Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?

Merging Wiki with e-mail, IM, and threaded discussions with fine-grained security already is powerful. I hate discussing an issue with 5 other people over a three-day e-mail/IM/phone thread and settling 7 or 8 decisions ... but nobody updates the "authoritative document" in a file share or in the Wiki. Two weeks later you need a big e-mail hunt to find what the decisions were. Google Wave consolidates all that discussion ... sales strategy sessions, collaborating on writing technical specs, deciding where to meet for extended family vacation, handling a tech support case where 1 support engineer + 2 customer contacts + 3 internal engineers + 1 account manager need to interact ... all these become more efficient and possible.

Add to that good multimedia content, versioning/branching/merging, embeddable widgets, and human-machine interaction ... Google Wave becomes a very powerful platform. It suddenly becomes much easier for a corporation to add human intelligence to deal with exceptional circumstances in automated workflows. There's fertile ground right there.

The exciting thing about Wave for me is that it is a way of distributing update capability to a server hosted xml document. The spotlight that is being put on Operational Transforms is the game changer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

To play fence-sitter for a moment, I won't be able to tell you what I think until I've used it.

Ignoring that, though, from what I have seen it appears to be providing the communication benefits that have recently been explored by social networking sites, while cutting out a lot of the potential for the egocentricism that seems endemic to places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like.

If it delivers on that, then I shall be very pleased. It'll be good to be able to once again focus on the interaction with my friends, rather than the banner at the top of the page with their name on it.

Too complicated. Anything worth having should be explainable in 30 seconds. I watched the first ten minutes of the Google Wave presentation, and still didn't understand what was going on. Maybe it has some cool features, but I think that it will go the same way as Google base and Google coop.

It seems like this is really "enterprise collaboration" done right. Think of how many places installed lotus notes or ms exchange to get some of these features.

Sprinkle in some calendaring and todo robots and you have an extremely powerful collaboration tool. Add in search and you have a new way to manage ad-hoc information.

It will be interesting to see how they come up with efficient representations when these document trees get to be large.

One downside of wave is that I haven't seen anything about how to stop spam. That was a major problem for email, and is becoming a problem on twitter too. Throw in differing social contexts like proper distribution of tweets for spymaster and you have some thorny social issues.

What is the IETF's stance on this? Or has the entire process become so politicized that it is now up to large commercial entities to dictate the future development of the Internet? I'm not entirely comfortable with this if it is true.

I'm sure it will be useful for some people but I'm pretty skeptical of all this "social " stuff. Most of my online communication is compartmentalized and direct and I like it that way. As a result it's hard for me to judge it since I'm looking at the product from the "will I* use this? Is it useful to ME?" perspective. The one thing I'm pretty confident about is the UI looks overly complex and convoluted for the average person to use. (look at the success of Twitter and Facebook UI change uproar for proof of that) I think Google needs to seriously improve the UI if they want it to be a mainstream product. Otherwise I see it being a niche service for people who really need this type of tool.

I doubt it will catch on.

(edit) Huh ? Downmodding this for what exactly ? This is a valid reply - I have no specific opinion on where Wave stands compared to other technologies, but I am pretty confident that it won't catch on in its existing form. They are not the first ones introducing new communication paradigm and they are certainly not the last ones. So far only evolutionary changes sticked, nothing revolutionary did (e.g. IBM's Remail).

The demo reminded me a lot of using Basecamp.

A lot of the analysis of Wave so far has (stupidly) focused on the web app that Google was showing off, on the whiz-bang HTML5 bullshit that ultimately doesn't much matter. I think it's really important to think of Wave not in terms of the front-end they were showing off, but rather in terms of the underlying protocol that powered it. Google envisions it as a sort of SMTP 2.0, powering most person-to-person communication on the internet; if (and only if) the industry gets behind it unilaterally, I think it has a real chance of success.

The paucity of existing documentation can be forgiven, but only to a point -- it's definitely on Google to make the complex elements of that protocol (and there are many) developer-accessible. As cool as the technology is, it'll wither and die without proper support.