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A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave
rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."
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First Wave
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Take a break from your open sores circle jerk and fix your fucking code.
Please repost your article on a site that doesn't use Vibrant's rollover advertising technology.
Given that Daniweb not only uses Vibrant's abusive rollovers but doesn't allow you to disable them without signing up, I'm going to blackhole their site in my DNS until they change that absurd policy.
Dude's post reads like a wannabe Google tester that's just scratching the surface. If they haven't thought this out or experienced them before with Google docs, they're dead in the water. Just relax and try it out before you play the role of beta tester and say it's not going to work.
* What happens when you have conversation with more than say five people.
It becomes harder to manage, just like an IRC, IM or real-life conversation with more than 5 people. It gets noisy, confusing and you will probably miss quite a bit. Wave isn't magic, it will have limitations just like anything else does. Or perhaps I am wrong and it will have tools to manage this, either way it's a non-point.
* Key Stroke by Key Stroke View Could Be Annoying
Could be useful too. Turn it off if you don't like it. Another non-point.
* Editing Ability Could Get Out of Control
There is a history bar. Presumably there will be a history tab/page. What exactly do you want from Wave? Something that allow the entire playerbase of WoW to interact in a single document or something to allow collaberation between 1-20 people working on a FOSS project, or in a business?
* Too Complicated for the Masses
Email is too complicated for the masses. The Internet is too complicated for the masses. The ones that picked up email and internet will pick up Wave, if they have to.
Essentially, this "look at Wave" made me remember this comic (the bottom one).
It seems every company seeks the holy grail of integrated software. One interface to do everything and time and again the general public ignores these "advances" (anyone remember GEOS?)
Why? Let's look at the latest massively successful "product", Twitter. Summary of twitter: Send 140 Characters to the world. Wow. Stunningly complex (from the user's perspective), huh?
What made Google so successful was doing one thing and doing it well. Wave holds 0 interest for me (disclaimer: neither does twitter but at least I get it). Another integrated communication method to take all my avenues of communication and point it to one. Oof. Sorry. If there is one thing we have too much of these days is communications. At least having to use separate programs or channels slows it down just a little. Who wants more mail, more IMs or more anything?
-Joe
Why does everyone keep saying to watch the first 40 minutes. The most exciting part and rarely mentioned in articles comes at the end. They plan to make the entire protocol and the majority of their implementations open source so that anybody can install their own wave servers. Thus it can be a full replacement for email as you can have your own corporate wave server independent from google with all the features and people on your system can send out a wave to someone on google system just as they can with corporate email.
This might not be the shittest story on the slashdots evaaaar, but it's certainly a contender.
At the bottom of the
What I am really concerned about is SPAM.
Real time bayesian filtering? Not really. And that's the most common solution.
The concerns I noticed were more technical than the ones he looked at.
Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
Bandwidth. Every change, send character by character to whoever happens to have it open. That's a lot of 'real-time' bandwidth for this central location. Both of these would work great in a corporate level with a WAVE server running on the LAN, but when it goes global, those servers will be smokin'
Especially with the concept of wave enabled blogs. If you blog hits DIGG, then the wave server will be sending out your edits to thousands of people simultaneously. I wonder what the datapath is. I'm sure Google/Blogspot has a lot of bandwidth, but when you combine all IM, EMAIL, BLOG traffic along the same pipes to a central location....
I just wonder about the scalability of the hosting solution.
They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works. But still, if this catches on, I see a future of new congestion problems.
On the flip side...I was very impressed by the demo...and if this catches on in a big way (and works) it could be a serious redefining of communication on the web.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Google Wave is beautiful, innovative and indeed holds great potential, I'd rather have Google get its products and especially Gmail out of beta.
How about improving Google Docs? Zoho's Writer is better and more functional in my opinion.
Back to Gmail: There are a host of features that have little attention, yet they could make the lives of users even better.
Heck....do something about Gmail.
We already have a ubiquitous, real time conversation tool that allows us to communicate simultaneously with multiple people in a "team". We can use it just about anywhere, any time and get to just about anybody. Its called a phone, its already in your pocket. I am amazed by my 19 year old college student son. I ask him, "Did you talk to ?" The answer is always that he had an extended conversation, but it was by text or FaceBook. What gives? I find you can accomplish more, in a more nuanced manner, in a 2 minute phone conversation, than in 20 minutes of texting, emailing or waveing.
Why does slashdot allow people to submit stories about their own blog posts? It seems like that bypasses an important filter - someone else finding the story and deciding it's important. Clearly, this story wouldn't have made it to slashdot if the author hadn't submitted it, because 90% of it is just nitpicking at minor details of a system that hasn't even been released yet.
Pish tosh! You didn't even get red in the face about the stupid name they're giving it.
Wave?
Weren't "message" or "mail" already perfectly acceptable terms for this kind of communication?
Why are people so eager to corrupt their language at the whim of moronic marketing committees?
There is no "tweet", no "wave" or "scrobble". I'm not "writing on your wall", I'm "posting a message".
Gah! </head-explode>
I checked my submissions. I have a pending submission that turned a year old last month and crap like this makes it through. Good QC, /.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Throwing every chat comment into a linear sequence certainly doesn't scale well for large conversations. Has anyone tried building chat into a tree, much like we see right here? It might tend to fragment conversations, but if the conversation gets too large, that's what's supposed to happen.
What I really want to see is something like the "decision duel" system from Marc Stiegler's David's Sling.
A very well put response- but Google is a big company, smart too. If I were Google, I would definitely think first before creating a supposedly unified web application to make all communication devices and workflows before obsolete. "We need you to complete the product for us" - no, you think?
The web is changing, no more do web applications simply display text, images and video. It's a whole new beast that's completely different from the desktop world. It might should like tosh for other geeks who love their mutt, pine, finch- but I won't find it surprising if you find morons who find things like Facebook appealing to easily accept Google Wave. If they accept it easily, it'll grow- want to make it emulate email or perhaps solve those problems mentioned in the post before? Well, you now have such an extensible framework and protocol you can easily write bots for to make it from what it is to what you want. How much power does that leave Google? Hell lots.
always seem to be the ones that only do one small thing really well that everyone suddenly needs and wants. then it bloats and adds new features as it matures. but the app probably won't get mindshare without the initial hyperfocusing of functionality on one really cool must-have
but a collage of preexisting functionality that promises to do "everything"? that actually isn't really sexy or attention grabbing. if i were a google executive, i would leave all the expansive functionality out of the picture, still functional, but just not talked about. then i would insist the marketing of the app present only one really cool, truly innovative tiny piece of the picture as what the app is all about. if this little piece is truly amazing and new and must-have, the app will go viral like twitter. otherwise, this focus here on a hundred bits of functionality sewn together that other apps do successfully already will just put people to sleep
yes, i know putting it all in one place is a big deal, but i'm not talking about what makes sense, i'm talking about what is sexy and makes people take initial interest
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It looks like IRC with a few other features just combined in to one interface.
Is this some new kind of way to try to make us read the article? Soon we're going to get nothing but a title and most people still won't read TFA.
Finally, at the behest of one of my online friends I looked at the first 40 minutes of the 1 hour and 20 minute presentation from last week's Google I/O conference, and I finally had an inkling of the potential.
I tuned out right after the opening where he talks about not even bothering to watch the whole presentation. I can form my own poorly researched opinions.
1) Write an Article about what you think, and why you are right.
2) Post it on a crappy site with lots of advertising.
3) Slashdot yourself.
4) ???
5) PROFIT!
Hey! Dontchya know that it's No fair to raise questions about Google tools!? They're all in Beta... all of em... forever...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
That's no different than saying "spam isn't a problem, my spam filters get almost all of it".
And I'm sure that's a few antisocial psychopaths who will immediately pop up and say "yeh, spam isn't a problem", well, I say arseholes to the lot of you.
It seems that people are missing the point with this technology.
Think about all the enterprise services that this spans. I'm seeing a Sharepoint, Exchange, and LCS killer here at a minimum. I was hoping to see Google Video/Voice chat mixed with this, but I would say that it's probably not too far off. If it had that, goodbye to WebEx, Genesys, etc.
This is a collaboration tool, and that's it. There's no spam in a controlled audience. Even where this thing can be exposed like blogs and wiki sites, you have complete control over what gets included and published.
Umm, just curious, what does being a butler again have to do with this article or the body of your post?
And how exactly does one re-buttle?
This guy is like and old man standing on his lawn shaking his fist as the future drives by and lobs a large bowling ball into his mailbox.
I, for one, have always missed keystroke-level chat. That's how it used to work in the old days of dial up BBSes and it WAS more efficient. I didn't have to wait for some slow-typer to finish hunting and pecking before I could start calling them retarded.
or else!
you're talking about what makes sense. i'm talking about what's sexy and makes people flock to something new. if google does what facebook does, but better, nobody won't migrate. simply out of inertia. which of course is a shame, but better products die in the face of worse products all the time, simply because they don't get adapted out of simple human inertia
i'm talking about the hook, the sexy cool thing, what makes users salivate and want to switch to wave. so google really needs to talk up that one little sexy cool thing, not the whole boring redundancy with facebook. that will just fall into place later, after you've hooked them with a wow factor
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
who switched from myspace to facebook, why they did it, the answer wouldn't be "because it boringly replicates the featureset of what myspace already does"
i'm talking about the sexy hook. the one little must have. yes, facebook does exactly what you say it does, but that's not what made people adopt facebook in the first place. consider the full range of functionality in facebook: 90% of the people who started using facebook did so because of only 1% of that full range functionality. the rest just fell into use later. that's my whole point: identify what that must have 1% functionality is, and you have a successful product
and what i am saying isn't an original or obscure comment. cars do a thousand different things, but they are basically all the same. the primary functionality of a car: getting from here to there, isn't even the prime motivator for picking one car or another. so why does someone pick car A over car B? "oh because i can plug my iPod into it". and so you see that prominently featured in the car's ad. not its transmission or fuel injection system
see my point? the sexy hook. the tiny little almost unimportant and obscure must-have. thats what wave needs to be successful, and that's what google should trumpet to the media. not "it does everything facebook does better and more!"
who cares? not sexy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
on different servers, so to could scale to everyone on the internet and only the people who subscribed to the bit which was interesting to them would see that bit.
God, I'm too old. I'm going to go take up farming or something.
Deleted
Dude Bush isn't president anymore, update your spam please
Wave is basically a private forum with versioning and file sharing. I don't see how it's much more "conceptually complex" than Slashdot.
A sickening depravity beyond words, beyond recognition. My fingers quivered - I could barely hold my pen to paper; the mere presence of this twisted human perversion was enough to chill my bones. A squeaky phlegm accompanied my nervous stutter, "What, what, how do you even think? What demented trauma's going on in that head of yours?"
"Spam", he gruffly coughed, staring at me through a fisheye lens into reality reserved only for psychopaths and Apple fanboys, an intermittent twitch pulsing his left eyelid, "is not a problem."
I think the writer and the majority of readers missed the key point about Google Wave technology. Yes, they demonstrated the power of the protocol with an end user application, but the main thing here is not the application. It's the protocol and the infrastructure.
See, they are releasing a full implementation of a protocol that enabled distributed communication with all of e-mail missing features like real time chatting and the possibility to expand it without corrupting the protocol.
Resuming, it means that you don't need to rely on a proprietary IM/E-Mail client/protocol anymore. This is widespreaded with e-mail already, but not IM. You no longer need to use MSN, ICQ or AIM servers to communicate. You can have your own server up and running and routing messages to other servers to reach people out. This means that if one service go down, you can still be up and talking. If someone like M$ realizes that Live Messenger must be a paied service, you just move to another provider.
If this protocol have enough success we will experiment the freedom we didn't had for years since IRC.
Can anyone who is familiar with both, tell me - Google Wave sounds to me to be awefully similar to Microsoft Office Groove - but more open, so that potentially anyone can use it? Am I far off the mark here? From the descriptions I've seen, it sounds kind of similar to Groove. Only using open, cross-platform, standards-based technologies (HTML, Jabber, etc)?
While I cant disagree with any particular point in the article, these are the SAME arguments that keep being used by old people (and I consider myself one of them, because I had the same thoughts when I first heard of Google Wave) about any new form of communication.
To many people change data: wikis
Beign overwhelmed by information: email and internet search
Losing the time to self edit: email and IM
To complicated: All of the above
Hell, I bet many of these came up with the invention of the telephone.
I don't see a problem. From what I see, the only thing that has changed is that there is no pink box around the area where you post comments.
The article needs to make a better case for why wave is more complicated.
Myself, I find the status quo hugely complicated:
Switching between various native and web applications with different log-ins, hugely different ways of doing things and no easy way to search and aggregate all the information or transition between them.
I don't twitter, facebook, wiki or blog much because of the amount of effort to partipate in all of them and 'context switching' between them. It's simply to complicated.
If wave brings all these different things together under a consistent workflow, that is simplifying things greatly.
A car is basically a buggy with a different propulsion system and a steering wheel.
But I agree, a lot of people are making Wave sound a lot more complicated to the user than it actually is. In my example, email is the buggy. People will learn to use Wave just fine.
Boom Shanka
This might be a good point to give the correct spelling of "rebuttal".
The wave demo reminds me bugzilla very much. Wave = next version of bugzilla.
Is that all it takes these days to hit the antisocial psychopath arsehole level? Man, all this work for nothing.
It really sucks, doesn't it? And then you have to beat all of Usenet just to get to the Boss fight.
Hold on.
You're saying that you believe some functionality of AJAX wouldn't be there if it wasn't for these people who abuse it?
You're kidding, right? Pulling our legs? Extracting the urine?
It's a prank, right?
You're not serious, surely?