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."
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.
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...
Re:Realtime typing? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Realtime typing? (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:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Informative)
Gmail threads top-post emails into a coherent conversation just fine.
Re:Can't say I'm surprised... (Score:2, Informative)
I don't need GoogleWave, I need a secretary that keeps people AWAY from me, so I can get something done.
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Echos thoughts of others after the demo (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Can't say I'm surprised... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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:I was thinking the same thing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:A bigger waste of time than twitter? (Score:3, Informative)
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" posters.. kinda like reddit or digg, but the opt-in nature makes the feeds more intimate. There are indeed people on twitter who go on about everything that happens in their day, or mix up their personal stuff, that I don't care about, with their professional stuff, which I dont - or visa-versa. Mostly I just unfollow such people.. occasionally I've managed to convince them that they shouldn't "cross the streams". http://twitter.com/focusfusion [twitter.com] for example started out tweeting about her difficulties getting a driver's license and other personally crap.. she eventually got the message that we follow her to hear about the project she's reporting on, and she can go make a separate personal feed for the rest.
There's value in there, it just takes some experimentation to fine tune who you follow to get the kind of feed you want. twitter is basically the RSS revolution that never happened, rebranded.
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, 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.
mediums? ghost whisperers? (Score:3, Informative)
Plural of medium is "media" (unless you're talking about seances).
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)