Google Product Design: Wave Confuses Planet
October 2nd, 2009Google just keep coming up with new stuff, don’t they? I guess when you’re one of the most profitable companies in the world, you have to offload that money somewhere. And they choose to pump it into lots of new web applications and product design ideas that no-one’s sure will be useful.
But they look cool. And here comes Google Wave. If you look at the Youtube adverts it certainly looks very sexy, with cute little blue boxes and pretty icons everywhere. But what the hell is it for?
Described by the makers as a “personal communication and collaboration tool”, it’s an application that can be edited by several people at one time. You can even see words appearing, letter-by-letter, as they’re written. It can translate between 40 languages and has solid spelling and grammar checking qualities.
Yes, but what’s it for?
100,000 lucky, yet very confused, users have been given the chance to trial it. A certain number of folks have been invited by Google directly, and those users can subsequently invite up to 8 more people. Hopefully they have worked out what Google Wave is for.
Like many software product design concepts, it’s hard to see the value until you use it for something yourself. Does it in fact solve a problem that couldn’t be solved before? Is it a very human way to create a new document – ‘too many cooks’ and all that? Some might imagine that if one person wants to write a line and the other immediately wants to delete it – this kind of communal document creation could lead to a few inter-office quarrels.
...your opinion?