I got a Google Wave invite (thanks nick) and I am remarkably unimpressed. Essentially it’s a threaded discussion system with the ability to insert different kinds of media and it works in realtime. For one thing, this is not actually new. Calling it “wave” and making it easier to include non-textual media does not make what you are doing new or radical. Sure, Wave is trying to get us to a better kind of email collaboration and email is certainly a technology that is overdue for either some much better client-side functionality or to be retired completely (but that’s a post for another day), but pushing email towards threaded discussion boards and adding Hype, meh. Secondly, Wave seems to do all of these things badly.
Let’s start with other media types. You can put images, videos, and “gadgets” (essentially mini apps) – all sorts of stuff in a “blip” (one particular message in a “wave”). Okay… I see that this might be mind-blowing to someone who has only ever used email and commented on one or two web sites. But there are a lot of different sites and infrastructures that allow this functionality now. There are blog plugins, help guides, all sorts of things… Facebook Apps are probably the most used example of this sort of thing. Okay, so not being “new” doesn’t make “bad.” Fair enough. It’s bad cause it’s confusing to use and abysmally buggy and slow. Sometimes you click on things and nothing happens. Since there’s no UI feedback I don’t know if something is broken or just slow. The rendering is pretty sluggish even when things do work. Also, since they’ve tried to pack so much functionality and slickness into a web-based app, more than once I found myself in focus hell. I was clicking around trying to move my cursor and I ended up opening three new blips (ugh, that just made me sound like a professor in college I saw trying to use a mouse for the first time).
Realtime updates. Waves update in page (as opposed to say, a thread on a blog post where you have to refresh). This seems like wasted effort to me. I know the software industry has been pining to provide the realtime digital equivalent of a whiteboard for years and tons of time and money have been spent on such systems (Gotomeeting has a whole mess of these kinds of features that I’ve never actually seen anyone use in a meeting). I’ve never understood the intensity with which people clamor for this functionality. At any rate, the aforementioned sluggish-ness of wave renders this an ironic feature and has probably made the code and API a gazillion times more complex. I sound like a broken record, but the the HTTP protocol was not designed to do this sort of realtime, stateful stuff. Also, the level of realtime-ness is overkill. Watching someone else fix their typos is about as productive as watching a Roomba and is, actually, far less interesting.
And then there is the threading, which might be the piece that bugs me the most. Wave essentially does the same sort of indenting seen in many threaded systems, with one really notable exception: It’s nightmarish to find new posts. Your Inbox tells you that there are new Wavelets, but there’s no way to jump to them. You just have to scroll around until you see the green bars or outlines. Really? REALLY? Tell me I’m missing something Google. There are so many sites that figured out this problem ages ago that it’s king of stunning that it works so badly in Wave. Also, you can’t mark a single Blip as Read (or if you can I haven’t figured out how, it’s not on the drop-down menu). So, all you can do is mark the current state of your Wave as read, even though it’s synchronizing in realtime. So if there’s a new Blip or Wavelet and I hit Read, does that mark that one as read too or is it smart enough to figure that out? Again, it’s such a bad user experience that I just don’t care.
All of this gave me deja vu of sitting through product demos where a tech evangelist would be explaining some “great new functionality” and I would just be sitting there going “that’s just X re-written to work with Office” and then, of course, it would crash. I’m really struck by how much Wave reminds me of something Microsoft would do: take existing concepts, rename them (the descriptions of Waves, Wavelets and Blips even describe them as “conversations,” “threads” and “messages” in the documentation, so why not just call them that?) and re-write them from scratch to work within its own ecosphere. Granted you will be able to host Wave robots externally to Wave and you can embed Waves on sites external to Google, but the embed API does not appear to be a data API. It looks like you’re literally dropping the Wave into a webpage, which is disappointing. Essentially you’re using Wave whole hog or not at all. Wave Aid.
Finally, if the Terms of Service are anything like the Google Apps ToS then Wave is dead in the water for the corporate world.
Tags: collaboration, communication, google, google wave, internet, microsoft, office, realtime, wave, web