Google Wave: What is it? Why should you care?

Unless you've been under a rock, one with particularly poor Wi-Fi, you've probably heard at least something about Google's newest newfangled thingamabob, Wave.

If you're lucky, you have a much-sought-after Wave account. The search engine giant recently opened a controlled beta version to 100,000 people, and desperate geeks are willing to pay real money for exclusive invites even if they're not entirely sure what it is they're willing to pay for.

Google describes Wave as an "online communication and collaboration tool." The technorati are calling it either the death or future of e-mail, the tool for collaborative documents (which must irk the Wikipedia crowd no end), a tarted up version of an RSS reader and a slumgullion of other confusing and occasionally contradictory things. Response favors the conclusion that it's a bit of a mess.

The name Google gave Wave is lifted from Joss Whedon's sci-fi show, "Firefly", in which characters sent "waves" instead of e-mails.

The implication of the name, also spelled out explicitly by its creators, is that Wave is what you'd get if someone designed e-mail from the ground up today. I have to say that's ambitious. And there's a lot to be said for the slow evolution of a communication tool.

Of course, tech gurus such as Gina Trapani of Lifehacker fame, and Leo Laporte of This Week in Tech, love it. Others, like this site that squares Wave off against things like lipid solubility or our own existence in a "which is easier to understand?" throwdown, are less impressed.

All the average Joe wants to know, of course, is: Do I have to worry about all this Google Wave stuff or can I go back to poking people on Facebook for a few more months?

So what's Wave like?
Cognitive science professor and author Donald Norman used to give students the Kobayashi Maru of design homework, asking his students to squish a CD player, tape player, clock radio, telephone and answering machine all together in an usable doodad.

The point was to fail, but also learn along the way that too much functionality defies a good interface. Wave's not the worst example of ignoring this principle, but nor does it provide a great metaphor to untangle the problem. Knowing what Wave is trying to be like would help people understand how to use it.

Pull up Wave on your screen and it looks like someone junked together a wiki, e-mail, Google Docs, IM, some elements of social networking, Twitter, Google Maps, and a bunch of other crud. That embarrassment of riches, it turns out, comes with, well, embarrassment.

On the left, you have a navigation tool that frankly doesn't get used much. Below that is the list of your contacts. There aren't a ton of folks with Wave accounts right now, and that's a (temporary) problem.

In the middle you have a list of waves, controlled to some extent by that navigation tool on the left, but also by the search at the top. You can make some waves public, the implications of which have yet to be properly understood. In that sense, it can be kind of like a Wiki.

Finally, on the right hand side you have a wave. It starts off a lot like either an e-mail or a post to a forum. If someone else is looking at the same wave, they can see you writing and editing in real time. You can throw in a map or a widget or whatever.

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