“There are countless pundits and other tech gurus describing Google Wave as a disappointment, lately. Most of that seems to come from the fact that nobody seems to get what Wave is for. So they compare it to social media. Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.” Read more here.
What Problems Does Google Wave Solve?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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From the release video here http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video they make it pretty clear that it isn’t supposed to be a Facebook/Twitter/etc killer, but rather an email replacement.
In fact, he explicitly states it “is email if it was invented today.”
Unfortunately, this description has never been helpful. Wave doesn’t replace email for all the various things that email is currently used for.
What this post clarifies, is that Wave does provide a superior replacement for ’email + shared document repository’, for groups of people collaborating on document creation.
This isn’t such a problem for programmers, where the email conversation is managed along with a shared version control system. It is a significant problem in the corporate world, however, where groups must work together to produce documents without the assistance of the VCS, and more of the history and contextual information must be borne by the email conversation.
Since watching the extensive developer preview, I’ve explained it to other people as “a combination of IRC, Google Docs, and email”.
The fact that it even “integrates” with those other services suggests that it was never intended to be a replacement — but possibly an additional tool that users of those services could employ.
You can for example add robots to your wave to integrate with blogger or twitter.
Having played with Wave a bit, I do see it as sort of a cross between email/wiki/IM tool that people can use to discuss or generate content with.
Of course, it sort of just represents a protocol – so uses for it can probably range into all sorts of realtime/live/collaborative applications in the future. This is probably why google has focused on developers initially, so that new ideas can be tested and implemented before the rest of the world jumps on board.
I’m glad I’m seeing more people getting it as time goes on. When it first came out and people where describing it as the next twitter or facebook, I had absolutely no idea where they were coming from since Wave doesn’t resemble them in the slightest. If you pay attention to the underlying protocols they are pretty clear about what its used for, it allows for real time collaborative editing of a document. Everything else is using UI, rules and permissions to shape the user experience and use cases. Of course Google still has a long way to go with the implementation and lots of fairly basic features are still missing, but we are still talking about very alpha level software.
Yeah, my faith in OSAlert was never really questioned, but now it is reinforced
It is really sad to see how the tech world does not get things like Wave.
This could be a real problem for Wave. It may take decades for the unwashed masses to get its benefits.
I want it much sooner than that.
Why?
The product is simply too complicated. Blaming people like me (who see Wave as a hopelessly complicated piece of software that solves problems few people actually have) for not understanding Wave is like a pilot blaming his passengers for not knowing how to fly a 747.
Edited 2009-10-15 22:08 UTC
Then just wait for a dumbed down web interface (from someone else). It is still pre-alpha and still needs more simple features (like removing people from a wave or deleting waves etc.)
The benefits the linked article mentions will still stand. Wave is a protocol and not just the current Google implementation.
You have to judge Wave by its potential not by its current state.
well I thought the concept was simple enough (don’t have an invite to Wave so I can’t comment on its implementation), but I think Google deserves a lot of the blame for the confusion surrounding Wave, in their massive one hour tech demo they don’t even begin to explain its inner workings till the very end and it was the smallest part of the presentation. It was mostly showing off gadgets completely unrelated to the core functionality. They were a nice way of showing that Wave is extendable and has an API to play with, but showing that stuff first really confuses things. The presentation also made no attempt to explain real world use cases, simply saying its an email replacement and letting people draw their own conclusions from that.
The final nail in the coffin of confusion is releasing the preview in the manner they did. Giving a collaboration tool to large numbers of people who have nothing to collaborate on is a recipe for confusion. Add that features that make using it as a communication tool more bearable, like draft mode or access controls, are totally absent at this point. Well its no wonder a lot of people are turned off.
Could you please explain to me what exactly do you find too complicated in Wave?
Sure it can do lots of stuff that email can’t, but do you really need to know all that to have a better email-like experience?
While it’s true that Wave is a great collaboration tool, all that fancy stuff is not necessary if you want to use it simply like email with nice conversation grouping – the wave. At least in my experience…
Dude… I was able to explain to my wife how to use it via a separate IM session (ok, sorta, ultimately she told me it seemed too complicated also)
So I was looking around for people who I know on wave the other day, found a guy I hadn’t spoken to in about 7 years. Pinged him, and had a bit of back and forth email type exchange. At one point I noticed him replying as I watched, so I started responding to him in real time.
GMail gave us the metaphor of email being a conversation rather then a letter. Everyone gets that pretty quickly. Wave just takes that to the next level, with some wiki-esque features thrown in. People may not get it after watching the video, but they will within a day of using the service.
Too complicated?
Give someone a Wave account, and tell him, that this is his new email.
If this person knows how to use email, he will start by “sending a wave”, discovering that he cannot actually “send” it, ask for help, and get the reply that he already sent it.
After that he will just work with it like with email, and discover additional use cases as he goes.
I have no idea, why you think it is too complicated. Quite the reverse, it is easy to begin with, and gets more complex the more advanced features you want to use. But the features are optional, one can get started without knowing the whole lot about it.
It’s rather like Sharepoint in most organisations. It’s overcomplicated stuff that people can’t figure out. What Google needs is a killer use case or add-on for it to take off.
Also:
Companies will not trust Google to host their conversations/project files. I don’t see that happen.
Wave is decentralized, anyone can host their own server.
Oh the company I work for actually does the basic document sharing through Docs, which at this point is quite limited in realtime editing (it tends to put edited bits back when several people have simultaneously worked inside a doc). We are well aware that Google may have access to the contents but we have nothing to hide.
We are still dependent on Skype to do the international communication, and are actually looking forward to working with Waves. Perhaps one day we’ll get Google Voice too (mainly Europe-based).
Ya wanna hear the dirt on Mother Theresa? I’ll bet Google has it.
Just another useless webapp that employs lots of javascript tricks to achieve what GUI apps have done 15 years ago.
True, but I find it very useful. I would prefer a desktop client though. I don’t really like web apps – just web services and Wave is a great one.
Web apps are only great when you’re using a public computer.
They have said on several occasions they set out to create what email should be.
I really like the idea of it although I have yet to use it.
After watching the very long introduction to it I see emails floating around work that would be perfect for it.
The “who wants to go to lunch” email where you get 15 people replying at different times to different copies of the email. They had an example of that where you check yes, no, or maybe and it shows you everything.
Also, when you want to mark up someone else’s email replying to different parts of it. This is fine, but when it gets done yet a 3rd time its no good.
If you think of it as an email replacement it should do really really well. You can’t think of everything as the next XYZ killer. Every new phone isn’t an Android killer, every new social network isn’t a Facebook killer.
Too much money and too many idle devs?