Google Wave’s Biggest Deal Breaker
03. Nov, 2009 
8 Comments
Google Wave seems to be the talk of the town, but there is one HUGE problem with Google Wave, you can only wave with fellow wavers (or would they be surfers?). Most people seem like this won’t be a problem once Wave actually goes public, as it seems many people will sign up for wave. But there lies the issue, if you don’t have Wave account; Wave doesn’t let you send an outgoing message to any standard email user, even Gmail users. So let’s say that John who has Hotmail sends me an email with a doc attached and I feel that I have a conversation in Wave that I feel this document can greatly contribute to I can’t just forward the email to my Wave address and add it to the Wave.
Google has also announced that it will be launching a federated wave system, that would allow companies to host their own wave servers onsite, much like how companies already host their exchange and SharePoint servers. But until Google allows for a system that would allow Wave to send and receive emails, or adds some Gmail/Google Apps (for business) support, no company will implement Google Wave.
I have Google Wave, and I think that it is a great idea, just at this point, poorly implemented. Google, I implore you, if you want Wave to survive, you are going to need to add either decent Gmail support or allow for incoming and outgoing emails.
For those of you that have Wave, please comment below and tell us what you think?
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The biggest problem:
It’s too complicated.
Eh, my biggest issue is the one you pointed out. It’s like have any technology that’s mean to be social when not everyone else has it. Think about it, if you had a telephone and only two other people you knew had one / same for email. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen but still…They need to hurry it up with the invites.
If that is your analysis, then E-mail should’ve gone down too. Apart from that, nothing stops you from writing interoperability of federation with smtp. The question is: is it needed and useful? E-mail isn’t compatible with waves and federation at all. The only thing I could think of is an E-mail notification service.
Apart from all that: this is a public beta. It is least to say, rough. If you should say something about it: it is slow. But I think that is merely the client. Once native desktop clients pop up, I think it’ll all be better.
@DennieBee you are certainly right about the differences in smtp severs. I have my problems with those and wish there was just one. However you can still email to any email in the world, where as with wave you can only wave with fellow wavers. For email it’s like you have a bunch of different cars but they all still drive the same and you can drive them all the same, but for wave, you have this new car that only drives on certain roads and no one else knows how to drive. You have an interesting point though.
@Max: I understand you’re point, but it’s void.
Wave is based upon a new protocol. The protocol (Federation) is an extension to XMPP. It’s an open protocol, just like smtp. Developers all over the world, will be implementing servers and clients, just like E-mail. Waves is just Google implementation of the protocol. So you will be able to send a wave from Google Wave to another person using another server and another client. This is just a matter of time. 
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