
On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life - icey
http://maxklein.posterous.com/on-how-google-wave-surprisingly-changed-my-li
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joshwa
I've found campfire + internal wiki or threaded messageboard to cover most of
the usecases in the article.

Also the UI around threading in Wave is _awful_ from a usability perspective.
It's nearly impossible to tell if you're creating a sibling or a child until
you've done a lot of experimentation. The affordances are extremely unclear.

And without email notification or other kinds of client support, Wave has
become yet another site I have to check every day.. I got sucked into a wave
planning a family reunion and I forgot to check it for a few weeks, and I
missed all kinds of activity. Even then it was a jumble since all the users
had difficulty grasping the concepts, and missing replies to earlier threads.

~~~
maxklein
The difference is that these are not integrated together like wave is.

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joshwa
what's the benefit of the integration? the transient back and forth
conversations of a debate don't need to be co-located with the longer-lived
artifacts-- the signal/noise ratio would probably actually harm effective
communication.

I actually wonder, on a highly trafficked Wave with many subthreads, if the OP
doesn't have trouble figuring out which parts are relevant and need to be
promoted or flagged as a more authoritative/final artifact of a discussion,
and which are just unproductive tangents? (especially since Wave doesn't let
you reparent your comment if you've accidentally put it at the wrong hierarchy
level. It also doesn't let you _delete_ comments! wtf?)

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brown9-2
_Suddenly, communication habits of everyone changed. People started grouping
their communication into topics and resurrecting old 'waves' when it was about
the same topic. For example, if we were talking about bonuses, and then spoke
about something else for two weeks, then came back to bonuses, we would simply
resurrect the old wave._

I'm sorry but couldn't he have achieved the same with a threaded email client?

It sounds like Wave just helped him smooth over a lot of poor email practices
- perhaps on the other end of the conversation as well, but still.

~~~
maxklein
It's easy to change your communication habits. But it's very difficult to
change the communication habits of others - particularly people you only deal
with for a single contract.

~~~
jbellis
That makes sense, and yet, getting people to switch to Wave is a whole lot
more of a change than changing email clients.

~~~
sjs
Changing existing methods is more jarring than adopting an additional method,
imo. Others probably disagree.

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robryan
Most of us doing business through email though don't have a developer that
didn't bother to check 50 emails that you have sent, that seems kind of weird.

~~~
brown9-2
I'm amazed that he would continue to work with someone after this:

 _After two months, one of my freelancers replied my email with a screenshot.
It showed his inbox, and there were about 50 unread emails from me, 10 of
which where various threats about why he was not replying my emails._

~~~
maxklein
Sometimes you don't have a choice. People who have what you want have you by
the balls.

~~~
pl0nk
Aren't you working with them because you have something they want?

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acangiano
I find Google Wave to be still too buggy for business use. For the time being
I'm using other solutions (mainly Google Groups + Sites).

~~~
DannoHung
I'd love to use Wave, but I don't have a lot of people I collaborate with
outside of the company I work for.

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breck
Thanks Max, I took a second look at Wave and lo and behold it's actually
pretty neat. I was surprised that right when I hopped in a wave, a friend of
mine was already there(apparently he keeps wave open all day) and said
"Finally you will figure out how sweeeeet this is!"

Looks like there's something to it after all.

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fjabre
Google docs paired with Google chat/talk is still my preferred method of
getting things done. In the rare instance I need to search for an interaction
it's easy enough to search through my chat history and gmail.

I've used Google Wave a few times and these are the issues I have with it
still:

1\. The feature set and jargon is overwhelming. I still have yet to use half
of the buttons available in the UI.

2\. The marketing around it is really confusing.. Is this supposed to be a
Gmail replacement/augmentation and will Gmail development slow down in favor
of this new model? Hello Microsoft marketing team.

3\. Real time character by character chat is weird and a little creepy. Still
not used to that.

4\. I'm on a fairly powerful machine yet FF or Chrome still seem pretty bogged
down after moderate usage.

For this guy it seems really useful and that's great but his case also seems
to be a niche one. I'm involved in 2 startups and my current setup with Google
docs and Gmail suit my needs for collaboration just fine.

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samdk
I feel Wave could be a useful tool, but I think the UI is killing it right
now. It's ugly, poorly organized (and hard to understand), and wastes a lot of
screen space. I've also found it too slow to be comfortable--even on fast
computer running Chrome.

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mcav
I use Skype to communicate with a lot of people much in the same way Max says
he uses Wave; we have several group chats open. Wave sounds like it would be a
good fit and more flexible than Skype, perhaps.

~~~
GBKS
I use Wave as a compliment to Skype. Imagine you're working with somebody on a
timeline or document. As you talk over Skype, both of you can edit the
document at the same time and you can see and build on each others edits. It's
incredibly productive for this specific purpose.

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ivenkys
Am i missing something here - Google Wave is still invite only isn't it ?

I have a Google Wave account and i can invite others but the invitees are not
immediately accepted , so one of your collaborators does not have a Wave
account , how do you collaborate with him ? So now, you have to have multiple
ways of collaboration - not good.

Unless of course i am missing something obvious.

~~~
pohl
I don't think you're missing anything, except perhaps that the author's
collaborators have already received and accepted their invitations to Wave.

~~~
DomesticMouse
I have 30 invites floating in my invite box if people are looking for one.

~~~
romland
I actually got curious about this thing now as well. I sort of missed the
initial "Whoa, do you want a Wave invite?!" and turned people down... But now,
well, should you have any invites left, throw me one!

Would appreciate it! (mail is in profile here at HN)

~~~
DomesticMouse
invited

~~~
romland
Cheers, appreciate it :)

(sorry for the off-topic to the rest)

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kingkawn
wave still crashes when i try to use it with chrome. i feel almost as though
that bears repeating.

~~~
baddox
Me too, but it's ok because they give some tongue-in-cheek error message. And
don't forget, it's a "preview" so they expect their users to have absolutely
no quality or reliability expectations.

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madh
Is this article a social experiment?

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prabodh
When i read the article, it makes me say that author feels one cant be
productive without google wave...Hmm..That is tough to accept..a Large part of
the world is still productive and making money without using google wave..

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pkulak
He's saying that now he's as or more productive with less work. That's the
point of any new tool.

~~~
prabodh
From the post .." There was a time just a few months ago when I did not have
google wave. I think of that time with horror - because that epoch was marked
with conflicts, total chaos, money was being lost every day, fights were
happening between me and my collaborators. Google wave came in, and within a
couple of weeks, a heavenly peace had descended on my business..."
....Accepted..Google wave helped him..But my point is people can still do that
without wave

~~~
mtoledo
And his point is, without any tool, people can still do most anything. But if
the tool is particularly good, they'll do that same thing better now.

People were still doing backups before dropbox. I, for one, am just doing them
better now.

