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Initial Reviews of Google Wave; Neat, But Noisy

Posted by timothy on from the here's-yer-firehose dept.

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."

5 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. A bigger waste of time than twitter? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...now trat's really saying something

    1. Re:A bigger waste of time than twitter? by ajs · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Twitter and Wave are communication tools. In the hands of someone who has something meaningful to say, they're powerful. In the hands of someone who has nothing to say, they're no more or less a waste of time than any other communications tool.

  2. Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo by Zerth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Email provides a linear conversation at least.

    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.

  3. You're Doing it Wrong by MBoffin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Missing the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Exactly.
    He is acting as if you NEED to be in there 24/7 so you don't miss things.
    Wave is literally a Wiki-IM hybrid.
    You can be instant or as relaxed as you want, it is persistent on the server-end.
    Just because all this information is there, doesn't mean you need to pay attention to it all at the same time.
    Wave won't make superhumans out of us.

    After playing around with it a little, the only potential problem i can see is people interacting with gadgets at the same time, causing collides.
    I've had it happen when a few of us were using a Google Maps gadget.

    This is the truest and best example of Multiplayer Notepad ever. IRC, eat it.