So last week, while we were working on some graphic mock-ups for FluidDB (which, by the way, is amazing and will change the world forever), Jason remarked via gchat, “you know, this would actually be a perfect situation for using Google Wave.”
He was right, too. Google Wave had tremendous potential as a productivity tool — a unique and robust mid-point between GMail and Google Docs in which the conversation surrounding a project is as central as the project itself. Much has been made of the problems with Google Wave as a product — and it certainly had its problems. But Google’s bigger problem was a communications problem. Wave arrived on an unprecedented *cough* wave of *cough cough* buzz. It was viral, it was fashion. But nobody really knew why they wanted it.
A couple years ago, I was at a Wal Mart in Seekonk, MA with my friend Alex. We saw a little kid holding some kind of product — we couldn’t figure out what it was — that was being aggressively cross-marketed with the then-popular film Shrek.
Alex walked over and asked the kid, “hey — what do you have there?”
The kid looked back incredulously. ”Shrek.”
“Yes, but what is it?”
Another incredulous stare. ”…SHREK.”
If you’re selling impulse purchase items at Wal Mart, this is all you need — once the item has been purchased, you don’t care if people have any use for it. For products like Wave, this is obviously not the case. Since Wave did not import contacts from GMail, Google needed to justify an entirely separate workflow and experience. They needed to explain, quickly and convincingly, how Wave’s utility justified its learning curve. (I would even go so far as to suggest that, in succinctly explaining its utility, they would in fact have made its learning curve much less foreboding.) They needed to explain not only WHAT Wave did, but WHY and HOW people could use it.
Instead, Google provided long videos outlining Wave’s many uber-cool features. It was funny for a time, when the “what is Wave?” meme became the “Wave is confusing!” meme. But, at the end of the day, the answer to “why do you want Wave?” was simply, “…WAVE.”
