
What problems does Google Wave solve? - swombat
http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html
======
junklight
Yep - I think that article gets it spot on. I got my invitation yesterday
morning and the first thing I used it for was to work with one of my co-
founders to work up an agenda and discussion points for a more formal meeting
later in the day while talking on skype. During the day before the meeting we
were able to polish it up and make points not to forget.

Perfect - something that has been missing from our working methods since we
all work remotely.

and yes we have kind of been using google docs for this kind of thing - but
wave is a much better fit

~~~
amichail
But it seems that Wave is currently marketed to people who won't find it
particularly useful.

One could argue that social media types are more concerned with public
communication than private collaboration.

~~~
mechanical_fish
It's a huge marketing problem. If your app can't connect with the early
adopters, it will never reach its target market.

Perhaps Google needs to try seeding entire _companies_ at once -- preferably
not companies composed entirely of geeks who know what Etherpad is -- instead
of handing out invites to random folks. On the other hand, such a strategy
would limit their growth rate and constrain their feedback in a _different_
way. It's tricky.

~~~
kloncks
But didn't other companies submitting new revolutionary "never before done"
ideas had trouble in explaining it to their early adopters? Email, IM, Java,
anything really.

I think Google Wave is great. But it is by its nature revolutionary, maybe we
need more time to redefine how we think of "communication on the Internet"

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njharman
The problem google wave solves is that Google doesn't have easy way to
slurp/index all the world's emails, text messages and similar communications.

This is also why Google Voice exists.

Google is serious when they say they want to search _everything_.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm anxiously awaiting GoogleDresser, so I can find those missing socks and
one of my favorite t-shirts.

~~~
richardw
You will never find your socks. Google wants you to buy new socks. From them.

~~~
redorb
*from someone who pays them to advertise socks; per click.

~~~
Periodic
Google is going to release Google Dresser, and it will be absolutely free! It
will keep your whole wardrobe on the server and provide a simple and intuitive
user interface through which you can browse, create, and wear outfits.

Google is willing to give away these dressers for free because Google makes
money through the dresser advertisements, so the more time you spend with your
dresser, the more advertising opportunities they have. Thus Google wants to
make a better dressing experience for you because ultimately it turns into
more revenue for them.

Next up: Google Life, helping you do more and reducing your need to sleep.

~~~
mapleoin
I know you guys are all joking, but those things really scare me.

------
e40
"To most geeks, the main problem with email is spam."

He lost me right there. You are not a geek if you have a problem with spam.
Spam? I never see it. It all goes into my +inbox-spam folder and I spend <
1m/day scanning it before I delete the contents.

The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I
must read and deal with.

~~~
swombat
I didn't suggest that geeks have a problem with spam. On the contrary, because
that problem has been on the geek radar for many years, it is largely
resolved. And because most of the other problems have not been on the geek
radar, they're not resolved yet.

 _The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I
must read and deal with._

And my point is that Wave can help reduce the clutter and chaos of these
messages by presenting them in a more structured, intuitive, and versatile
form. So instead of having 50 emails discussing the text for the new homepage,
you can have just one Wave.

~~~
andreyf
_To most geeks, the main problem with email is spam._ ... _I didn't suggest
that geeks have a problem with spam._

You certainly could have phrased that better :-P

~~~
swombat
Yep, clearly! Sorry!

------
fjabre
So then: Wave is an Outlook killer.

It definitely seems to fit much more than what we've been hearing over the
last few months.

He's right. We've all been looking at this the wrong way.. Brilliant piece.

~~~
swombat
Yep. Outlook killer is a great way to put it. I guess Google tried to do that
with GMail, and Google Apps for your Domain, but only managed to kill off
Exchange (in small businesses). GMail still suffers from many of the same
issues as Outlook, in terms of collaboration (though it did solve both the
spam and the storage problem). This is a more complete solution that has a
chance of replacing Outlook because it's just a lot better.

Then again, Microsoft doesn't need to ditch Outlook - they could just release
Outlook Wave - after all, it's all open-source. That would be nice - we'd all
win from such a move.

------
kloncks
Thanks for that insightful article. I only just recently got my Google Wave
invitation (finally) and I for the first time logged on and was a bit lost.

I knew I might be on the initial phase of the next direction of
communication/email and knowing that this might one day replace Email and/or
IM kept me thinking that I am visiting something grand, even if I still had a
small idea of what it actually does.

Google Wave is such a hard thing to explain to friends/family and non-
techies...this article really helped me try and stitch a clearer picture.

I am, however, worried about the amount of spam/bots that might come with
these waves as soon as they're made public.

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smikhanov
Google Wave does not solve problems directly, just like SMTP/POP/IMAP _per se_
does not solve the problem of communication. You need email client to
communicate over SMTP/POP/IMAP, and the better your client is the better you
deal with your problems (e.g. Outlook's feature of transmitting the messages
of predefined format over SMTP to all the appointment participants helps you
manage appointments).

When Wave will be public, I expect plenty of different Wave bots, clients and
other type of software appearing out there. This Wave-based software will
solve real problems, not Wave itself.

~~~
jaaron
I think you're mixing up wave.

Wave _is_ an actual application, not a protocol. It uses several protocols to
get its job done, but it _is_ an application.

And the wave code is already public: <http://code.google.com/apis/wave/>

~~~
smikhanov
Sure it's an application, not a protocol.

However, I still think that it's not the current application that will deliver
most of the Wave's value. Just like it's not the Twitter website that delivers
most of the value of Twitter, but the ecosystem of the clients using its API.

~~~
richardw
Think light wave - sometimes it's an application and sometimes it's a
protocol.

 _da-dish_

------
pasbesoin
This closely mirrors my own reaction, after five minutes of examining the
introductory videos Google has placed on YouTube. Wave solves a number of
problems I've faced for years in corporate environments, and in a much more
integrated fashion than the piecemeal approaches that have previously been
available.

It also provides a single point of integration. In the past, I've advocated
for e.g. bulletin boards to replace email exchanges where information tends to
"submarine" into private exchanges. But getting corporate IS to even consider
a deployment -- even just a small one for a single team -- was a non-starter.
Going rogue would be a termination offense.

If you can get Wave adopted, you solve a whole bunch of problems all at once.

I remain extremely skeptical, though, about the compatibility of Wave as it
currently exists with many businesses' requirements for both confidentiality
and guaranteed information access -- uptime, an unlimited timeframe into to
future, and not becoming locked in to a single vendor platform to the extent
that Wave currently seems to imply. A Wave failure on any of these points
could quickly destroy a business; so much would be locked up in its data, and
if there is no alternative -- even if imperfect -- means of access...

~~~
Poiesis
Yes, this. In a corporate setup, you need a messaging system that, for lack of
a better description, is like email but persists like a message board.
Targeted to a particular user/users but available for the next person to join
the team without someone digging through their mail looking for the message.

The problems with adoption of current solutions (wikis, hosted stuff like
Basecamp) are that many corporations don't let you host proprietary data
offsite, and adding another server is something that is so difficult as to be
essentially impossible. Not to mention "another server" could be one of 50
alternatives, all incompatible.

There still will adoption issues, as it doesn't seem like Google is aggressive
in pursuing business customers, and I don't know if they have good answers for
the questions that will come up. But I see Wave as essentially a protocol
designed to solve the same sorts of problems as Basecamp et. al.

~~~
netsp
Basecamp, sure.

But I think the best example is a customer support ticketing system. This is
pretty much an attempt to record email conversations in a structured way and
be able to attach files to them.

------
10ren
_Crossing the Chasm_ had a distinction between applications and platforms. The
latter are harder to sell, but scale horizontally, leading to massive
adoption. Potentially.

Wave seems to be a platform. It needs a killer app in order to be adopted.
Often, this happens through hitching a ride on some bigger change, like faster
hardware.

There are _plenty_ of great technologies that never got adopted. It actually
seems common for a second-rate but good-enough version of a technology to win,
because actual adoption is a huge challenge in itself. Perhaps a greater
challenge than creating the technology in the first place. In pg-land, it's
the "people want" part of "make something people want".

There's great opportunity here for the one who _can_ apply Wave to alleviate a
felt pain.

~~~
jaaron
Only geeks see it as a platform. The current Google Wave client feels like a
single, unified application just like GMail (compared to a platform like
'email'). The current wave client _is_ the killer app.

~~~
notlisted
Or rather... it fails to convince as the killer app.

~~~
swombat
Give it time! It's still in beta :-)

It should get out of beta in, oh, what, 5 years' time, going by GMail's
timeline?

------
axod
Isn't that all pretty much taken care of with forums, google groups?
(Attaching files, giving everyone the same view, keeping people added, etc)

Why would you use wave over a forum/google group etc?

~~~
swombat
Forums, Google groups, etc, don't have the "edit other people's posts"
Etherpad-like collaborative editing. Most of them aren't branchable in the
same way Wave is. They generally don't have the privacy controls of a Wave.
They don't weave from email-like to IM-like like Wave can. They're not built
to allow native clients to interact. And they don't have any federation
ability.

You could say that Wave is a bit like Email, Basecamp, Campfire, Etherpad, and
a bunch of other collaboration tools, all merged into one unified interface.
I'd be scared if I was 37-Signals. From everything I've heard, the feature
Basecamp users most like is the discussion system... with Wave, that becomes a
lot less worth paying for.

~~~
bbgm
I haven't bought into Wave yet, although it has more to do with the current UI
than anything else. In addition to what's mentioned above, there are plugins
for LaTeX, for rendering molecules, etc which make collaborative editing very
powerful, potentially at least.

------
justlearning
I didn't find anything new in this article.

But to have a few use-cases, I found this lifehacker article better
(<http://lifehacker.com/5381219/google-waves-best-use-cases>) (it is a
crowdsourced collection from users on how they would use google wave, rather
than one person speculating on various uses).

The use-case from the air traffic controller seems to be the best - as if wave
was an app made for traffic controllers!

~~~
jlees
I found the lifehacker article to be a rosy-eyed view of what people would use
_their idea of what Wave is_ for. Some of them just wouldn't fly with the
current UI and so on. swombat's more on the button as to what Wave actually
_is_.

~~~
notlisted
Exactly. That lifehacker article was terrible. People were buying the spin and
the promise or real-time collaboration.

The OP article made great points, and in principle google wave (client and the
underlying protocol) should provide everything the article outlines, HOWEVER,
as is, the web client solves little or nothing.

The interface is sluggish, mysteriously buggy, overly complex and it actually
exacerbates one of the MAIN problems it was going to resolve, ie the endless
indentations. It fails #miserably# at that, because of the incredible amount
of "chrome" (icons, borders, etc etc) used in the interface, especially in
large public waves, but even with a very limited set of co-workers, you'll end
up with a sea of bordered bubbles impossible to read for an ordinary human
being.

I've used wave for 2 weeks now, I'm fully aware of all the browser short-cuts
and features and my appreciation for it has waned.

Contrast this with etherpad (<http://www.etherpad.com>). It has its own issues
(e.g. no indication of age of edits) but it actually works and #everyone# I've
introduced to that site keeps using it and I've received many kudos.

Since google wave is both a client and a protocol.Perhaps an independent group
can create a wave client that actually works...

------
5park
I completely agree with the author of the article. And he even introduced me
to a new, possibly better, way of describing Wave to friends of mine: "it
solves the problems with email".

I'm also relieved to see someone else pointing to Scoble's article and noting
that he doesn't understand what Wave is about. When I read that article, my
respect for the 'king of tech-bloggers' took quite a dive.

Anyways, kudos to you for writing about Wave more sensibly!

------
CulturalNgineer
This is a good analysis... I also now have Wave account and can very quickly
see that it's as a "much-improved" system of email that it's real strength
lies.

My only problem right now is I don't have enough fellow friends and associates
with a Wave account to use it more and do better evaluation.

I'm looking forward to its spread!

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ct4ul4u
I think the problem Google Wave is intended to solve is Facebook. Facebook
being a problem for Google, rather than a problem for the user.

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tdubya
It was given to the wrong group, it should have been given to a collaboration
of people working toward a common goal.

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JBiserkov
Google Wave will force me to learn to touch type to avoid embarrassment in
front of my geek friends!

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ashishb4u
i hope i can "wave" people who are'nt on Google Wave... If only it can convert
wave-traditionalEmail & vice-versa, it would be cool...

Also, i guess that should be fine as Google should be intrested in
information-base rather than user-base...

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kashif
The needless "beta" limits how many people I can converse with using Google
Wave - the invitations don't propagate soon enough to hold my interest.

Google wave = Jabber Client + glorified logging

------
known
synchronous, asynchronous & broadcast communication.

------
jv2222
Ok, if this article is correct then it's a big problem for Google. Because
their entire revenue model is based on earning money from from advertising...
I can't imagine enterprise level organisations allowing Google to Earn money
via advertising.

I know that Google have made some efforts to make money by directly charging
Enterprises but that represents a tiny part of their revenue to date.

In other words, is Wave a much smaller opportunity than they had hoped? And if
so, it might just end up being a "side project"...

~~~
gloob
_I can't imagine enterprise level organisations allowing Google to Earn money
via advertising._

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this. I would take you literally,
but taking that sentence literally would be mad (Google does earn money via
advertising, and every enterprise-level organization "allows" it in the sense
that they don't explicitly "disallow" it (what would that look like,
anyway?)). Could you clarify?

