It might be okay, I guess, and it might be useful for some people who want to improve their email responsiveness but don’t want to utilize instant messaging…I guess. If they have laptops or a phone that doesn’t deal well with email. I don’t know…email oddly enough works surprisingly well for what it does, and that’s to allow a person some time to craft a response that involves more thoughtfulness than an instant message, comment, or tweet. There is certainly a place for that in our dialogue. I see Wave as kind of a tweener technology that will probably have to give up some of its instant messaging features in favor of more conventional email features…and probably will eventually be incorporated as Gmail’s “optional” email client.
It’s just that it’s a johnny come lately to a crowded social networking field that doesn’t really bring anything spectacularly different and necessary to the game. Like Google hit the sweet spot with search, Facebook seems to have hit the sweet spot with social media. Twitter kind of is its own niche altogether…even though Twitter and Facebook “want” to compete with each other, they really don’t. They’re complementary technologies that really would be best served working closely together to deliver an even better product. Twitter does status updates far, far better than Facebook. Facebook does the whole “me webpage in a can with a photo gallery” better than anyone else.
LinkedIn, though, is an entirely different animal. I think most people would rather like for their LinkedIn to be separate from their personal stuff…even though all that personal stuff can be surfed up if you want to read it. I know full well that my employers can do that, and honestly, if I knew I wasn’t hired because they didn’t respect my political or technical opinions even if they disagreed, I think I’d kind of hate working for people like that anyway. In that regard, if social networking websites REALLY wanted to own the market, they’d do a better job of letting their users track the people who visit their sites, and block anonymous services that let them snoop on prospective employees without those employees knowing. I’d also like to see labor laws written that absolutely require employers to disclose whether or not they’ve been snooping on employees or prospective hires. It IS technically an invasion of privacy…if your boss intentionally followed you home from work and looked through your garbage to see if you were buying a competitor’s product, wouldn’t you find that just the least bit creepy?
Anyway, I just don’t see Google Wave, as it is now, really breaking the market open. Google has been desperate for something to really blow everyone away since they got their search out there. They have shareholders that they have to trick into thinking that their stock is worthwhile keeping there. That’s kind of the peril of letting your company go public…if Google were a private company, they could just settle with being the biggest search player out there, and having a sizable chunk of the web mail market. They wouldn’t have to overstaff in an attempt to churn out new ideas and try and branch out into crowded markets with products that just can’t improve on what’s there.
Bottom line, it’s just an example of why corporations need to de-merge, break up, buy up their own stock, and become private. If more companies did that, they’d be able to operate far more efficiently (though they’d have less of an ability to offshore jobs effectively…that’s not so bad too) and overall, you’d probably be pretty impressed with the overall monetary outcome of all of those spun off businesses.