It’s Christmas morning, and you’re 5 years old. You rush downstairs before everyone else and start tearing into that one gift that’s been teasing you with its shiny wrapping and big red bow for what seems like forever. Shreds of paper begin to rain down as your eyes widen at the sight of… a brand new chemistry set.

That’s pretty much how I felt about Google Wave when I first looked received my invite. It could be awesome… later, once I actually figure out what to do with it. But because it’s in limited beta right now, there aren’t really enough people that I can interact with in order to take advantage of all of its features. … Ok, a chemistry set isn’t really a social device, but you get my drift.

Don’t get me wrong. I “get” why it’s awesome. I just haven’t been able to experience it for myself. Depending on how long it’s in beta (which is likely to be quite some time, given their track record with their other products) I suppose the userbase will grow, and soon we’ll all be engaged in really rich conversations about the most recent episode of House, or how much I loathe green peppers or something.

That’s one of the things that amuses me about the mass audience (myself included). We seem to crave really cool, ever advancing technology to perform the simplest of tasks. The vast assortment of new applications dedicated to interesting ways to churn out 140 character posts on Twitter is proof of this. What do any of these apps do that’s really THAT much different from sending a text message to one or more people? Further, given that there IS a difference, how many of us take full advantage of even the most basic features? Given the iconic nature of the image below, I’m willing to bet it isn’t many.

If you’ve seen any of the trailer videos for Google Wave, they make a pretty good case for how it could be used in the course of daily events. A near seamless blending of email/IM/texting etc., making the sharing of information that much easier. But given the ever present challenge of convincing people to change their online habits (IE is still the leading web browser, despite Firefox/Chrome/Safari being better products in my opinion), I’m a little apprehensive about how fast this will take place. This isn’t merely a new tool, it’s a new toolset that’s going to require people to change the way they think about how they communicate.

I guess, as with most things, we shall wait and see. If anyone else out there has access to Wave and wants to give it a spin, drop me a line at my Gmail account (Chris DOT Baboolal).

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 1:29 pm and is filed under communication, social networking, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.