
Google Wave: Our First Hands-On Impressions - mcxx
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wave_our_first_hands-on_impressions.php
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ryanwaggoner
I know everyone in the tech community is drooling over this, but I'd give it
50/50 odds at best. The real advantage it has going for it is that Google can
throw a lot of weight behind it and maybe push it through with sheer force of
will.

Here's the problem with Wave: what is it? Every blog post I've read about it
struggled with how to explain it. I read this entire post and I'm still not
sure of how I'm supposed to use this thing or what pressing problem it solves.
Even the videos I've seen are super long, presumably because you can't really
show it off in 60 seconds. "Well, it's kind of a mix between email and IM, but
also with wiki functionality and social networking...oh, and it's got these
crazy widgets and media sharing and stuff. Hmmm...you really have to play with
it to understand." 97% of the people I know wouldn't get that, and don't have
the patience to figure it out. It seems like it's just too flexible, that it
can be used for a million different things, which makes it hard to know how to
use at first. Think about almost every successful web site out there and how
easy they are to explain, especially when they first launched. You would have
zero trouble explaining Google, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter,
etc. in a 60 second video.

Wave is like FriendFeed on crack, and FF is already dangerously close to being
too much for most normal people to grok. I just don't see it catching on.

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derefr
Here's a one-line summary of Wave: _it's like Outlook_. It's a big... PIM...
thing, with lots of features, that you live in, and grow completely dependent
on, especially when your coworkers (or, with Wave, friends) use it.
s/Wave/Outlook/ in everything you said, and it lines up almost perfectly.

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calambrac
That's a summary of the Wave client Google demoed. It's not a summary of Wave
itself.

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derefr
Well, there's no use summarizing Wave itself. Protocols aren't able to be
grasped easily without examples of clients that use them. What really needs to
happen to show off the power of Wave is for Google to create a few _other_
Wave clients.

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ntoshev
In its early days ICQ had a mode that allowed you to see what the other user
typed before he hit "send" - just like google wave seems to do. I hated it - I
like to edit my message and make sure it's right before others see it.

I see value in others getting updates without hitting refresh, though.

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davidw
The unix 'talk' utility did that sometime back in the 80ies (and still does).

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ralph
ytalk(1) is the modern version.

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oliverkofoed
I can't help but wonder why they didn't try harder to fix spam. As far as i've
been able to tell, it'll be same-old/same-old: Mark as spam, possibly
automatic filters.

It seems to me that part of the answer to the question "What would e-mail look
like if invented today" should be "there would be no spam".

Couldn't it be done by request/approve like on Skype/Facebook or something
more advanced like reputation or something?

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flardinois
having talked to the guys on the Wave Team, it is clear that they are still
trying to figure these things out. They are just now opening it up to more
users and seeing usage scenarios they didn't even think of themselves. I'm
guessing spam wasn't really an issue they had to deal with so far, and from
what I've seen, there really is no spam on the site yet. Also, given that you
invite your own contacts to join a 'wave,' chances are, spam won't be a huge
problem as far as I can see.

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bjelkeman-again
Discussion on the subject of spam. Where Andrew Ower (Google) says:

    
    
      We're fully aware that any platform that achieves 
      critical mass will be subject to abuse and are working 
      to prevent this from troubling users. 
    

[http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-
api/browse_thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-
api/browse_thread/thread/2043f11aeae26b8e/28711db1ad34c3ad?#28711db1ad34c3ad)

