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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."
...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.
Those that simply have to stay connected to others at all times in order to feel validated and important will love Google Wave. Right there in front of you is evidence that people are connected to you! In real time! Better than texting! It's so amazingly interactive! It's like... like... a telephone!
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.
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.
I was lead to believe using Google Wave would be like having Jesus bust a nut on your face.
I played with Google Wave for a (very) short time, and it definitely has some strong potential to be a key social networking tool in the future. It's kind of like Facebook mixed with IRC, IM and email...which, in other words, makes it a JUGGERNAUT of a platform to have.
I think it was overhyped, but so was the iPhone before its launch...
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.
You can indeed. There's a small checkbox next to the send button, or at least that's what I saw in the developer preview.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
You damn youn^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HYes, I could see how that would be annoying.
The "tech world" is awash with excitement for today's scheduled release of a hundred thousand invitations to preview Wave, Google's innovative new website, communication protocol, interactive environment, multiplayer online role-playing game, bulletin board, wiki, dessert wax and floor topping. Experts, all heavily consulted by the media while Parliament is in recess, say it will revolutionise how we do business, organise parties, manage projects, make friends, waste our employer's time at work, pick up girls we swear we didn't realise were under sixteen and cheat on our homework.
I've been testing the Google Wave Developer Preview. The implications for journalists alone are stunning:
In conclusion, Google Wave is clearly an absolute boon to the noble institution of the Fourth Estate in its mission to protect the public good, further the dynamism of social discourse and watch the watchmen. And this is why we at News International consider Google a threat and menace to the news media and the institution of journalism that must be reined in by government edict without delay. God bless you all, and please PayPal us 20p for having read this article, you parasitical pixel-stained technopeasant. And now, Tories and tits.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Dude, he just associated 'twitter' with being productive.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
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)
They covered that in the video of the Google I/O 2009 presentation. It's long though, I can't blame people for not having seen it. There's a small check box right by the input area to disable that feature.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
There was an article here a day or two ago with one of the lead developers of Wave. He mentioned the subject of "robots" that monitor the conversation stream. I'll admit to failing to RTFA in both cases, but it seems like Wave is intended as a low level foundation to build upon. The analogy that comes to mind is the data bus in the computer. If you try to use a computer by monitoring the 0s and 1s flying between the CPU and the RAM or the disk subsystem you won't get anywhere fast. On the other hand, if you leave that low level hardware interaction to the drivers and use a software application, the computer becomes useful.
It seems to me, and again I didn't RTFA, that Wave will only be useful when people start writing decent robots and applications to sit on top of it. I imagine it working something like SNMP. The application only traps what is relevant for what it is monitoring, even though there are a lot of conversations going on. Likewise, in terms of collaboration or project management, there might be applications that tag certain types of communication and only pay attention to similar types of communication. Status updates would be monitored by the calendaring robot and only displayed by the calendar application. IM like communication streams might be aggregated into an Inbox like feature so that people can "mute" the conversation stream and go back to it later. I'd imagine that there will be a great demand for threading and search capabilities on those sorts of streams.
Right now it seems like people are looking at Wave from the perspective of an individual user. Does one user need to talk to twelve different people at once? Hell no. On the other hand, your average organization has dozens if not more conversation streams taking place between departments and individuals at any given point during the work day. Different departments might not know what each other are up to in a timely enough manner to be relevant. With something like Wave tying together the various information streams (email, calendaring, wiki, etc), connections can be made between individuals that might otherwise be missed.
Then again, I didn't read either article and for all I know Wave might just be a Twitter clone with a worthless API that can't be leveraged for anything other than talking about Britney Spears.
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.
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!
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.
I always thought it would be nice if people in IMs could see what I'm typing, to feel more like a real conversation.
Now that I think about it, it would be very disrupting to have several people with their messages appearing slowly all at once... which is not unlike a real conversation.
You know, if people are able to see what others are typing, it may lead to strange "waves" in which people may not hit submit even once.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Ok, I'm a nobody... but personally, I think this is going to be a revolution in communication and to say it's overhyped is plain stupid.
Essentially, the technology is very complicated, but the premise is something we can all follow and appreciate. We all need to communicate in realtime sometimes, we all need to communicate at our own pace sometimes, and we all need to collaborate sometimes; until now that required a minimum of 3 separate tools and mindsets.
Google hasn't created anything really new with wave, we have all done the things wave allows us to do before... but we have never done them with the same tool. And we have never done them with a tool that allowed us to seamlessly transition from one paradigm to another without thought.
I KNOW that this is the future of on line communication, if not Wave then something like it. I absolutely LOVE the fact that Google recognized the importance of what they were doing and created Wave as a standard that could be implemented by competitors... creating a technology rather than an application.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
See, who needs google wave! I use slashdot to take my grammar nazism and pedantry to the next level!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I look at it a little differently, and I don't put them all in the same categories.
Facebook, for example, is mostly for friends that I don't talk to regularly, so for those people it's a good place to give periodic updates and keep in touch on a less regular basis. I don't update every single day, so as long as you use it in moderation it can serve a purpose.
People that I communicate with more often are either in person or on the phone, so they're a closer circle of friends and family than I would use facebook for.
I haven't personally found a use for Twitter, since I generally agree I don't feel like relaying how many bowel movements I've had today or giving every single detail out to the public. I guess I could see a use if you like following celebrities or some special groups that have started using it, like the LA Fire Department, but otherwise it's not my thing.
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.
I'm gonna blow your mind: You can, get this, not log in! Like, if you're not in the mood for some "what's up?" time, you don't have to close your account and uninstall the application, you can simply turn it off and refrain from inputting any information.
Pretty obscure information, but now you know.
You can't take the sky from me...
Some jobs require teamwork to get the job done. It makes sense to have 12 people talking about something when you are all working on the same problem or all building the same thing. The fact that he thinks it would decrease productivity shows that he doesn't work in the sort of industry where teamwork is encouraged. If you work with 12 people there are instances where you will need realtime communication with all 12. Rather than have a series of meetings and brainstorming sessions you can stay at your desk or even work from home with apps like this. I don't see how it would decrease productivity unless its used as a toy.
Ironically enough I created a facebook account for the sole purpose of protecting my online identity.
Now it won't be as easy for someone to impersonate me.
There is one reason why Gmail killed my email client application: Conversation view. All related messages stay together and you never have the embarrassing problem of replying before reading all of the responses. It also makes for a cleaner inbox that actually reflects how many things you've got on your plate right now. I don't know why offline email clients can get it right (Postbox is trying, but it still isn't as good as Gmail).
The only thing that breaks it is if you have one of those annoying correspondents who insists on just hitting "reply" to any random message from you, and writing about something unrelated without changing the subject line. Or the people who do change the subject line, even though the subject hasn't changed.
I also prefer subject lines to be a one-line summary of the topic, not a "title." Something like: "Please get me that TPS report by next Friday (10/9)" rather than "TPS report." But that's just personal taste.
Mostly by Robert Scoble.
I haven't personally found a use for Twitter, since I generally agree I don't feel like relaying how many bowel movements I've had today or giving every single detail out to the public. I guess I could see a use if you like following celebrities or some special groups that have started using it, like the LA Fire Department, but otherwise it's not my thing.
Personally, I have no issue letting everyone know when I'm pooping. I've called and SMSed people from the can on multiple occasions simply to tell them that I was pooping. That would probably be the only thing I would use twitter for, if I were to use it at all.
Here I sit, all broken hearted.
Came to poop, but only farted.
Plural of medium is "media" (unless you're talking about seances).