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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."
The fear is that once your friends know you carry a cell, they expect you to answer. If you fail to answer, they'll assume you're screening the call and will leave you out of the loop on the next social engagement as a punishment for breaking the social contract (screening your friend's call is a slap in the face).
If they don't know you have a cell phone, they'll treat you the same old way through the old/slow communication channels. I got away with that for a week until they realized I had a phone.
p.s. I almost completely missed out on the "texting" fad amongst my friends. They kept giving me shit about not having a cell phone because they wanted to be able to text me instead of call or email. I refused to get a phone for years, and then within the first month after I bought a disposable cell phone they all dumped their old texting phones and got smartphones. Now they refuse to use text and only want to use email. Well now I can just throw away the cell and continue using email the same old way. Wheee... (one has to wonder if my decision to get a phone is what prompted them to get smartphones -- maybe they felt compelled to maintain the same differential in social status).
If you fail to answer, they'll assume you're screening the call and will leave you out of the loop on the next social engagement as a punishment for breaking the social contract (screening your friend's call is a slap in the face).
Only to the terminally insecure. All of my friends know that if I don't answer the phone it's because I'm busy, left the damned thing in the car again or driving and don't have my headset with me. They know I'll call them back to find out what they wanted when I'm available.
I would argue that Twitter and Wave have the exact opposite effect. In the hands of an lucid and incisive orator, they are next to useless as a medium for the dissemination of ideas. On the other hand, for vapid, shrill and fallacious authors they are a godsend, enabling them to broadcast their general message of stupidity and ignorance to a wider field than ever before.
In a way, they are a microcosm of the Internet itself!
May the Maths Be with you!
I could see this becoming popular for small OSS projects. These can often have an IRC channel or 5, A website, Possibly a google group, a forum, a bug tracker, a gitorious site, a wiki, email, IM, and i'm sure other things.
If this Google Wave thing gets good robots and cuts the crap in half it will be incredibly useful to small OSS projects. Not only will it be less of a pain but it will make the project more efficient and better in general. I've seen plenty of situations where half of the info sources are out of date.
Some good tools would be importing data in a nice manner from a variety of sites. If it can just import a wiki then we will see people change much faster. Other things would be tools for programmers generally, ability to post code in a nice way, with the dif highlighted. Or perhaps something to make a todo list.
That said it is all in the implementation. If they make it easy to add toys I can see it being used quick. It also needs to be open, private wikis spread since people can make their own. It doesn't matter if it still goes through google so long as users have a way to implement it in their OWN way on their own site, so it has to be customizable. Making an OSS client for this would help, they are replacing types of communication that can be accessed from lots of places. I also think integrating feeds of different types would help, maybe be able to email into the wave or read through email. Access through a phone ap. Basically for it to go well they need to integrate and eat all the forms of communication they are competing with. They'll be hard pressed to make this work unless the are competitive individually with each type of communication.
There are a lot of little things that need to go right and I doubt it will happen first try. But I believe this type of integrated, combined interaction is the future of small group communication. And I haven't tried it myself.