An Inevitable Look At Google Wave

Google seems convinced that real-time communication will change the world. As opposed to the current, and absolutely intolerable, 3-second delay in uploading blog posts, emails, or tweets.

(Some of my friends have actually discovered something called the "telephone", which is truly brilliant for "real-time" communication. I've even heard tales of multiple people using this device to chat at the same time! Don't look up "Skype" or "iChat" unless you are prepared to be amazed.)

- OMG, they're having a live chat!? That's MAGIC!
- Build your own blog... you mean like Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Amazing!
- Embed stuff like videos, pictures, links, and feeds into your blog? Uh... you mean like Facebook, and Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Incredible!
- Share photos? Sure, I'll believe that when I see it! Wow, you people must be on drugs!
- Real-time collaboration tools? You mean like the business software that has been around for years, that only a tiny fraction of the market ever has, or ever will, use? Genius!

Sites like Plaxo and Friendfeed already aggregate your content from multiple other sites. Almost all of the blog and social sites I've joined have asked for a dozen other logins during the signup process, so I could do everything from that site without logging into the others. All my blogs, messages, pictures, video, audio, and friend updates from all over the web can all be organized by any of these sites. Kind of like Wave, except they really exist.

Pretty soon Google will "develop" something that is simply Skype, but they'll have a big press release, call it Google SpeakBonanza, and tell everyone it's groundbreaking for some reason.

Here's why I think Wave will suck by trying to cram everything you could ever do into one window:

1) If your browser crashes, everything you are doing crashes all at once. How dumb is that?
2) It takes away the freedom of being able to move any window anywhere on your desktop (two desktops in my case).

It won't make anything faster, or easier, or safer, or cheaper, or more fun. I honestly don't understand what they're thinking. It's lame, limiting, and a step backwards compared to what already exists.

Or maybe there's something I'm not understanding. We'll see what happens over the coming months.