When I first heard about Google Wave I was excited, another platform that could help me communicate, network, gather information and assist me in personal branding. When I finally had an invite trickle my way I immediately signed up and was ready to start waving.
And that is pretty much where my fascination with Google Wave stopped. I signed up and attempted to see if any of my Gmail contacts had also received an invite but only two had. I searched for some of the people I follow on Twitter… not that many of them had accounts. So I was very limited in the “waving” I was able to do.
Those people I knew who did have Wave accounts did not seem to be logged into Wave that often, so Wave was basically working like a combination of AIM and email. Not too much else. Was it my group of friends/contacts that limited me? I do not believe so. My set of contacts and Twitter followees has some tech savvy people who span the SEO, social media and tech industries. What I consider to be the target market of this beta launch.
One other reason I believe Wave did not take off, at least for me, was it was much easier to communicate with Twitter. On Twitter I already had a group of contacts, who all had access to and weren’t limited by invites. After about a day of leaving Wave open in my browser I found it to be annoying. I already had Tweetdeck taking up space on my desktop so Wave eventually fell to the way side. Basically all out of the fact that no one was using it, including me.
I did receive quit a few invites from Google so I am hoping that as I spread my invites through out my circle more people will become more active on Wave. I am hoping that as more users have the ability to use Wave that it will become a tool I can utilize. But I have a feeling until it opens to the masses it is going to be a interface that I check rarely.
There also is the possibility that Wave may not be the social media platform I suspect it to be. I do see some valuable business related tasks it could enhance. During launches, releases or updates to websites QA and devlopers will often communicate through emails to fix bugs and relay any issues to the proper team members. They often embed screen shots and code within the body of the e-mail. I see the Wave as a possible solution to having your inbox flooded. If all members on the team had Wave accounts they could get real times updates flowing through a single Wave. With the fixed code and screen shots of issues right infront of them in real time. Not having to worry about a new email coming in and possibly missing something important. But the problem is.. none of them have invites yet.
