Jimmy Gilmore

Finally got my Wave invite and I have a first impression.

Google has made the case that Wave is what email would have been been had it been built with today’s tech­nol­ogy. But Google Wave strikes me more as a col­lab­o­ra­tion tool rather than a replace­ment for email. Frankly, I know a lot of peo­ple who would be pretty freaked out with other peo­ple edit­ing their typ­ing while they’re try­ing to send a message.

Why do we need to replace email any­way? I love email. Not Out­look or the the spam that comes with email. But I do love the call and response mes­sag­ing that email pro­vides. And I really love how Gmail pro­vides con­ver­sa­tion nest­ing for eas­ier track­ing of the back and forth. I find email very freak­ing use­ful. In fact, just a moment ago it got a friend of mine a job inter­view. Can’t do that with Wave. And did I men­tion my mother can use it?

But I am excited about where Wave is going. For geeks work­ing with other tech savvy peo­ple, there’s a lot that can be accom­plished with this tool. But for Wave to be more use­ful than email, we’ll have to wait for wide­spread adop­tion and be lucky enough to work with peo­ple who are pretty tech­no­log­i­cally inclined.