Why is Google Wave So Hard to Understand?

Google Wave is a pretty new idea that seemingly changes the way people communicate. Despite this massive change in the way people communicate, “waving” your friends hasn’t spread like wildfire just quite yet. This could be for a number of reasons: Google’s somewhat closed “invitation system”, the lack of publicity surrounding Google Wave, or because people just don’t want to change and would rather stick with their email inbox instead of their Wave inbox. In sum, Google Wave still has a lot of people stumped.

Google Wave changes the way people have communicated since the beginning of time

Think about it. How did the earliest civilizations communicate? Most of the time, it was a short message to a person, often taking weeks (or months) to get a response. Over several thousand years of course, we’ve arrived at our comfy idea of email.

But yet, there’s still an ancient concept that lies behind email: you send a message, wait for a response, send a reply, wait for a response, etc. Put quite simply, it’s just back-and-forth messaging, and the message’s just keep piling up. And this is how it’s been done since the beginning of time.

But Google Wave presents an alternative approach. Instead of responding to a whole message, just double-click and respond to part of it.  When you’re “waving” somebody else, you can see them typing their text word-for-word on your screen (no need to wait for them to hit “Send”). The biggest change is that Waves are dynamic instead of static emails.

The resistance to change

Imagine if somebody walked over to your workspace and completely rearranged it. What if somebody logged into your computer and reorganized your files in a foreign fashion?

You’d freak out.

You want your workspace and computer how you want it! Whenever something that we’re comfortable with changes, we naturally become a bit uneasy. No matter who you are, we all don’t like change to a certain extent (some more than others). Change inevitably interrupts the process in which we’ve become so familiar with.

The lack of understanding

Because we don’t like change, it gives us no incentive to want to understand what Google Wave is. That’s why it’s so hard to understand Google Wave. It’s easier to write it off and not give it a thought.

Like any other tool, Google Wave may or may not work for you and your workflow, but as we look at the future of the web (dubbed “web 3.0″), it’s quite possible that new methods of communication could exist within the new generation.

Will Google Wave replace email?

Some day it could. But based on what we’re seeing from Google thus far, I doubt Wave will replace email any time soon. Google, somewhat surprisingly, has not hyped Wave a lot. Sure, the tech community knows about it, but the average person probably doesn’t know about Wave. If Google were trying to replace email with an alternative technology, they’d have to launch a massive campaign (at least using more resources than they are using presently).

This leads me to believe that Wave is an experiment more than anything. Google knows that new forms of communication are emerging and perhaps they are presenting Wave as a concept of what communication could look like in the future.

Could Wave replace email? Sure. In the near future? No — that’d take some time.

If Google Wave still has you stumped, keep an open mind; Wave’s evolution may be more interesting than you might like to think.