Comments on: Underwhelmed by Wave: Google’s Wave Falls Short

By: pittendrigh

pittendrigh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

You complained about the distraction of real-time typing,
and a lack of fine-grained access control. Both are smop problems.
Also the distraction of real-time typing comes from a voluntary IM
way of using the application. The email concept means you log in two or
three times a day and look. The headline seems to promise smoking gun
bad news, but actually concludes with \"the jury is still out,\" which
we already knew.

By: psychomike

psychomike — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I\'ll agree that there are plenty of applications out there that support a large subset of Wave\'s (current) capabilities. But I think you\'re overlooking the biggest step forward - federation.

Email became the de facto communication standard because anyone with an email address could connect with anyone else with an email address, regardless of what provider they used. And different providers were important because they not only enabled competition and feature-differentiation, they allowed security-conscious organizations to get in on the game. Email can be used for internal communication, never leaving the walled garden of servers you control, and still has the ability to seamlessly connect to the outside world.

Instant messaging was a similar situation. It didn\'t take off in the corporate environment until it was possible to run a dedicated private server. No one wants to trust their internal traffic to a third party needlessly.

Google Wave is the first next gen service I\'m aware of that has this breadth of features AND supports private servers AND runs on an open protocol that allows communication between all those servers. If anything lets it really take off that will be it.

By: psychomike

psychomike — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I also find that the real-time nature of all the components can be distracting though. But I\’m confident there will eventually be settings to toggle most of it. There\’s already a \”Draft\” switch (not enabled yet) which you can activate on a per-message basis to hide what you\’re typing until you\’re done. I expect that to also evolve into an account-wide preference so you don\’t have to keep selecting it for every message. And I\’m sure there will eventually be a way to freeze a wave while you read it, or at least update it a full wavelet at a time instead of character-by-character. That\’s where the very-early-beta status of the project becomes a factor.

By: nealmcb

nealmcb — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think the key here is to look beyond the current user interfaces, and focus on the infrastructure beneath it. There is a new *federated* protocol, which is important for all the reasons @psychomike notes above.

Part of that is the new \”general verifiable federation\” protocol. That is what allows everyone to type at once, and stay consistent without having to lock a document across the whole Internet and suffer the inherent delays.

Federation along with the integration of authenticated identity (anti-spam), robots, gateways, extensions and apis gives it a huge advantage over many other approaches.

Currently it is buggy, slow, and complex enough that folks are trying to figure out the best ways to use it. It may end up not being a good fit for some of what it can do. But it has big potential.

http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/google-wave-architecture

By: ddennedy

ddennedy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I am underwhelmed by this article: fails to live up to the hype of its headline. I think you are overly critical for something that is so immature. It\’s like saying \”my newborn child falls short because she can not run yet.\” Maybe the reason it does not feel new is because today\’s Google Wave is just a convergence of existing tools. And perhaps a little let down because it is a small subset of those tools. I fully expect existing and new apps to integrate the protocol in interesting ways. For example, there are demo videos of a collaborative version of the Maya tool that is based on some the same technology as the wave protocol. Google could very well just make the technology popular enough to really become interesting. When you have a lot more people using Wave with real, purposeful activity, I believe it will be more compelling.

By: manawiz

manawiz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Agree strongly with ddennedy. The article complains that \”Basically, I only knew one or two people on Wave, so the actual collaboration possibilities were severely limited.\”, but misses the key point that Google has the brand image, brand loyalty and marketing muscle to ensure that most of us will use Wave assuming it is not substantially worse than the alternatives. That alone makes it extremely valuable, compared to say EtherPad.

By: adriawave

adriawave — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I guess, now its very popular to talk against google..!.

By: pingpong

pingpong — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Actually, the Google I/O Demo already showed it off quite well. Disabling the life typing can be disabled. But I find it quite useful, because often you know what the other person wants to say before they finish. So it speeds up the \’conversation\’. And heck, nobody is forced to use the IM mode. Some people use email like it is a chat tool. That\’s why many people hate email: it is not good as a chat tool, but _others_ try to force using it as a chat tool on them. Therefore we get tons of meaningless little emails every day. Google Wave will probably change this. And if people than agree on considering the \’chat\’ as not official, we can auto-delete the chat after x days from the waves forcing people to send the usual \”meeting note\” emails after important online \’chat\’ sessions.

By: markslay

markslay — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There has been a new updated website on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, check it out here: http://www.waveprotocol.org/federation moving

manawiz said:
Agree strongly with ddennedy. The article complains that “Basically, I only knew one or two people on Wave, so the actual collaboration possibilities were severely limited.”, but misses the key point that Google has the brand image, brand loyalty and marketing muscle to ensure that most of us will use Wave assuming it is not substantially worse than the alternatives. That alone makes it extremely valuable, compared to say EtherPad.

There is, in fact a seemingly robust group interaction on this page, and I think you are right about the brand loyalty. Unlike the Google Phone, I think Wave is here to stay.