Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings | Hacker News Reader

Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings

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21 pointsyarapavan28 comments

I thought the same thing, "meh", until I had an epiphany last night.

I really think this changes everything. People keep leaning on the document aspects of it, but I tend to think of sites like reddit, digg, hn, even 4chan and how, if applied, it changes the way web communication happens. Imagine a realtime Reddit with living, breathing comment threads. Even the StackOverflow model becomes something new with this.

Even more basic than that is how this, I believe, will replace email for even casual users. I'm sure the rest of you have similar experiences where you get involved in long email threads with friends, and how that can slow down, say, planning something to do that night, or planning a trip or some kind of thing that requires consensus and a bit of discussion. The flow of reply-all, wait, reply-all goes away completely.

And, of course, the collaboration aspects of it are pretty awesome.

So I wasn't convinced until last night, and now I'm nearly as excited as when I first saw the graphical web with Mosaic or sent my first email with a NeXT box in college or dialed up my first BBS.

There is quite a bit of promise here.

I don't completely disagree, but realtime is not a holy grail - after all, we had chatrooms long before we had reddit, digg and the like.

It's slick to be sure. However, what I keep asking myself is this: what problem does it solve?

If it's not obvious to you what problem it solves, then you've spent too long away from corporate environments with their massive, unwieldy threads of emails flying about, full mailboxes, and other email issues.

The problem that Wave solves is blindingly obvious to anyone who uses email as a primary tool to work with teams. Whether it's the right solution is another question altogether, but the problem is definitely there.

It doesn't really solve this problem when corporations don't want to trust their data to google. It's well known that gmail doesn't comply with HIPAA/SOX and doesn't offer any kind of guarantee on data when corporations use it, this is a huge issue for adoption in the workplace by many corporations.

I could be missing something though, is Wave something you can install locally and have control over? It's not Google's style so I'd guess not.

If I'm mistaken, I'm more than willing to be enlightened.

Yes, it's an open protocol. http://www.waveprotocol.org/ It's still being revised and edited. There are example clients and servers based on the actual code Google is using. It would have taken you about 5 seconds to search for this, btw. :]

Indeed, I could have searched and dug around for it, but work is calling and I wanted to get in as much hackernews as possible before starting the day. Thank you for the link, will be reading up on it later as it looks very interesting.

Not only that, but it's a federated protocol (like email), so your company can set up its own Wave server, and you can communicate through it with users on any server.

It is, but federation doesn't work yet. They're saying they're aiming for the end of this month for working federation on the sandbox, which I eagerly await :]

If that's the case I think they should narrow and focus. If it's a tool for corporates to communicate, 'mailing lists 2.0?' then it'd be cool to go that way.

Being marketed as "It can do everything!!! It's the new internet!", which seems to be the current strategy, could pay off, but maybe not. Likely only with geeks wanting to play with technology.

I'd be really surprised if it takes off with consumers quite yet.

They need to get buy-in from geeks first, otherwise no one will write programs for it.

This is probably true. But if the purpose of Wave is to be "Collaboration Tool for Large Corporations to Share TPS Reports," isn't it doomed with most hackers anyway? Who would want to write programs for that?

...and in XML :/ eugh

It definitely is over-hyped. I think it has to do with the focus seemingly on the developer addons and bots and such vs. the collaborative communication medium.

Perhaps they thought they had to differentiate from message boards or IM or email or IRC?

It's not just a tool for corporates though; they're just a handy example because at their scale the problems are unavoidable.

If you have to coordinate communication and collaboration among any group of people, Wave will help. Though if it's only 2, 5 or 10 people, it's more likely you can get everyone to agree on convention and get by with older tools.

"Mailing lists 2.0" is an interesting term. It's kind of the principle we have used in building MooGroups http://moogroups.com. Instead of setting up a mailing list only for a specific group of people you email often, we make it so that essentially each group email is its own mailing list, so people who are part of that group email can email each other in an organized fashion or opt-out as needed.

Unlike Google Wave, MooGroups is available now, being improved upon everyday, doesn't require any signup, and allows you to use any email system.

Agreed, I get around 100-200 emails a day. Most of them are just continuations of a single conversation between the same 2-3 people. On top of that, because email can get unwieldy, we often just fall back on IM for many things.

Wave seems almost obvious except that it wasn't invented earlier.

The problem is definitely there, but, after using wave for a couple of months now, I don't think it's the right solution.

I would echo a lot of other reviews: it's too complex and ambitious. This applies to the protocol/platform as well as their initial client. There's just so much going on and it's trying to do so much at once that it's very unwieldy.

I think simplicity is an important feature if you want new software to gain traction, and especially if you want new protocols to be adopted. I think simpler tools like http://shoptalkapp.com (disclosure: co-founder) do a better job of solving the problem you describe. And the tools we use to build it, which are gradually being open sourced at http://dieselweb.org, make real-time web apps pretty accessible to developers.

Having used the wave client and read about the protocol, I just think both are too complex to really gain traction. All the bugs in Gooogle's own wave client are evidence that it's not an easy platform to write apps on, at least at this point. I'm sure they'll continue to pour tons of resources into it, and maybe they'll turn it around. Time will tell.

If I don't want to wait I use jabber. If I DO want to wait I use e-mail.

I think CampFire solves most of these problems much more elegantly.

I'm not familiar with Campfire. How well does it scale teamwise?

It's effectively group chat. I believe 37 signals themselves use it. Scales well to most situations, where you have groups of under 20 people working on any one project at a time.

I got my invite, but with no one I know also having an account, I don't really have anything to do with it. So it will probably be ignored until I'm able to toss out invites.

http://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-invite-others-for-google-w...

Invite some HN folks:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ar8He-EcPg54dDVvRjZp...

Or put your Wave address here so we can add you to a HN wave.

Maybe Google Wave will be to email what conference calls are for telephony. Personally I never mustered the energy to figure out how to set up conference calls. But some people (companies) use them, so they might have their place.

Though I have to say I remember the conference calls with 20 participants as one of the more absurd excesses during the dot.com bubble.

Wave is simply too new. Appropriate conventions, best practices and basic netiquette haven't yet been communally agreed on.

Most of the other problems reviewers have identified appear to be almost purely basic software issues (new or updated waves don't float to the top for example, can't draft a response yet, etc.), things that Google could just silently update tomorrow or next week.

In addition, we've only seen one Wave client. The protocol itself seems sound, but alternate clients could easily solve many of the identified "problems".

The importance of Wave is and always has been the protocol. The client is just an example or reference app.

For myself I'd love to use it to co-author papers and collaboratively write technical specifications and design docs with my (across the continent) colleague.

90% of the problems that people seem to have it are with the real-time typing, but Google will have "draft" mode built before it's out of testing. I'm not sure it's fair to say that it's a dud because you can see while people type. If Google's smart, they'll make draft mode the default.

Err yea, but didn't most people have mixed feelings on the iPod, gmail, Twitter, etc too?

As a geek, I'm mainly interested in the API, not myself using it immediately. That will come around surely, but the API is what I really want to sink my teeth into.

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