Initial Reviews of Google Wave; Neat, But Noisy 336
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."
A bigger waste of time than twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
...now trat's really saying something
Re:A bigger waste of time than twitter? (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.
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Exactly. If you look at different people's e-mail inboxes, some are full of primarily work-related communiques, while others are filled with idle conversations with family & friends. If you find that your inbox is filled with chain letters and unproductive correspondences, then perhaps you need to reconsider your e-mail habits and who you give your contact info to (or use 2 separate e-mail accounts). It doesn't make sense to blame the communication protocol or your e-mail client. Likewise, instant messa
Re:A bigger waste of time than twitter? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:A bigger waste of time than twitter? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess that holds true, but only if you use wave like twitter (which is to miss its main attractions).
Where wave really shines is for collaboration, communicating ideas between people working together towards a solution rather than disseminating information to a large audience.
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So presumably you're not interested in space.. Jeff Foust goes to just about every space conference there is and reports via twitter on what he sees there. You'll find stuff there that a wider audience might not appreciate. As I can't go to these conferences myself, it's invaluable, I don't have to wait for the winds to decide that something Jeff sees is worthy of turning into one of his fantastic articles [thespacereview.com].
Of course, this is just one way people use twitter.. call them the "stuff I thought was interesting"
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I am, so I went and checked. I never really used twitter before, or followed anybody on it. So here yo
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I have an RSS reader that does the same thing. Except that if the interesting person has more to say than 140 characters I can read that too.
And people used to worry MTV was shortening attention spans.
Re:A bigger waste of time than twitter? (Score:4, Funny)
[in panicked tone]: who's trere?! HELLO??
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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 "wh
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Nope I have never visited facebook.com, or twitter.com ever. not even to look someone else up. I figure that by the time I finally get around to it will be unpopular so I won't have to worry.
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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 face
Re:I was thinking the same thing (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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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.
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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.
Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah I work with an air traffic control system. The UI has to take a lot of complex information and present it to the user in the most pertinent way possible. It has to understand what is important (an aircraft which is off course for example) and give just enough emphasis to that object without taking too much of the users attention away from other tasks. It is a fine balance, particularly if you expect your UI to be used for hours at a time in a stressful environment.
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Why is it sad that something that has been honed over decades comes out on top of something that hasn't even reached beta testing yet? I would hope the ATC system comes out very, very, very far on top.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yes, we are fortunate in that way. I do know what you are referring to and have seen it...that and people who reply ADHD machine gun style, a couple of words or a sentence at a time, covering one topic in each email, when they could have composed one longer email detailing everything.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Informative)
Gmail threads top-post emails into a coherent conversation just fine.
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Gmail threads top-post emails into a coherent conversation just fine.
Bah. The concept of threading is as old as dirt, and despite people "discovering" it, or otherwise implementing it as a "new feature", there's plenty of people using email that still don't grasp the fundamentals. Either way, there's far more to coherency than how a given list of emails is visually sorted.
As for Google's Wave, what I remember from the videos was that replies (at least those shown being made) were made "in-line". If that'
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So long as you have no experience with coherent linear conversations, yeah, Gmail provides an excellent simulacrum of what you might think one looks like.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Gmail to the rescue. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 correspo
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not "all the way at the bottom," at least if they're responding to more than one specific point in a message.
If one is responding to specific points, then they should always obviously delete any bits you aren't responding to AND respond below. Why respond below? Because we read from top down, and when bottom-posting the reader can read it normally -- read the bit of quoted material for context THEN read the response directly beneath.
In the *rare* times that top-posters *do* respond to specific points, then the reader has to constantly "tennis-match" move their eyes up and down to read quoted material/new material.
Note some many people consider "top-posting" while forwarding is hypocrisy of top-posting haters. I disagree, because when forwarding, one rarely makes specific/detailed responses to various different pieces in an email. (If so, then they should reply, and possibly add new CCed people, mentioning that new CCs were added.) Generally, at least the way I use it, forwarding is more of "Hey, take a look at this:", so putting that comment at the top makes sense.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Funny)
I actually appreciate the salutations and valedictions. Sometimes they even help me identify Nigerian spam.
Sincerely,
Your friend,
mctk
PS I just thought of something to say, but unfortunately I've already typed out the message, so I'll just have to write it out here at the end.
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I always add the salutation - because if I don't, people on the CC: list will reply, thinking I addressed it to them. Some people are rushed. It is a courtesy.
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Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that a lot of the early reviews are complaining that when they use like a real-time forum, it gets too busy. When a reviewer claims that he's chatting to 12 people at once and it's too much of a time sink - what is he comparing it to? Chatting to 12 people in a normal IM client is a huge time sink because there is always somebody talking.
I'd like to read a review by somebody that knows what that they're talking about. Sure, it's a tool that tries to integrate blogs / forums / chat / email into a single product. But that doesn't magically mean that it can turn forum style interaction between hundreds of people into a linear two-person conversion like email.
If anything, the combination is going to create different conventions for hybrid forms of communication.
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I'd like to read a review by somebody that knows what that they're talking about.
Welcome to Reading. You must be new here.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on what you do for a living. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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Doesn't really qualify as an answer. Point out where Google claimed that they would magically take n-party interactions and make them as simple as two-party. No answer, eh?
Translation: I've decided the GP is wrong without having any evidence, so to rationalise my decision I'll flame him li
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Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:4, Interesting)
It could be seen as an intermediate point in that process, yes. Only time will tell if the neurological structure can build itself to accommodate that or not, or if there are some fundamental limitations in the structure that would require a few thousand years of evolutionary development to fix.
I am reminded of Stranger in a Strange Land, who's protagonist was raised by aliens to learn quite a different set of abilities, and to think very differently from humans, with the same brain. Could be possible.
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We aren't? I mean, it's not like the brain isn't simulatiously thinking about what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the work due for the week, the work due for NEXT week, the work due LAST week that was done but needed thinking about, an old girlfriend, sex with said girlfriend, and your reaction to reading this, along with your decision to respond to it...
We definitely think in a multi-threaded fashion, which I think is well-aligned with Google's vision in Wave.
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I am remotely diagnosing you with ADD. Get thee to psychiatry!
-l
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No they don't. They want to see the client in order to hand them the bill.
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I don't know what you're talking about. I d---OH LOOK, A DUCK
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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.
Welcome to old age. We'll set up a rocking chair for you on the porch.
The generation that grows up with heavily multitasking-oriented tools will make us seem rather sad.
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Nope. Since multi-taskers do poorly on both tasks [stanford.edu], those who grow up thinking heavy multitasking is the way to go will wonder why the old farts seem so smart.
Multitasking is great for creating the illusion that things are getting done, sure. But for real results, it seems one thing at a time is still the best way to go.
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So you're proposing we downgrade wave to be more linear? I propose that we'll evolve into it.
People will like it (Score:5, Funny)
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HAPPY HUMP DAY LOLZ!!!!!!!
* Obnoxious glittery
Re:People will like it (Score:5, Funny)
Sheldon: I have a very wide circle. I have 212 friends on myspace.
Leonard: Yes, and you've never met one of them.
Sheldon: That's the beauty of it.
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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!
It doesn't need to be a "real time" system at all. Everyone pays attention to the instant message/email side of Wave. People need to pay more attention to using it for things like an issue tracker or a wiki.
An issue tracker starts out as a single idea, then may move into a discussion, and then it gets completed. Wave looks perfect, you stick the description as a new wave, you discuss it, and then once it's complete you drop the whole wave and swap in a one line summary of the problem and the implemented sol
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Like a telephone? LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! Phone can LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! be nice, but they have LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! a huge and very annoyLOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! annoying habit of breaking LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! your train of LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! thought.
LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!
LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!
LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!
People LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK A
Sounds like he needs to set pingable to off (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Sounds like he needs to set pingable to off (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Sounds like he needs to set pingable to off (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Sounds like he needs to set pingable to off (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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If you fail to answer, they'll assume you're screening the call
Those are some pretty assuming friends.
Of the people I know who carry a cell, they don't always answer it, don't always physically have it with them, and don't always have it on. There's really no safe assumption I can make for the reason my call didn't go through.
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.
I wish I had friends like yours. I pretty much have been insisting on IM and email for years now.
Re:Sounds like he needs to set pingable to off (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Seems geared towards heavy chat users... (Score:2)
... not email users.
I can see the benefit of email like features in a chat client but not the reverse.
Then again, I haven't actually tried it.
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Missing the point (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.
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No other Internet communications medium we've seen before has that kind of flexibility.
I'm, not sure I agree with that. I think you might be overlooking Skype.
You can chat line-by-line in realtime while both (or more) parties are online.
You can send one-off email-length messages and then ignore any response until you feel like dealing with it.
You can message people while they're not themselves online and they'll receive those messages when they next become available.
Include videos, pictures, files right the middle of the text.
Add additional people to an ongoing chat.
Share your desktop. Use co
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No other Internet communications medium we've seen before has that kind of flexibility.
I'm, not sure I agree with that. I think you might be overlooking Skype.
And I think you might be overlooking the fact that, unlike Skype, Wave is an open platform. Google are open-sourcing much of their code, and developing communications protocols in an open forum that will allow others to create and run fully-featured, interoperable Wave implementations.
I'm as excited about that as I am about Wave's user features.
Can't say I'm surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
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I don't need GoogleWave, I need a secretary that keeps people AWAY from me, so I can get something done.
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Okay.. so what am I missing? Admittedly I haven't really spent much time looking into it - the initial PR was way too fluffy and said nothing specific.. and this is apparently too focused on one thing and not really using the full pote
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You haven't watched the hour+ long tech demo, have you? You seem to be completely unaware of it's capabilities for collaboratively building a document, or it's extension systems that mean people will be adding new capabilities all the time. It's a lot more than just an integration of email and IM.
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the initial PR was way too fluffy and said nothing specific
Did you miss this [youtube.com]?
Re:Can't say I'm surprised... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
So to summarize your post: the reviewer doesn't make any solid arguments to support his position that Google Wave is not very exciting, and you heartily assert that it's the best thing ever.
Useful if in moderation (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? (Score:2, Funny)
I was lead to believe using Google Wave would be like having Jesus bust a nut on your face.
A failure (Score:2)
This failure can be described very simply. From an information theory perspective, an ideal thinking being should complete a task more efficiently if he or she can stay synchronized with collaborators more often. In theory, google wave's technology is superior to email and check in/check out document collaboration tools. Real time chatting would in theory prevent wasted time and mistakes and allow all the collaborators to stay synchronized, analogous to a bank of CPUs running in parallel.
The problem is t
It's acutally quite neat. (Score:3, Informative)
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...
You're Doing it Wrong (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.
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The revolutionary potential of Wave! (Score:5, Funny)
The "tech world" is awash with excitement [today.com] 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.
Underlying infrastructure? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Interesting (Score:2)
It's interesting how many of the objections to the review don't address anything technical (which they haven't seen anyway) about Wave (other than to insist that despite what anyone says "it's way cool, it's Google, it's cool by default, four legs good, two legs bad"), but instead concentrate on ad hominem attacks on the author.
Audio editing (Score:2)
Small OSS Projects (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yeah, it seems somewhat noisy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is possible to toggle the per-character updates, at least on the sending side so people don't see you typing. I could see some filters being added for the ADD types who get distracted by other people typing too.
That was uncalled for. Remember that several people can participate of the same wave.
It would be good if I had the option to disable the view of per-character updates, or even disable per-character updates altogether. It would require less javascript processing and maybe even bandwidth.
Talking about bandwidth and processing, how does Wave behave on slower connections/low-end hardware. Having per-character updates means it both need constant asynchronous communication with the wave federation server, which w
Joe Fry calls it underhyped... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
mediums? ghost whisperers? (Score:3, Informative)
Plural of medium is "media" (unless you're talking about seances).
Re: (Score:2)
But I still don't lend credence to anything he writes, because he was a paid hack for so long. Who knows if he's still taking cash?
Re:Scoble? Calling hype? Wat? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
He could be taking cash from anyone.
Once a paid hack, always a paid hack, as far as I'm concerned. He's demonstrated that his pen is for hire, and so now he can't be trusted to write from an unbiased perspective (regardless of how much (or little) editorial control was exercised when he was an employee of Microsoft
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't want people to watch you type, use a text editor and C&P when you are ready to post.
I'm sure other clients will add the option for "burst" mode.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They covered that in the video of the Google I/O 2009 presentation [google.com]. 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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Alas, you can't in the current client.
http://www.google.com/support/wave/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=163057 [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
$ which talk
which: no talk in (/usr/lib/colorgcc/bin:/usr/lib/ccache/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/4.3.2:/usr/games/bin)
I guess a replacement was needed.
Re:Try IRC. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Try IRC. (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] like ZNC [en.znc.in] 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 [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!
Re: (Score:2)
This sounds like a nightmare.
I prefer IRC where everyone is always idle, and you can get some peace and quiet.
Who needs wave? (Score:4, Funny)
See, who needs google wave! I use slashdot to take my grammar nazism and pedantry to the next level!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ahh but in Wave you could have edited the original comment :p
On SlashdotWave you could have grammar nazi wars.. bring it on!