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Initial Reviews of Google Wave; Neat, But Noisy
bonch writes "Reviews of Google Wave are out, and opinions are that it has potential as a development platform but is noisy to use for real-time communication. Robert Scoble calls it overhyped, claiming it's useful for little more than personal IM or small-scale project collaboration. He complains about the noisiness of tracking dozens of people chatting him at once in real-time and calls trying to use it a 'productivity killer' compared to simpler mediums like email and Twitter."
You can set your status to "not available to chat" and treat it just like email.
Don't look at the blinking and it can't bother you.
Gmail threads top-post emails into a coherent conversation just fine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ars Technica did a pretty good writeup on it.
IRC in itself is pretty good, but it misses a couple of features, like offline backlogging and some kind of more direct integration with pastebins, source code repository and such.
If you want offline backlogging, an IRC bouncer like ZNC can take care of that for you. As for pastebins, pasting the URL to a post is dead easy; there's plenty of IRC bots out there which can automatically post a "$user has made a new pastebin post at $url" message to a channel as soon as someone posts.
At work, we use IRC to communicate, we have a copy of the codebase from pastebin.com with a small modification to report pastebin posts to our development channel, and a script run from a Subversion post-commit hook which reports commts to the channel with a link to view the diff.
Works pretty well for us!
It's the way the information is structured. It's linguistic convention, and it has a point; it's not a matter of "social niceties." Information is transmitted in the way language is structured as well, and structure facilitates its reception.
More importantly you clearly have difficulty imagining any form of written communication other than the few you regularly come across. A single-page business letter that is magically attached to it's envelope for all time is one possibility. It's a rudimentary example.
This is
What's top posting?
I agree, top posting is awful.
Clearly you interact with people who know that top-posting is evil and have no urge to reply to each email before reading the following responses that have been sitting in their inbox for 3 days.
I envy you.