How Google Wave changed my life

How Google Wave changed my life

Short version, it hasn't.

I'm sure that when everyone has actually figured out what Wave is good for, there will be some nontrivial change to how some things age done on the Internet. But when it does happen, will it even be the type of thing that most people are even going to notice?

Right now, Wave feels like this massive web forum, only without a whole lot of structure. And, from a content persective, governance and direction.

To be honest, this doesn't surprise me. It's a whole new information and community space. And this space, compared to the Internet as a whole, is limited to just those of us that have been invited.

I'm not surprised by, and at the same time bothered by the number of public waves that have a title that says something like "The Official X wave" when there isn't any indication that the owner of the wave has anything to do with whatever that wave is about. Other than being a fan.

I don't have a problem with fan sites (or waves), but one does have to wonder when the disputes over which fan's wave is the *real* official wave for content X. At least until the owners of X get a chance to post their own wave.

Wait, this is starting to feel a little bit like what's happening on Twitter accounts or Facebook with pages. And we've already seen plenty of this happen with forums, when IP/concept/product owners/artist started hosting their own communities, when a somewhat mature fan community already existed with pages and fora of their own.

I don't know yet where Google Wave is going to go. I fully expect at some point I'll be embedding something of Wave into SysMango.com, but until they get at least read-only anonymous access, there isn't going to be value to having content that only about 200,000 (my guess) people ableto even see. And the odds of any of them ever seeing SysMango.com . . . slim. Very slim.

Of course, this is me on Google wave, day 4. We will have to wait and see what develops.