Google Wave is a gargantuan mess and will never replace e-mail
For some reason, a while back, I got an invite to Google Wave. I was excited for all of ten minutes, and lots of people on Twitter were very jealous. They shouldn’t be.
Google Wave won’t replace e-mail at all. It’s a toy. A very complicated, slow and strange toy. It’s not at all intuitive for me, and will be even less intuitive for so-called normal people.
It’s not an improvement on e-mail though. It’s an improvement for people who have sucky e-mail clients and broken e-mail habits. For someone who has a management-addled Outlook and Exchange hell, where they append 150KB of utter shite on the end of each e-mail, warning recipients that the e-mail has been through seventeen anti-virus processes, that it’s absolutely and strictly confidential and that I shouldn’t print out the e-mail and that if I do any of these things, they’ll stick their e-lawyers on me. Of course, this is after seventeen pages of top-posted bullshit CCed to half the fucking planet.
Yeah, if you use e-mail like that, Wave is a big improvement.
But if you use e-mail sanely, and use an e-mail client that’s not designed for idiots, Wave is not a big improvement.
The Wave interface, as I say, is way too complicated for any sane person to use. It’s filled with rich text shit which is totally unnecessary. The thing crawls along slowly even on a 2.4GHz machine with 2Gb of RAM in Safari. When it comes to offline usage, it’ll be Gears/HTML5 offline. Which works pretty fucking unreliably compared to an actual offline application: not written in JavaScript and browser plugins. I know. I have the misfortune of trying to use Gmail offline and Google Reader offline, if only to remind me (a) that Mutt is so much more awesome and (b) that NetNewsWire could be more awesome if they only sorted out the damn Combined View and made it look halfway decent.
I can’t find any reason why I would want to use Wave rather than e-mail. It’s that simple. It’s not an improvement. The mild productivity gain you would get in not using e-mail would be offset by the sheer complexity of Wave. Perhaps I’m a dunce, but I can understand almost enough of the mental model of e-mail to really use it pretty well. And most people can. It emulates something that we are all familiar with in real life: the postal service.
I’ve made the comparison before, but compare Wave with EtherPad. Wave is trying to give us all-singing, all-dancing doodads. EtherPad just lets you edit text together with others.
What will it take for Wave to replace e-mail. Let me see. Firstly, you’d have to convince a huge number of people that e-mail is broken. Even though it is actually mostly okay for most people. Next, you need to build the huge coral reef of infrastructure around e-mail again. That means clients, servers and stuff that’s built on top. This is a huge and pointless effort. There are e-mail clients for almost every single platform. You can buy pay as you go handsets in Britain for fifty pounds now that have e-mail built in. Not to mention, you’ve got to port over e-mail tools: encryption, contact sync, mailing list management, directory handling (LDAP etc.), address book/contact handling, mobile-desktop sync stuff. That isn’t going to happen.
The sort of people who think that Wave is going to replace e-mail also probably think that replacing NXDOMAINs with a friendly redirect to a branded search service is nice because it’s less unfriendly than a browser warning. Or that Second Life is going to be used for anything other than furries fucking. TechCrunch-reading twats, in other words.
Reserve judgment on Wave until you try it. I promise you, you’ll be completely disappointed unless you are either totally brain-addled or a Google groupie smackhead. It’s a fun browser tech toy, a neat showcase of what you can build in HTML. It’s really great at that. But it’s like trying to convince people that OS X is great by showing them the Genie Effect or drop-down menu transparency or the Cube transition in Keynote. E-mail isn’t going anywhere. And if you do it properly, it doesn’t suck as much as you think.
