

Google Wave: too complicated for its own good - adamhowell
http://www.slate.com/id/2232311/pagenum/all

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swombat
I think people who think Google Wave doesn't get it will be eating their words
later, much like those who thought the same thing about the iPod (most of the
geek communities turned their nose up at that too).

I can see instant usefulness to Wave. I have my invite, and one of my
colleagues does too. I can't wait for my other cofounders to get access so
that we can use it for real work. Email really just sucks in so many ways.

Edit: It's worth adding that a lot of articles and pundits seem to be
comparing Wave and, say, Twitter. Wave is nothing like Twitter, nor does it
aim to be anything like Twitter. No, we're not going to start using Wave
instead of Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc... because that's _not_ what
it's for! Wave might end up being useful for social communications too, but
the most important pain points that it resolves are business pains, problems
that people encounter when they're trying to work together remotely.

~~~
axod
>> "I think people who think Google Wave doesn't get it will be eating their
words later, much like those who thought the same thing about the iPod (most
of the geek communities turned their nose up at that too)."

I'd somewhat bet the opposite. Geeks will be raving about wave and how it's
realtime, XMPP federated, technically impressive etc etc, whilst the average
person on the street will have no clue what it does and why they need it.

~~~
icey
So the question is whether or not it remains a niche tool like RSS (which is
to say only used by the technically savvy) or does it get abstracted into a
transparent technology and used as a leverage tool like AJAX?

~~~
steve19
I don't think RSS is a niche. What major email client does not have RSS
integration? What major websites do not offer RSS feeds?

~~~
icey
I don't know about you, but the only people I know who actually _use_ RSS are
more technically advanced than 90% of the internet users I meet.

~~~
rooshdi
RSS is too complicated and constrained for the "average joe" on the street,
which is why most "non-techies" I know just Google wherever they want to surf.
Google speaks a language most people understand, while RSS still sounds like
useless jibber jabber to these casual users.

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pavel_lishin
I stopped playing with it when I realized that the option to turn off instant-
typing-relay wasn't implemented yet. Sorry, instant deal breaker. I've
^H^H^H'ed far too many obscenities directed at friends and clients for that to
fly.

~~~
felixc
I don't understand why instant-typing-display was implemented in the first
place. Or rather, I understand that it's supposed to speed up communication,
but the drawbacks to it seem so huge in comparison to the tiny benefit that it
really just feels like engineering-porn; i.e. a "cool" feature that does more
to showcase technical brilliance than to serve any real need.

~~~
wtallis
I think it serves a very real need: discipline. By making it the most basic
wave feature, they're committing to making sure that the system can always
handle a constant stream of realtime updates from every user. If anybody
breaks it or introduces a performance regression, everybody will notice. It
also means that people writing robots and extensions can assume that they can
deal with updates in realtime, on such a fine grained level. If extension
writers had to worry that per-character updates might introduce too much
overhead, it would hamper their creativity.

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unalone
What I find fascinatingly baffling about Google Wave is that it's partly one
of the most impressive communications tools I've used, and partly a
compilation of features I saw removed from other sites for being poor design.

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vlod
I think we'll see high level abstractions of a wave. My bet is google will
introduce it to the generally population with most of the features turned off,
so they don't even notice.

For example: \- In Gmail, when you hit reply it will be in a wave. When you
hit replay-all, it will create a wave, auto-invite the recipients and it just
looks like Gmail version 2.0.

\- In GoogleDocs, the document can be shared now, but you'll be able to rewind
the stack and see peoples changes. There will be commenting on documents
(dunno is there is now?).

So I think most of googles apps will be wave-ified gradually and most people
wont really notice. I think at the moment, you have the full wave hose turned
on and people are getting a little freaked out.

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misuba
Google needs to do two things with the GWT client UI:

1) clear up the confusion between collaboration spaces and conversation
spaces, by making each wave have one collaboration space at the top and
conversation space below it;

2) confine live typing and editing of the contributions of others to the
collaboration space.

I wouldn't apply these same strictures to gadgets necessarily.

Also, they need to stop trying to use the Wave brand to mean two things. It's
stuck as the name of this one client experience; the protocol should get an
acronym or something.

~~~
gfodor
Yup. This nails it. The biggest problem with wave is I think they took it just
one baby step too far in abstraction. The thing needs to clearly separate
these two uses (collaboration, conversation), and all of my main gripes of the
thing will disappear. Not sure of the _best_ way (one could imagine a fixed
layout as you suggest, another way would be to allow users to filter things
more easily, whatever) but without this Waves (at least, the big ones) degrade
to the least-common-denominator of the various use cases: chat rooms.

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m0digital
I think Google Wave will succeed...eventually. I'm not sure if they are aiming
it as a replacement for GMail. Most non-technical people I talk to have no
clue what Google Wave is and when I explain it to them, they usually could
care less.

The concept is a big change from what we people are familiar with today and I
think the only way for Google to try to make it a household name like GMail is
to slowly merge the features into GMail. Once they get a large enough
population raving about it, these people will usually make their
friends/family/colleagues try it out, and from there adoption will gradually
increase. But if Wave is not a replacement for GMail, I'm not sure people will
go out of their way to use another service that most of the time their email
program will do just fine.

Now, if you like the Google Wave concept, I ask you to give MooGroups
(<http://moogroups.com>) a try. You get the power of centralized discussions
directly in your inbox, without ever having to leave your inbox, without
having to create an account, and while using any email program. Plus a polls
gadget based on free-form text.

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megaduck
I think for Wave to be ultimately successful, they'll have to ditch the "live
typing" feature. Typing is a low-bandwidth form of communication, because you
lose all of the other conversational cues (tone of voice, facial expression,
etc.) that make sure your proper meaning comes across. Thus, when you're
typing to somebody, you often have to double-check what you've written to make
sure that it's not taken the wrong way. With live typing, you don't have that
option. The cat's already out of the bag before you can reach for the delete
key.

I can't count the number of times I've retyped a sentence on IM because the
original was too ambiguous and could be misconstrued.

They're going to have to either kill the feature, or turn it off by default.

~~~
ellyagg
I wish they wouldn't. I always missed that feature from icq and I've never
felt self-conscious about missteps and corrections. That is, after all, how
talking works.

~~~
megaduck
Unless you talk in a monotone, talking and typing are inherently different.
Talking has a dramatically higher bandwidth, because you can alter the pitch,
stress, and semantic meaning simultaneously.

For example, sarcasm is trivial with spoken communication, and remarkably hard
in written.

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fjabre
Posted on this yesterday: [http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-
creepy-feature...](http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-creepy-
feature/)

Definitely agree with the OP. Wave should allow this feature to be disabled
easily for chat.. I can see it being used for doc collab but for chat it's a
horrible idea for a number of reasons.

Is it that hard to get a conference call going via Google Voice and actually
talk to other users in real time using your voice?

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sebastianavina
It reminds me of ICQ...

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CamperBob
Google Wave is the next Zombo.com, as far as I can tell.

