Slashdot Mirror
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."
...now trat's really saying something
After watching the demo, a lot of people were commenting that the major problem is that it runs counter to how the brain operates...we aren't designed to heavily multitask. Email provides a linear conversation at least. Still, it's interesting and I think that it does have uses. Perhaps the user feedback will cause it to evolve into something more manageable for a regular brain. I think the potential to assist with remote project collaboration is great.
A lot will depending on how people use it, not what it is. There will need to be settings to help people set limits on the barrage of information.
This reminds me a lot of what people were saying a few years ago when they pondered whether they should get a cellphone.
"But it's always with you! People will call at all times!"
The obvious solution is to turn it off or don't answer it and people will get the idea and communicate on your terms. You have the control of how or when to respond.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
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.
I think he's missing the point. You don't need to use Google Wave in "real time": you can treat it just like e-mail or twitter if you want. Open the wave, ignore anyone else who's editing it, make the changes or reply you want to, and leave it to come back to it later.
You can use Wave for anything from any level of communication synchronicity from e-mail, through IRC, to teleconference, on a completely continuous sliding scale. No other Internet communications medium we've seen before has that kind of flexibility.
I also think that a lot of the negative reactions are because it's a paradigm-shifting technology. People don't like change; they don't like adapting to new and unfamiliar ways of working. When e-mail first started becoming widespread, many people found it impossible to understand and deal with; now it's an intrinsic and familiar part of every working environment.
Pirate Party UK
...because trying to actively collaborate with 100 people, even face to face, is noisy and futile. The fact this is his resulting opinion, in my opinion, doesn't validate his view in the least. No one has ever claimed using Wave will make humans suddenly super human; able to do things no other humans could previously do.
Lets be realistic about the types of things people collaborate on and how its currently done today. Try doing that with 100 people or even face to face and its pretty message. And with mediums such as IM or email, its far more likely many will walk away with differing understandings of the effort. Even worse, after the fact, people will be challenged to recall why certain conclusions were reached or decisions were made. None of those are nearly as likely to be problems with waves.
Also, what people are currently testing and using is simply a proof of concept of a series of robots and applications. These, in of themselves, are not Wave proper. In other words, as people gain more experience, the types of activities, applications, and robots which contribute and provide increased value will only grow over time. The applications which people perceived as "Wave" today is absolutely not the "Wave" people will see tomorrow.
So the real summary is, he fails to understand what is being used. Likewise, a lack of imagination is obvious, as is realistic expectation. I'm sorry but I can't seriously consider his review on any level. He only comes off as small minded and unrealistic.
Coming full circle back to expectations, only a handful of people are able to focus on more than single thread of conversation and predominantly they are women. Like any significantly new technology, it takes time to fully absorb and leverage all that the new technology has to offer. In this case, its very likely people will be forced to retrain their brains to better follow multiple, concurrent conversations to fully benefit from the technology. Everyone can do it, but it doesn't come natural to most; especially if you're not female.
Simply put, Google has provided an absolutely awesome, sky is the limit, technology. If multiple killer applications are not in place which leverage Wave within a year or two, I'd declare this a failure of developers and imagination rather than a failure of Google and/or Wave.
In this case, I'd say the reviewer has failed everyone.
I think it is going to be very useful for collaboration projects and some specific conversations. Of course, some people will stay staring at the screen the entire day, but that already happens with facebook, twitter, etc. The point is.. you don't HAVE to. I like the way you can track the conversation even if you got there at a later time. My guess there will be a first moment of wow-ness and them it will fall back to be used normally, like everything that is new.
Keep in mind that these complaints are from the same guy who followed tens of thousands of people on Twitter and complained when Facebook wasn't allowing him to add more than 5,000 friends on Facebook. If he joined an e-mail mailing list with 35,000 subscribers, he would probably complain that mailing lists as a whole are too noisy and write them off as useless. Now that he's dealing with something that requires more attention to actual individual people, he finds it harder to deal with. Well, duh.
Sure it's noisy on the public waves, but they're public. Everyone is using it all at once... hundreds of people at a time. That's not going to be the main way people use Google Wave. Right now more people are using the public waves because they want to interact with other Wave users, and all their friends aren't on Wave yet.
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. I haven't been invited to Google Wave yet, but I had the impression the whole point was to have something like that: an IRC integrated with all the corollary tools that can be used to coordinate development.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Am I the only only one who doesn't like that everyone all the time know what I am doing, if i'm online or if i'm available for a chat? Or whatever other people are doing. I abandoned MSN messenger for that sole purpose a few years ago, and facebook too.
There's a lot of socializing time already even without having all these apps on your computer too. I do have instant messaging for my work, but those people *know* when it's the right time to msg me and they're doing so for a good reason - not just to ask "whats up dude?"
It's nice to have some peace sometimes, and computer is a really nice way for that. I dont want all the contacts and people bothering me when I just want to spend some time and feel relaxed.
I guess my friends aren't as big a bunch of dicks as yours. Anybody that'd I'd consider a decent friend knows enough about my personality to not take it personally if I don't bother to answer. If they don't know me well enough to understand, then chances are I don't care what they think anyways so whatever.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.