A few weeks ago, I watched a video about Google’s new product, Wave.  Ostensibly, Google Wave is Google’s view on what you would get if email had been invented now using modern techniques.  By combining the best of email and instant messaging, you would get a dynamic conversation that was both synchronous and asynchronous, stored in a central location so that there would be a single defined copy of ‘the conversation’, or wave as they like to call it.

In practice, what this sounds like to me is communicating with someone by editing a Google doc at the same time.

If this sounds kludgy to you - rather than brilliant - then congratulations, you have a critical mass of properly firing neurons.

Despite my skeptism, I decided to try it out.  I’ve been wrong before.  My impressions were thus:

1. Because HTML 5 (which will supposedly deprecate the need for silverlight and flash, it is to laugh) is not supported in Internet Explorer - the browser used by 65% of the world - and because google apparently can’t be bothered to make Google Wave work without it, the only way to use Google Wave in IE is to install the Chrome Browser Frame, essentially a browser within a browser that allows sites to switch out IE’s rendering engine and use Chrome instead, if they choose.  There are a million reasons why this is terrible.
2. At least when I was using it, it didn’t even work.  Friends of mine who have Wave can’t see Waves I invite them to, nor can I see waves they invite me to.  Waves I create are not even saved within my view.  This means that Google Wave currently does absolutely nothing at all.
3. In addition to installing a useless, market fragmenting plug-in to use their application which does nothing (or installing firefox, which is what I actually did), it apparently only lets me do nothing with people who are already on my google contacts list.  It will allow me to ’start a new wave’ with these people (ficticiously), or to ‘ping them’.  Both of these things seem to do the same thing, only one of them opens a wave above the top nav bar, and one opens it in the right view pane.  Neither works.
4. Even if this did all work, the usage model is bizarre.  When I say it’s like communication via google doc, I mean that in the worst way.  It also means it’s non-linear, so you can go back up further in the conversation and add new threads, which means as someone trying to follow the conversation, you need to continually scroll back up for new bits that have appeared further up the conversation.  Wave has a control panel similar to what you might see on a VCR to play and rewind a conversation, which should scare you.

This is perhaps the worst product I’ve seen out of Google yet.  Lots of people create useless products, but it takes someone really special to create something that does nothing, and would be useless even if it did what it was supposed to, with the kind of financial backing that Google has.

I really don’t know what the hell is going on at Google these days.  Once upon a time they were releasing things that were extremely complex and useful, requiring deep understanding of algorithms, or positioning information in ways that were useful and had never been done well before.

The offerings these days are applications based on web-kit, leveraging ’standards’ that haven’t been adopted in 2/3 of the browser marketshare, requiring anyone on the platform to get deeply in bed with Google, and providing no value whatsoever, unless in this brave new world confusion and failure are now valued monetary instruments.