Google Wave: You'll get used to it, just like you got used to everything else online.

Get your unconventional pants and fancy walking telephones off my lawn, you kids, I’m brandishing my cane, readjusting my bifocals and raging against Google Wave.

A couple of days ago Google announced their latest step towards the construction of Skynet in the form of Google Wave, which is arguably the next “revolution” in communication. This revolution essentially comes as an aggregator of every communication tool currently used online, from web-based email to instant messaging, Flickr to Twitter to Facebook.

Mash it all together in a stream of gibberish from everyone you know and all their friends. These potentially never-ending, compiled threads of information will be dubbed “waves”. It’s the ultimate sharing tool by being completely indiscriminate.

The application was concocted by the Sydney-based Rasmussen brothers, Lars and Jens, who developed Google Maps. If you’re particularly interested in the ins and outs, the feature film-length unveiling video is here, hosted by a geek from central casting, aka Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra. But we’re not particularly interested in the ins and outs, because we’re technophobic Gen-Xers raging against the dimming light of reason and cohesion.

The main concerns I have with Google Wave are paradoxical: by blending all of our previous online communication methods, the application invites us to at once share too much and not share enough.

First, let’s see how it works in practice. Based primarily on the Gmail model of conversation threads, I will start a wave with you requesting that you join me for an evening of ribald fun at the Hot Oil Wrestling. You reply in the thread that you are, in fact, into it, and would also like to invite two of your more randy friends. Instead of forwarding the wave, you merely drop little avatars of your horndog buddies  from your contact list into the wave and they immediately get access. If you want to convince them with pictures or videos of previous hot oil wrestling outings, you just drag the media into the wave and it’ll get updated on everyone’s browser. Good clean fun.

Here it starts getting fast. Rather than a strict call and response, users can click anywhere in the message and reply to that particular part. If you’re all online, you can each see everyone typing in real-time so that it can work even more quickly than instant messaging. If you come late to the conversation, you can hit playback and it recreates the conversation’s steps in order of when they were typed.

Just imagine this streaming digital clusterfuck. If you’ve even been stuck in the infinite loop of a ReplyAll conversation, you can imagine it pretty vividly. Now multiply that exhausting experience by infinity. That is how Google Wave is designed to work. Like popular bulletin boards, by the time you’ve got up to speed on playback, you may have to get up to speed on what happened while you were getting up to speed.

Google Wave: yes, no or maybe.

Now, do you think any of this is conducive to people actually thinking about what they are writing? When typing in real-time between more than three or four people, waves are going to become the written equivalent of the Taiwanese Parliament (and probably be equally as productive). If you turn off real-time typing and give yourself a moment to think, you’ll soon be miles behind the conversation.

Now add the possibility of endless diversions at multiple parts of each message. This means a mountain of digital spaghetti, most likely strings of LOLs and smileys, is likely to clog every second line of the wave. ‘Twill be the never-ending tale, told by multiple idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even if there is anything worthwhile, will you be able to sift through to find it?

Over the years, our online communication options have expanded, each performing their own specific purpose (Twitter for commentary on our digestive system, Facebook for ‘Which Fungus Are You?’ quizzes, Tumblr for LOLcat compilations, fmylife.com for self-pity), meaning that email has reverted to a mostly business medium. So all this instant, compounded claptrap might be tolerable as long as I only add my idiot friends to the wave.

Consider, then, that any one of my idiot friends’ idiot friends can add their idiot friends to a wave started by your idiot friends. Soon enough people are playing back parts of an online conversation that was surely not meant for them. You can private message within a wave, but it might be too late if your grandma adds Aunt Doris to you and your mother’s initially jocular “What does Aunt Doris deserve for her birthday?” wave.

But these problems are common with email. Who hasn’t accidentally hit Reply instead of Forward when trying to show a friend how much of a loser their significant other is? Me. I haven’t. But if you have, how would you like that mistake to be Google-able?

Tech Crunch reports that “Waves can also be published as their own entities on the web. This would make them and their content indexable by Google’s bots.” They also report that a wave’s published status would be clearly visible. But what about a wave that you previously contributed to which now hosts a trenchant comment on tax reform some other contributor thinks the whole world needs to read? Will the racist in-joke between you and your Madagascan friend also appear?

I protest too much. We at The Enthusiast are avid technology users, in that virtually everything we do is hosted by our Google overlords. We Facebook, we Twitter, we MySpace (but, like everyone else, not that much any more), we comment, we upload, and we Gmail like we’ve got stocks in the damn company. We have managed to conduct ourselves in keeping with their requisite web etiquette in each forum.

What I’m worried about is that, like everything else in the world that can revert to the lowest common denominator, Google Wave will too. With all our tools in one place, the threat is that all online communication shall devolve to the level of YouTube comments on hot oil wrestling videos. Ultimately, it’s up to us how we utilise such an all-encompassing application. Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”. Google Wave should advise, “Don’t be stupid”. I just don’t trust us.