you can't understand google wave

Please everyone, just stop. Everyday someone writes a new article about Google Wave. If you are writing a first impressions, explanation, frequently asked questions type of article, go ahead, this rant is not aimed at you. The rest of you people writing reviews, glowing or scathing, you can't understand Google Wave, yet.

Google Wave is big, that's for sure, its got a Federated Protocol and XMPP and PubSub and all kinds of neat technology. It has an interface too, half email, half chat client, half sentient alien technology. The problem with people waxing inanely about what Google Wave will be is that they have their heads up their asses. They don't know, because they can't know.

Let's go back to 1975 and somebody explains the idea of the World Wide Web, they go on and on about HyperText Transfer Protocols and HyperText Markup Language and they show you the first webpage. Imagine that instead of being the tech savvy web surfing person that you are that you have no idea what HyperText or Uniform Resource Locators are, this is where we are at with Google Wave.

The idea behind it is complex, the foundations are new (at least in application) and also very complex, and the future of Google Wave is unknown, more than that it is unknowable. Could Tim Berners-Lee have guessed what we would be doing with his invention today, could he have dreamed of web applications, twitter, social networking. I guess he could have, but it wouldn't have been immediately apparent.

The technology is too new, it could be a new World Wide Web, or it could be a Gopher. We won't know until we see what people create with it. Google has already produced a collaboration tool that looks very promising, and people are already finding surprising ways to use it.

So if you want to vacillate and bloviate about Google Wave continue doing so, I certainly can't stop you, but you might go down in history as the guy who called the internet a fad.