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The wave experience
I had the chance to take part of a multi people conversation on Google Wave.
Overall, I have to say that it was an interesting chat experience, but it lacks some very important things. Chief among them, if you are going to allow multiple people to edit at the same time and expect to give a real time experience, you have to provide good experience when people are editing “beyond the fold” (the areas of the documents that I am not currently viewing.
Replaying stuff is nice, but it isn’t working for the real time edit portion, which is the most interesting bit.
Overall, I have to say that I found it to be somewhat like IRC, and I dropped out of that years ago, because it had a real time requirements that I could not justify. I much rather use something that is by nature async, with a sync-like experience, like email or twitter.
Comments
My advice is, don't try to use it as IM. Use it as real-time, multi-threaded email.
To be honest it's not the real time editing that excited me about Wave, it is the massive reduction in the number of emails and the ability to edit things after they are sent.
I tried using Wave for chatting and found while it did work it just wasn't friendly enough for it, needed to place your cursor at the bottom of the wave manually to ensure the conversation flows logically is just frustrating.
I too don't find wave good for chatting. I think it shows a lot of its power though in coordinating open source projects, which is what I'm using it for now, for Noda Time ( http://code.google.com/p/noda-time/)
I think that you can't see this new service as a way to chat with anyone. That's a mistake that everyone made about Google Wave.
One way that I'm using it's for BrainStorming with my colleagues, better saying Offline BrainStorming or even in a metting, the first thing that I do it's add all my metting colleagues to a wave and in the end the summary of the meeting it's made with collaboration of all participants.
To chat, we have better ways like MSN, GTalk, Yahoo, etc.
You can add me: aboimpinto@googlewave.com
regards
Paulo Aboim Pinto
Odivelas - Portugal
I've found it is a much better way to collaborate on design ideas with remote people than e-mail. Too often the ideas flow resulting in changes that don't quite get captured by an e-mail.
Wave makes it easy to change the top level details easily and the discussion of why they were changed remains below in the threads. We try to keep the top level post edited with the final result for reference and let the rest remain untouched so that we don't lose that useful banter.
It's not IM, in fact, when we work on documents together at the same time, we're typically on the phone as well. Now if we can get some diagramming widgets for it, it would be ultra-awesome-ness.
I think Google Wave has no ways and no future.Before of all, the Java Script is not the uberplatform developers want to build new project on. Google tries to build more and more over it, and it faces more and more problems, which makes them to jump over their heads to bring such solutions into life. It cannot go endlessly.
And imho Wave is the first step of Google's falling. Of course, marketing hype can save some of popularity, but -- I think, goo-guys've simply selected wrong math for good idea.
Google wave isn't just about java script. It's an open source protocol and, when released, everyone can make programs that support it on any platform they please. I do see a bright future for the Wave.
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