Google Wave is ‘Email Refreshed.’ The entire purpose of Email when it came into existence was to be a more effective medium than ’snail’ mail. As a result, Email wasn’t built to be able to include videos within the message or to have an embedded Monopoly board that would allow you to play the game with your friends via Email. No one back then thought that you would be able to do such things over the Internet and consequently the way Email is right now, such features can not be added. So Google has built a whole new tool called Wave that allows rich communication and collaboration and that could potentially phase out Email.

Wave also tackles a lot of small problems that currently exist with E-mail and Instant Messaging. For example, when there is a long exchange of mails amongst a large group and someone important gets included at a later stage – then he or she may find the context missing. Also, some may reply to an older email in which case the new people on the list may get left out again. With Google Wave that would not happen. It introduces a playback button which takes you through the entire exchange of messages sequentially like in a video.

Apart from several such improvements, Google Wave also allows you to collaborate with friends and colleagues. So it gives you the ability to collaborate on a presentation or solve a sudoku puzzle along with a friend or play chess against someone without needing any attachments.

While all of this makes it sound like a revolutionary concept, the truth is that the smaller improvements come at the expense of a lot of complexity and requires a user to learn a whole new way to communicate. Despite my savviness with technology, I found the tool extremely painful to understand and use. Also, while the collaboration ability is actually path-breaking – one may want to use it either to work on documents with colleagues or to play games with friends. And for that we already have document collaboration tools like Google Docs and if one wants to play games with friends you would rather go to Orkut or Facebook. The whole point is, why would anyone want to collaborate on a document or play a game inside an email when there are better ways of doing it on other applications such as social networks?

Verdict: Google Wave will get an extended run because it’s from the Google stable but in its current avatar it won’t see too much success. Google is probably desperate to win an audience that is fast moving towards Facebook for all its communication needs. But then Wave is definitely not the answer.

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This review was written for the first edition (November 2009) of the newly launched Times Group magazine called Top of Mind that is focused on celebrating marketing excellence. (Scanned copy)