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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
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.
* 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.
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--
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.
Modded off-topic, sure, but Slashdot is a broken mess. Wish they'd stop trying to be cute with their useless ajax bullshit and just fix their fucking code. An ideal non-broken Slashdot should look and behave like this.
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.
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.
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!
If it's such a problem, browse in Low Bandwidth mode with NoScript turned on. Turns into a very nice website indeed with those options.
Have you seen the video?
That's what it does. Exactly.
You can split the thread into further sub-threads at any point, and also limit certain threads to a specific group of people.
I know it sucks, I get the same problem; but here's a quick-and-dirty work-around: Click the "Change" button, even without making any changes. The page re-post will cause the titles to magically appear.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
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.