When Google unveiled Google Wave a few months ago, the excitement was palpable. The hype has been based on Google Wave’s potential to become a powerful personal portal (aka PPP) that you could configure to meet your specific digital needs and goals.

But it’s difficult not to get the feeling that Wave is not only over-hyped but whether it will live up to a smidgen of what people believe it could be. So far, Wave has been underwhelming. I realize it has just been rolled out to only 100,000 users but the buzz has been, at best, modest. Meanwhile, it has been interesting to hear excuses being made for Google Wave’s lack of sizzle such as “Well, it’s really just a tool for developers right now.”

The uncertainly surrounding Wave is also becoming evident among the digiterati.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently said: “I sure as hell don’t know what Google Wave is going to be. I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet”. Robert Scoble recently declared that “Google’s Wave will crash hard onto the beach of overhype”, suggesting that people who use it will fall into the trap of “unproductivity”.

It could be that Wave has yet to reveal its full potential, or it could be that Wave is still in the early stages of its development. But there’s no doubt Wave is currently under-baked, which is a bad place to be in a world in which users barely give a new application the time of day if it quickly fails to perform well.

In many respects, Wave is a different kind of new service for Google because the benefits are not immediately obvious. With GMail, for example, the potential was evident even if the service still needed some shaping and massaging. With Wave, however, it’s impossible to tell if it has any appeal.

Who knows, maybe Wave will become a smash-hit but right now it reminds of the children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in which the emperor walked around thinking he was wearing beautiful new clothes until a young boy told him that he has been tricked, and that he was wearing nothing at all.

More: Having played with Wave, the biggest problem is the all-important “What’s in it for me?” is far from obvious. Perhaps the biggest issue is figuring out why I would even need Wave.