On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life | Hacker News Reader

On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life

maxklein.posterous.com

133 pointsicey44 comments

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.

Every once in a long while I need to collaborate on some sort of document with my coworkers, but the vast majority of the time I just want chat.

As you point out, Wave's UI is horrible for chat. That's why we're building http://shoptalkapp.com; it's similar to Campfire. We use it every day and couldn't live without it. It's like a virtual office.

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

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?)

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.

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

Wave allows you to rearrange and drop messages so that you can restructure a conversation to make it easier to follow, kind of like I think rebasing in git is supposed to work.

If all the participants in an email conversation adhere to a strict bottom-quote and trim discipline, then you can keep everything organized in a threaded email reader. However, wave makes it easier to not include all the quoted cruft and keep replies in order for those people who haven't been initiated to "proper" email conversational etiquette (which is probably most of the internet).

You also don't have to leave things in your inbox to keep them current, though that might be a bad email habit of mine. A wave is "heavier" than a conversation but "lighter" than a label/ folder.

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.

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

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

So would you say the primary benefit of using Wave was it's effect on the people you communicate with? It was hard for me to get out of the article if the big benefit was on how you communicate, or if it was how they communicate with you.

I would say both: I don't use a desktop client because I use multiple computers regularly and there are different OSes on the PCs. I don't like the context switches between desktop clients.

So my email habits were bad, as where those of the others. Wave naturally guided us to a different way of communicating.

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

I would agree... but I've yet to see an email client that never breaks threading when handling emails between X number of other email clients, some of which are not threaded, some of which strip attributes, and some of which rewrite attributes.

Emails need a better, unified threading control, and clients need better, more powerful organization tools. Once that's done, sure, a proper email client would do the same thing, though with significantly increased duplication (5 replies == 5 emails to each person in the conversation, or a single highlighted thread in Wave(-like) apps).

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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)

invited

Cheers, appreciate it :)

(sorry for the off-topic to the rest)

http://twitter.com/benjaminwootton : He wants one

Please!

http://twitter.com/rtrunck

Please. Thank you.

An email address would help =)

geppa.dee at that mail system owned by google

invited

got it, thank you.

Pretty please, with sugar..? :-)

BerntBu at GMail.

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

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.

Is this article a social experiment?

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..

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

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

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.

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