When Google Wave was announced, there was big hooha surrounding it. But months down the road, somehow it still has not been met with widespread adoption as their other phenomenally successful product GMail. Wanna know why? Read on to find out more
#1 – A Google Wave user can only communicate with another Google Wave user. Whereas with GMail, I can use it to send emails to my friends’ hotmail, rocketmail(Does it even exist now?) email accounts, so Google Wave is a victim of the negative network effect (Not many friends = not many users which leads to not many friends again, the downward spiral continues)
#2 – Although Google Wave is meant to be a collaboration software or a reinvention of email now. But the idea of using 2 email accounts for personal use is beyond most people. I know of only a handful of people who use multiple email addresses for their personal emails while the rest are just content with 1 email address. So, 1 way to increase usage of Google Wave is to put a link in the GMail interface so that people can access Google Wave from their Gmail accounts without going to http://wave.google.com and logging in again.
Google Wave sounds very good and I do see some potential in it, but technology without the people using it, is useless as technology was created to serve people.