The more I use (or “try” to use) Google Wave, the more I think this new Google’s communication and collaboration tool is at a too early stage of its development to be released to a wider audience. Here is why.
No realtime
In a world that is heading towards everything realtime, Google Wave (at this stage) is not. I have 22 waves open in my Google Wave account and I wouldn’t ever use them or a new one to start a collaboration session with one or more of my contacts. Why? They wouldn’t see my request when I need them to.
I made the following experiment: I tried to contact one of my friends on Twitter, by Email and by starting a new Wave. I asked him something that needed an immediate feedback and for which Google Wave would have been a great and effective tool to respond. He responded to the email after 25 minutes, Twitter after 1 hour (not addicted to Twitter) and Wave… well, my message is still there… without any response.
No alerts
This point is strictly connected to the first one. Unless you have Wave open, you don’t have any way to be alerted by any kind of activity in your Wave account. This should be sorted out very easily through some kind of widget, browser plugin, (for Mac) Growl notification or something like that. Anyway, at least during this first stage, an email notification would have been much appreciated in order to get people used to this tool. Someone is doing that, though.
What a mess!
In my Wave inbox I have a wave involving 73 participants and over 180 messages. How easy is keeping up with every message? I tried and gave up. Very difficult and in this case an old, well known forum would have offered better results. A moderation system should be introduced, too, otherwise some waves could led to unexpected and unwanted results…
What do you think? This is a someway provocative post because, despite I’m an eager early adopter of any kind of new technology internet related, I find Google Wave to be half backed and, IMHO, not ready for the prime time. Yes, it’s a preview that is making the internet community buzz a lot and I’m sure Google will learn a lot from this buzz, but it’s not going to be something I’m gonna use continuously.
What about you?
P.S. stay tuned for the next post about Wave where I’ll list three applications for using Google Wave at its best… 
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