| In his recent post, James Pyles ponders, Why Hasn't Google Wave Gone Viral? Of course, there are probably many reasons, not the least of which is that almost nothing—in the grand scheme of things—actually “goes viral”. But even if Google wave is, potentially, one of those things that could go viral, it simply is not ready. It's very, very early in the life of Google wave—one can't even sign up yet without an invitation, which adds some serious friction to the viral-going process. But beyond that, GW is still so new that even the forward-looking techno-geeks are still just getting their minds around GW-enabled usage paradigms. GW is still too confusing and too unpolished to replace established solutions, let alone to go viral. But the new wave-paradigm genie is out of the bottle and it’s not likely going back in. GW will continue to evolve based on the feedback of hundreds of thousands of early users. My hunch is that Google wave will never “go viral” in the sense that it explodes into the mainstream (and perhaps later, just as quickly, fades from grace). Rather, it will slowly and steadily become more and more useful, more and more widely used, and more and more indispensable as both an application and a platform. |
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