Is “Google Making Us Stupid?” Is the web making us “shallow?” My students say “no.”
BGSU students argue that the web is making us smarter via VoiceThread.
BGSU students argue that the web is making us smarter via VoiceThread.
Mashable is chronicling the surpise death of Google Wave, the super-hyped tool of last year, here.
I, for one, am sad to see it go. I think it had loads of potential. However, like other Google products (Google Buzz, you’re next), a great engineering concept is crashing due to lack of marketing backing and a purist refusal to use legacy tools to promote, and aid the transition to, new ones.
Acknowledging that Wave was conceptualized as a tool designed “as if” 1990s e-mail never existed, why on Earth did Google refuse to provide even a basic tool for notifying e-mail users (at least users of Gmail) of changes to waves, especially when Google itself restricted the growth of Wave through its limited invitation scheme, which meant that “lucky” invitees had to check (manually) both their e-mail and Wave accounts because most e-mail users (many of whom wanted Wave) were stuck waiting for their Wave invitations? This strategy gave Wave the tech buzz of iPhone circa 2008 with all the compatibility of Macintosh circa 1995. Oh, the frustration.
This approach essentially guaranteed that Wave uptake would stall before its hype. Too bad, because Wave’s ability to facilitate real-time collaboration and integration with the whole wide Web were amazing.
I sincerely hope that the technologies behind Wave will find their way into Google’s other apps, especially Docs, which Microsoft is now challenging with its own free office suite (which, surprise, supports online collaboration and high levels of compatibility with documents created using the nearly ubiquitious client-side Microsoft Office suite.)
Sadly, despite Google’s assumptions and assertions, Wave’s enemy wasn’t really old fashioned e-mail, but paper and “versions” of electronic “documents” (paper you read on TV.)
Had they allowed a simple e-mail to be sent that said little more than “the Wave you have subscribed to has been updated,” they might have really been on to something great.
Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave — simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you are a Google Apps administrator at a business, school or organization, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost (more on our Enterprise blog).
» via Google Wave Blog
