had went to someone who squandered it. Many times over.

On the other hand, this could be indicative of the kind of hurdle this technology faces in the mainstream. If you're old enough to remember the time when you got your first email address, but most of your friends still hadn't gotten theirs, then you probably can see how a technology like Wave needs widespread adoption in order to really, well, make waves. If these first preview users give up on it so quickly, that could mean trouble, and that makes me really sad.

Here are a couple things I would do with Wave at work if I got the chance to play with it:

• Refine the proofing cycle. Currently, one of my customers emails me with a change they'd like to make to a document, I delegate that task to an employee by forwarding them the email, and they email the PDF proof back to me. I review the PDF and if it looks acceptable, I forward that to the customer, who may send back some additional changes. Rinse. Repeat. Wave could improve this process because, even if it was just being used internally, the back-and-forth nature of the revision process could be reduced to a single document that had a complete history of changes made during that proofing cycle. It would be easier to review, easier to discuss changes, and easier to keep a record of everything that happened.
• Refine the process for resolving production problems. If we have a data-related problem with a customer's file, there could be many reasons. It could be a customer-side issue, which means our CSR would need to contact them and resolve it. It could be a common internal issue, which can be delegated to our junior programmer. It could be an internal issue that's never come up before, which would probably require my attention. Sometimes, it's a combination of those. The problem is, the production team doesn't know the difference, so it can take a while to figure out who should be dealing with it. However, if the production team was able to create a wave and add all the people who might be able to help, we could collaborate on the issue, delegate specific tasks, and keep tabs on the resolution, all from the same place, without a half-dozen emails flying around.

I know that eventually I'll get to try out Wave; it just may not be as soon as I'd like. I really, really hope that most of the people getting their hands on it today are testing it and giving quality feedback, the way my staff and I would.

A Twitter post says they're still working on getting invitations out, so there could still be hope, but they could also just be referring to the additional invites that can be handed out by each if the initial 100,000. I don't know. I'll try not to hold my breath.