Is Google Wave getting desperate?
A lot of people around the world have wondered how they should use Google Wave. There has been a general trend of people first clamoring for wanting to get invited, and then not knowing what to do with the service once they get in. I am certainly part of this trend. The problem is that a number of people today don’t have time to find out for themselves how a new way of doing things is useful. This is certainly true of me, at least. If its not obvious to me at first go why something is useful for me, I typically don’t visit that service that often. The same happened to me with Twitter – which I joined in 2007, but didn’t start using regularly till earlier this year, when some of my friends became regulars.
Anyway, back to the topic. It looks like Google Wave is getting desperate for adoption.
I am a user of EtherPad which Google purchased sometime ago. For those of you who don’t know what EtherPad is, it is a web-based word processor that allows for people to work on a single document in “really real-time” and it really does work in real time like you wouldn’t believe it. Their real time technology is of course interesting for Google Wave.
Anyway, today I got an email from EtherPad:
The email contains an invite to join Google Wave (I don’t need it because I already am on Google Wave). Could it be that they are not getting enough traction so now they are trying to get people who already are used to working with real time collaboration applications (such as EtherNet) to use their product?
By the way, here’s a very interesting re-tweet making the rounds about Google Wave:
Google Wave was built to show younger people how older people feel when they try to use the internet.
Not sure who is the original person who made it. Anyway, if someone can explain to me how to use Google Wave to do something useful, I will start right away.
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December 19th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Spot on Vaibhav! The retweet could not have rung truer!
Btw, the blog renders awesomely on the iPhone – I remember you’d posted about that change some time back.
December 19th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I know, I just can’t over how great that re-tweet is. Yup, the iPhone rendering is thanks to the plugin I use… I just dropped it in, set some config options, and it was ready to go.
December 21st, 2009 at 1:43 am
I think we need to give Google Wave time to mature. In my opinion, no doubt the hype surrounding the same was not worth but still the whole collab thing is pretty useful if implemented properly.
For example the one in Acrobat.com by Adobe, makes Documents editing so easy, similar is the case with Google Docs.
Wave just makes a clutter of a lot of things. Still, I’d be willing to wait and let Google churn out some improvements.
December 21st, 2009 at 9:05 am
Yup. That’s all we are doing. Waiting