What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way

Anil Dash writes about his doubts on Google Wave – will the complexity deter developers, will it invite them to add fancy bells and whistles or will it inspire them to add “incremental enhancements” to their sites?

I think that everything worthwhile doing in this (Enterprise 2.0) collaboration space is going to have both an immense level of “complicatedness” inane and also needs to invite people to add and tweak stuff (yes, this can be done because Wave is complex not complicated alone, if it were complicated like **** nobody would care to experiment with Wave).

So I am pondering understanding Google Wave as a CAS – complex adaptive system? Right, I think it is, like the Internets it’s a platform built upon a range of easy protocols that allows for the emergence of unforeseen new patterns (bells, whistles, “incremental enhancements”, …).

Sounds great to me and as an Enterprise Collaboration Consultant I really do hope that Google Wave will succeed – in all it’s platformy-ness and complexity – with both developers and business (process) people.

But then another task needs to be dealt with – protecting users from the complexities of the platform and helping them find ways of use, here usability of apps and sites built upon Wave must be better than what we’ve seen so far … this messy UX above reminds me of some platforms best forgotten.