Google Wave; Will it Prove to be the Ultimate Email Killer?

Judging by the tweets I’m seeing and what I’ve seen from friends and acquaintances, some of those 100,000 Google Wave invites are starting to actually arrive in in-boxes of real people, and so also the concept of Google Wave, as trying to redesign or redefine email (or cause the so-called death of Email communication). If you are new to the latest hot topic that is buzzing allover the internet (read as “Google Wave”), here is a small intro:

“Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more…”

Google Wave Features:
1. Near Real-time
2. Group-ware with shared Edits
3. History
4. Interspersed with Text, Media, URLs, Blobs etc
5. Version-ed
6. Time-threaded
7. Collaborative

Recently, much before the arrival of Google Wave, I have seen several friends who have almost stopped using email altogether. They simply message each other on FaceBook, using each other’s walls or the private messaging or the live chat. Unfortunately FaceBook wasn’t designed for that at all. So it’s a mess (even bigger mess than Email today). Based on such experience, I’m inclined to stand behind Google Wave, and hope it succeeds as a concept and hope that people don’t get stuck on what they see on wave.google.com.

Will Google Wave kill Email? Well, we are yet to find out. But, a large part of online population think that email means Outlook Express. In that way, Outlook is a platform in itself. But, can Wave replace this? Or will it always run as a parallel for early adopters and geeks? We are yet to witness a time when we actually can go ahead and dump Email for corporate communication and start communicating via FaceBook or Twitter! So it is probably safe to assume that Gmail (and other forms of Email communication) is here to stay. That being said, is wave positioned to replace the MS Exchange or just be a geeks alternative? I still wonder.

Interestingly, Google Wave is still lacking must-have features to complete the idea of being a mainstream communication tool. Unfortunately, when those features get added, it will become anything but overly complicated. On the other hand, Email is simple – from, to, cc, bcc, subject – that’s it! Twitter is that simple, too. FaceBook – even simpler! Google Wave – not simple now and even less so when fully-featured in the future.

Due to these reasons it’s not very clear yet in which way Google Wave is going to go. But it’s definitely going places – and not just to Brazil! Anyway, one must admit that Google Wave’s this so called ‘new’ style of communication is rather exciting, if a little daunting at the same time! I can’t see it catching on right away, because most people don’t like change. But when it does (which is probably inevitable) its implications could be huge; by huge I mean really HUGE! What do you think? Have you received a Google Wave Invitation yet, by the way?