
The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing - blasdel
http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009/10/the-lost-lesson-of-instant-typing/
======
nwinter
I love Wave's instant typing. Chat happens so much faster, and both parties
stay engaged instead of drifting away while they wait. It raises the
bandwidth.

This kind of editing isn't something you could have turned off by default in
Wave, because otherwise you can't have multiple people editing the same thing
at a time. For blips authored by one person, you could--and that'll be an
option. I hope people don't use it, though.

~~~
furyg3
_Chat happens so much faster, and both parties stay engaged instead of
drifting away while they wait._

What's wrong with drifting away? :)

This will sound cocky, but: I'm multitasking chat conversations
simultaneously, can type fast, and can express my thoughts quickly. I'm sure a
lot of Hackers are in this category. Why should I sit there with someone who's
not so great at those things and watch them struggle along at typing,
thinking, or pausing in the middle of a sentence because someone walked in the
room? I'll be over here, just give me a visual beep and I'll _instantly_ be
back.

Put another way, I'm learning a foreign language at the moment, and I wouldn't
_dare_ want to put my native speaker friends through watching me find the
right article...

If I want a high-bandwidth, high-commitment, high-intensity medium, (or to
make my friends suffer through my horrible Dutch) I'll use voice or video.

~~~
nwinter
Drifting away when the bandwidth is low is fine and can still be done. I
should have said that avoiding drifting is novel for me when both (or more
than two) parties are capable of expressing themselves quickly (both typing
and composition). I just never had that experience before except in person.
(Even voice and video were just laggy enough to make them lower bandwidth than
face-to-face talking.)

Voice and video are fine, too, but there's no easy record of what happened,
they're one-to-one only, and you still can't talk at the same time or edit
what you say. And if you say something complicated, it can't be reread until
grokked. Plus, you can't use them as easily with people you don't know as
well.

Maybe I'm not explaining it clearly. I've just had great experiences with Wave
so far, having discussions that I would have only been able to have in person
(and would not afterward have a record of), at even higher speeds than I would
have had in person. That's cool.

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litewulf
I think its a bit interesting that everyone is criticizing the "instant
typing" when in the original presentation they almost immediately said that
they were going to have the option to turn it off. It seems a neat feature but
its not exactly deal breaking to just remove it.

~~~
tseabrooks
Agreed. It is currently there in Preview, but they stated immediately they'd
offer a method to disable it.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is fair. But much of the value of good software design is sensible
defaults. If you need to twiddle 8 different inscrutable, independent knobs to
just the right settings in order to make a default installation usable, that's
not a good user experience. Most users will simply give up when faced with
that level of UI hostility, which is hardly good for business.

~~~
litewulf
I'm going to make a prediction that the default will become "not live typing",
and the feature will disappear altogether later.

(And yes, a thousand times yes, sensible defaults. But even more than that, as
few preferences/options as possible. I would much prefer people make _a_
design choice, than _no_ design choice.)

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gfodor
The main point of the live typing, I'm guessing, is not for back and forth IM
but for active document collaboration & editing. I'm betting in the final
version of Wave it will be a lot smarter about when and where to enable live
typing.

~~~
gfodor
By the way, we were doing this in ytalk 20 years ago and nobody was
complaining about self consciousness, maybe people need to toughen up a bit,
too.

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aaronsw
It's like none of these people have ever used Unix talk. You try that for
about five minutes before you go back to using write.

~~~
ibsulon
That's not to mention the dozens of us who grew up on BBSes. :)

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petercooper
Yeah, this is why I can't be bothered with Wave at all. Add to that the
"presence" aspects where people know whether you're on and reading the Wave
and.. it adds up to a pile of anxiety if you're an asynchronous communicator.

~~~
secret
I use to hate the "presence" aspect too about chat in gmail so I would always
leave it logged off. Then I came up with a better solution. I leave myself
logged in to gtalk on my phone 24/7 and now people don't know whether I'm
really there or not. Best of both worlds!

------
ramanujan
The eye is drawn to motion, which is another key problem with instant typing.

I would bet you actually spend more total time & mental energy reading a
sequence of characters that keep disappearing and appearing than you do an IM
conversation, where you can scan several (complete) lines in a second.

You can also multi-task and multi-convo on IM without being rude, which is why
it's so much better than a phone call for technical conversations w/
colleagues.

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tseabrooks
I haven't used Wave yet. My good friend nominated me (or whatever they are
calling it) and I'm just waiting. But, I can't help but feel the backlash at
the instant typing is just the anti-Google backlash that happens with their
new releases and dies back down after a bit.

The complaints, starting with Farhad Manjoo from Slate all boil down to this
sentence, "I don't like instant type because it makes me feel like / shows
that I am not as witty or well spoken if I can't carefully craft a message
before sending, this makes me self conscious".

I think, perhaps, people just need to adjust to this new, old, form of
communication. I suspect that this can deliver a similar experience to speech
if users put in the time to develop new habits. In speech most languages /
cultures have developed ways to show they are thinking mid sentence... This
may be in the form of a sound "uhhhh" or a facial expression (furrowed brow).
We just need an acceptable way to do this as we type.

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mkyc
I've been using etherpad for collaborating on documents. I've found that live
conversation often breaks out in the middle of the document itself. I love
this, and prefer it to the normal chat area offered on the right side. (The
only problem is that the in-document conversation often ends up deleted.)

I'm no longer worried if I'll sound stupid, though this did bother me when I
used this feature on ICQ many years ago. I do worry about accidentally typing
something rude, but I think I'm getting over this too. Communication really is
much faster and more engaging this way. (It's also edifying to see how others
compose their messages).

We have a similar problem with letting others see our code. The trick to
getting over this is to just put it out there. In that spirit, I've made my
writing of this message public at the link below; feel free to watch me
stutter and change things. You can also try out live chat there, if you've
never tried it before.

<http://etherpad.com/hackernews>

~~~
Luyt
I use a separate editor to type in my text, and when I'm satisfied with it I
copy & paste it into the IM application.

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InclinedPlane
We've had the benefit of live communication before, in face to face
communication and over the phone, and it has many benefits, but it is not an
unalloyed good by any means.

Live communication is full of repetition, verbal tics, and inexactness.
Necessary mechanisms as one thinks out loud and mentally edits their own words
until they circle in on the best expression of their idea. There are many
downsides to this. For example, it's much easier to get into a meaningless
argument as people stumble or become fixated on conversational detritus (the
words and thoughts that would have been edited out of conversation in the
final draft), either because people are needlessly confused by awkward wording
or use of an inapt metaphor, or because they are being intentionally
confrontational. Anyone who has ever read a transcript of a live interview has
almost certainly been struck by the degree to which live speech seems
convoluted, distracted, and poorly structured when compared to typical written
communication.

I can see why google thought it was "neat" to put live chat into wave, it
makes for a slick demo. But if their goal is to build a communication medium
that is superior to existing technologies (phone, IM, email), then relying on
live chat is a step in the wrong direction.

~~~
joe_the_user
Does anyone remember video phones ... from the 1950s??

Obviously, Google Wave isn't the same thing but anyone following
communications media over time should draw the conclusion that more
information, more quickly, is no always useful.

No one wants their boss to see their undone hair, no one wants to _have to_
respond in real time to some document and have their keystrokes visible. The
_delay_ of email as compared to chat, has it's advantages, otherwise some form
of chat would have 'won' already.

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pkulak
People are really grasping on to the live typing. You'll be able to turn it
off shortly. Let's not all get our panties in a bunch!

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sjs
As long as there's a preference to have it off by default I'm happy.

