I should admit, I never really watched the full Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009 video back then in June when TechCrunch’s MG Siegler posted an article about it. Heck, all the developer-this-developer-that talk got me thinking this product didn’t have a decent user-ready face to look at yet. The idea was the one of smartest I’d heard in a while but I was going to wait a bit longer to see something solid. How wrong I was.
Today, as I read on the official Google blog that more than 100,000 Wave invites will be sent out tomorrow I hoped hard that I did request an invite early enough to be on this list. I watched the developer preview video shortly after and slapped myself for missing out on discovering this refreshing innovation.
The Wave’s potential to gradually wash away the need for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and the like will obviously be very clear in the next few months, but the fact that email as we know is undergoing a major engine overhaul and will never be the same again is clearly undeniable.
I can’t help wondering though if most of Wave’s features will be usable on a typical Zimbabwean internet connection. Most of us here can’t even fully load the new Gmail version on a standard ‘broadband’ internet connection. Real broadband north of 512kbps costs an arm and a leg and even medium sized companies cannot afford it. One hopes all this talk going on about EASSy and SEACOM submarine fiber-optic cable construction into Zimbabwe translates into cheaper real broadband for ordinary Zimbabweans soon.
