Google Wave, the maddeningly confusing yet highly innovative real-time collaboration tool, will become a member of Google’s online office suite Google Apps later this year. The service, still in closed beta, is meant to be a modern-day revamp of email – what email would be if it was invented in 2009 instead of the 1960’s. Yet the interface, a mashup of email, chat, and collaborative document editing, left many early adopters with mixed feelings about the product…at least in its current form. Called “unproductive,” “complex,” and “overwhelming” by the same people who usually embrace new technologies, it seems an odd choice to add the still-developing Wave service to the Google Apps line-up at this time. But Google has confirmed they will do exactly that.
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As mentioned in a blog post late last year, Google is now preparing to roll out Wave to Google Apps customers along with the VoIP service Google Voice and 200 other improvements and updates to their current suite of office tools.
Google Wave: Innovative, Confusing
The technologies at the core of Google Wave are impressive. With an HTML5-enabled interface and real-time protocols for instant interaction, Wave was highly anticipated among tech enthusiasts prior to its launch. However, once beta testers gained access to the redesigned inbox experience delivered by Wave, the results were those of confusion, feelings of being overwhelmed and apparently, eventual abandonment.
That’s not to say Google Wave is a failure. The service is just a little too raw right now for everyday use by a majority of internet users. The problem with Wave stems from its overcrowded inbox of “waves” – threads of conversation updated in real-time. Within a wave, users can have IM-like chats, share and edit documents, and even “replay” a wave to see a history of the changes made. At launch time,
Tags: Google
