Google Wave: too complicated for its own good
slate.com
slate.com
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.
Wave is very open for anyone to make their own clients to use wave in whatever way they see fit. With the right client, Wave could be a much more powerful twitter.
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.
The average geek is equipped with many methods of communication and collaboration... So of course this just seems like a marginal improvement. The average normal person, though, uses mostly email, and so will find this client exceptionally useful. The average person will just see (perhaps not even explicitly) that it makes it easier to add people to ongoing email conversations, and that it's easy to attach files to the conversation, and that it's easier to branch off sub-conversations, etc.
So how does the average person find out about wave - let alone learn all the terminology, how to use it, etc etc. We're only hearing the geeks feedback so far, because the rest of the world doesn't know/care it exists. I'd be interested if you have some examples of communication forms that geeks didn't start using first - email,sms,twitter, were all pretty geek lead...
I think the average person won't see how this solves any problems they have - facebook,twitter,email,sms all work pretty well for communication.
I can see your point about teams working together - business collaboration - I can see it making some inroads there.
Lots of the things I hear wave does are technically fun, but in practice, horrible design choices - showing text as people type it was the norm 20 years ago. Since then, we've pretty much all agreed it's irritating and not really useful.
Google replaces GMail's plumbing with Wave and the inherent abilities of Wave are introduced as GMail features. Robots, conversation splitting, collaboration, etc.
It's the only sane way to approach it, really.
And I have no idea why people keep harping on live typing. Google announced that there was going to be a way to turn it off about 5 minutes after they pulled the drape off Wave itself.
It's almost certainly a feature destined for the dustbin. As such, it's an utter red herring. Complaining about it is perhaps more pointless than the "it's too complicated" meme.
People probably keep harping on about live typing because it made no sense to include it. It's a gimmick rather than a useful feature.
Also it is too complicated for most people. You can't just ignore arguments and call them a 'meme' :)
Facebook wasn't. Or MySpace. I found out about FB from non-geek friends. I was shocked.
I don't know if wave will ultimately be compelling enough to draw people away from those other sites and services, but I don't think it will be a complete flop (I'm looking at you, VRML).
Wave is for solving the key problems with email in a corporate environment:
1) It's hard to track (will presumably offer an API or be trackable by widgets)
2) It's hard to use it to collaborate on a piece of text to be sent out to someone else or included in a document (which is what it's used for half the time...)
3) When adding new people, it's hard to ensure that they have a clear view of the beginning of the conversation - often they get a garbled, over-indented mess in reverse chronological order, that's hard to follow.
4) When adding new people, often they get dropped again if someone replies to all from the wrong email.
5) It's hard to keep multiple conversation branches going. If you're collaborating with 5 people (hardly extraordinary) on a 2-page document, and they each have 1 distinct comment, and each of these comments requires a brief exchange (back and forth 3 times, let's say) before it's sorted out, you'll end up with a fairly messy conversation once it's all flattened out.
6) It's hard to attach files (particularly large or numerous files). And when you add extra people to the conversation, they don't see those files anymore. If there were multiple files sent at different time, sending all of them to the new participant is a pain in the ass.
7) When discussing, say, a document, correcting even a small typo requires a full email instead of being able to just dive in and correct the typo.
There are no doubt more, but this is what I can come up with fresh out of bed.
1. You can't do a threaded reply to the last blip in a thread. You have to make a "footer" and then reply to the next-to-last item.
2. When you copy something to a new wave, it doesn't copy the children over.
3. The hide all replies feature doesn't work yet.
Anyone else find these annoying, or am I missing some settings or not thinking about the first two the right way?
You can, actually... just select a bit of text in that last reply and you can branch off.
You can't expect every feature to be in and working flawlessly in the preview.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, sarcasm is trivial with spoken communication, and remarkably hard in written.
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?