What problems does Google Wave solve?
danieltenner.com
danieltenner.com
Perfect - something that has been missing from our working methods since we all work remotely.
and yes we have kind of been using google docs for this kind of thing - but wave is a much better fit
One could argue that social media types are more concerned with public communication than private collaboration.
Geeks and early adopters are the only people who Google could expect to stick with it in it's current state (or to at least try it again later).
In any case, it seems clear that Google Wave is still in heavy development. More than any other Google app, Wave deserves and needs its 'preview' appelation. The early adopters are the ones who are going to provide feedback. And even if most people are wrong in comparing Wave to Twitter (I'll be honest, I have not seen that comparison made once, but I don't read Scoble either), it's true that the Wave interface is not the most graceful or immediately-obvious thing to ever roll out of the Google garage.
Something which can let you do a small, but consistent and very useful set of operations everywhere will eventually attract the largest body of users. This is what Google should be aiming for with the Chrome OS. They should make sure that the Wave protocol is throughout that product, and everything else that they do. If they can eliminate the dozens or hundreds of minor frustrations faced daily by users due to the imperfect seamlessness of the current OS/browser/apps toolset, Google will garner tons of mainstream love.
Perhaps Google needs to try seeding entire companies at once -- preferably not companies composed entirely of geeks who know what Etherpad is -- instead of handing out invites to random folks. On the other hand, such a strategy would limit their growth rate and constrain their feedback in a different way. It's tricky.
I think Google Wave is great. But it is by its nature revolutionary, maybe we need more time to redefine how we think of "communication on the Internet"
You can't test a collaboration tool if the people you collaborate with can't frigging access it.
This is also why Google Voice exists.
Google is serious when they say they want to search everything.
Google is willing to give away these dressers for free because Google makes money through the dresser advertisements, so the more time you spend with your dresser, the more advertising opportunities they have. Thus Google wants to make a better dressing experience for you because ultimately it turns into more revenue for them.
Next up: Google Life, helping you do more and reducing your need to sleep.
[1] Wild assumption, but I expect that the numbers will bear this out.
That said, I haven't actually tried to do any work on Wave, so I can't speak for its usefulness. As a pure email replacement, I find it comparable to Gmail, minus the inferior keyboard shortcuts in Wave.
He lost me right there. You are not a geek if you have a problem with spam. Spam? I never see it. It all goes into my +inbox-spam folder and I spend < 1m/day scanning it before I delete the contents.
The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I must read and deal with.
This is where you lost me, because it just supports the real intent of the author's statement, which is that spam is a problem that results from design flaws in email. Despite the author's use of the word 'geek' being unnecessary, not all geeks are happy with myriad sometimes-adequate workarounds to fundamental design flaws. I'm glad you've made your peace with spam, though.
The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I must read and deal with.
And my point is that Wave can help reduce the clutter and chaos of these messages by presenting them in a more structured, intuitive, and versatile form. So instead of having 50 emails discussing the text for the new homepage, you can have just one Wave.
You certainly could have phrased that better :-P
Gmail already does that. See 'Gmail Conversations': http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
"So the main problems for geeks are that they’re signed up to so many services that they get inundated with notifications, monthly newsletters, automated messages, and shreds of spam that manage to get through GMail’s spam filters."
"Spam" was probably the wrong word to describe emails that are automated or informational, but requested; however, your view doesn't appear to disagree with his.
If your problem is that you have too much email from real people that must be evaluated and responded to, your problem is not with email at all, but rather with human organization. You have too many people relying on your input for too many things and that has nothing to do with technology. Offload work to an assistant, or outsource some functions, or grant increased decision making responsibility.
It definitely seems to fit much more than what we've been hearing over the last few months.
He's right. We've all been looking at this the wrong way.. Brilliant piece.
Then again, Microsoft doesn't need to ditch Outlook - they could just release Outlook Wave - after all, it's all open-source. That would be nice - we'd all win from such a move.
I knew I might be on the initial phase of the next direction of communication/email and knowing that this might one day replace Email and/or IM kept me thinking that I am visiting something grand, even if I still had a small idea of what it actually does.
Google Wave is such a hard thing to explain to friends/family and non-techies...this article really helped me try and stitch a clearer picture.
I am, however, worried about the amount of spam/bots that might come with these waves as soon as they're made public.
When Wave will be public, I expect plenty of different Wave bots, clients and other type of software appearing out there. This Wave-based software will solve real problems, not Wave itself.
Wave _is_ an actual application, not a protocol. It uses several protocols to get its job done, but it _is_ an application.
And the wave code is already public: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
However, I still think that it's not the current application that will deliver most of the Wave's value. Just like it's not the Twitter website that delivers most of the value of Twitter, but the ecosystem of the clients using its API.
da-dish
It also provides a single point of integration. In the past, I've advocated for e.g. bulletin boards to replace email exchanges where information tends to "submarine" into private exchanges. But getting corporate IS to even consider a deployment -- even just a small one for a single team -- was a non-starter. Going rogue would be a termination offense.
If you can get Wave adopted, you solve a whole bunch of problems all at once.
I remain extremely skeptical, though, about the compatibility of Wave as it currently exists with many businesses' requirements for both confidentiality and guaranteed information access -- uptime, an unlimited timeframe into to future, and not becoming locked in to a single vendor platform to the extent that Wave currently seems to imply. A Wave failure on any of these points could quickly destroy a business; so much would be locked up in its data, and if there is no alternative -- even if imperfect -- means of access...
The problems with adoption of current solutions (wikis, hosted stuff like Basecamp) are that many corporations don't let you host proprietary data offsite, and adding another server is something that is so difficult as to be essentially impossible. Not to mention "another server" could be one of 50 alternatives, all incompatible.
There still will adoption issues, as it doesn't seem like Google is aggressive in pursuing business customers, and I don't know if they have good answers for the questions that will come up. But I see Wave as essentially a protocol designed to solve the same sorts of problems as Basecamp et. al.
But I think the best example is a customer support ticketing system. This is pretty much an attempt to record email conversations in a structured way and be able to attach files to them.
Wave seems to be a platform. It needs a killer app in order to be adopted. Often, this happens through hitching a ride on some bigger change, like faster hardware.
There are plenty of great technologies that never got adopted. It actually seems common for a second-rate but good-enough version of a technology to win, because actual adoption is a huge challenge in itself. Perhaps a greater challenge than creating the technology in the first place. In pg-land, it's the "people want" part of "make something people want".
There's great opportunity here for the one who can apply Wave to alleviate a felt pain.
It should get out of beta in, oh, what, 5 years' time, going by GMail's timeline?
Why would you use wave over a forum/google group etc?
You could say that Wave is a bit like Email, Basecamp, Campfire, Etherpad, and a bunch of other collaboration tools, all merged into one unified interface. I'd be scared if I was 37-Signals. From everything I've heard, the feature Basecamp users most like is the discussion system... with Wave, that becomes a lot less worth paying for.
Google Wave is, IMHO, a godsend to corporate IT staff. It's a single application that solves several, very real office collaboration problems. Moreover, you can (or soon will) deploy it in-house, so you don't have to worry about a third-party hosted solution.
As far as I'm concerned, Google Wave solves all the problems of "intranets" and with a few robots and extensions makes a pretty decent project management tool too.
But to have a few use-cases, I found this lifehacker article better (http://lifehacker.com/5381219/google-waves-best-use-cases) (it is a crowdsourced collection from users on how they would use google wave, rather than one person speculating on various uses).
The use-case from the air traffic controller seems to be the best - as if wave was an app made for traffic controllers!
The OP article made great points, and in principle google wave (client and the underlying protocol) should provide everything the article outlines, HOWEVER, as is, the web client solves little or nothing.
The interface is sluggish, mysteriously buggy, overly complex and it actually exacerbates one of the MAIN problems it was going to resolve, ie the endless indentations. It fails #miserably# at that, because of the incredible amount of "chrome" (icons, borders, etc etc) used in the interface, especially in large public waves, but even with a very limited set of co-workers, you'll end up with a sea of bordered bubbles impossible to read for an ordinary human being.
I've used wave for 2 weeks now, I'm fully aware of all the browser short-cuts and features and my appreciation for it has waned.
Contrast this with etherpad (http://www.etherpad.com). It has its own issues (e.g. no indication of age of edits) but it actually works and #everyone# I've introduced to that site keeps using it and I've received many kudos.
Since google wave is both a client and a protocol.Perhaps an independent group can create a wave client that actually works...
I'm also relieved to see someone else pointing to Scoble's article and noting that he doesn't understand what Wave is about. When I read that article, my respect for the 'king of tech-bloggers' took quite a dive.
Anyways, kudos to you for writing about Wave more sensibly!
My only problem right now is I don't have enough fellow friends and associates with a Wave account to use it more and do better evaluation.
I'm looking forward to its spread!
Also, i guess that should be fine as Google should be intrested in information-base rather than user-base...
Google wave = Jabber Client + glorified logging
I know that Google have made some efforts to make money by directly charging Enterprises but that represents a tiny part of their revenue to date.
In other words, is Wave a much smaller opportunity than they had hoped? And if so, it might just end up being a "side project"...
I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this. I would take you literally, but taking that sentence literally would be mad (Google does earn money via advertising, and every enterprise-level organization "allows" it in the sense that they don't explicitly "disallow" it (what would that look like, anyway?)). Could you clarify?