Waving around

Posted on | November 3, 2009

I got my Wave account a while ago, but I was not using it as none of the people I communicate with, was using the service. Last week I was nudged to become an active Wave user as the backchannel of eComm Europe 09 was split between the latest Google product and Twitter. I decided to write this post as a compilation of my personal thoughts regarding Google Wave and the underlying protocol. I know I might be wrong in many ways :)

Google Wave is not cool

Google Wave Screenshot

Image by marketingfacts via Flickr

Wave is not cool. At all. The user interface is buggy and unfriendly. A lot of people have been complaining about the search interface - [in:inbox]?!? Furthermore it is absolutely unusable on small displays. One gets the feeling that Wave was designed to be used on a 24″ widescreen display or a larger monitor - future proof. The vertical column design is not really a space friendly solution and there are better options that have been explored by several email/IM/twitter clients.

Can I have a desktop client please?

I love web services but for a communication tool integrated notifications are an absolute must. Waveboard is a partial solution, but still in a very early stage.

If Wave came from a startup

Have you ever asked yourself if you would really be prepared to use Wave if it came form a startup? I would say that a startup presenting a product like wave would be tore apart from the tech blogs (TechCrunch, RWW, Mashable). Most probably they would not even publish a story about it and just ditch it as a crappy real-time hybrid of email/IM and a document collaboration suite. Please comment on this as I would really love to hear if you would be willing to test Wave if it came from a startup (let’s say from Slovenia).

If Wave was a Microsoft product

Now imagine Wave as a Microsoft product. Would you give it a try? Would you be so patient with it as most people are being with Google’s product? I am willing to bet that if Microsoft launched something like Wave there would have been a lot of media buzz and people would try the service, but the feedback would be much worse than with Google. I can see the headlines: “M$ Flops again with a strange service only Ballmer would use!”

The Protocol is Cool

Basically the only part I like about all this Wave thing is the underlying protocol which promises to deliver some interesting use cases if it will be open enough and allow federated waving. From my point of view internal wave clients might be quite useful for communication and brainstorming, however I do not see wave replacing email or IM any time soon.

These are just some of my views summarized in a blog post. Feel free to share your opinion in the comments.

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Filed Under Design, Funky Web, Thoughts |

Comments

  • yup, i was also disapointed when i got the invite. So much buzz for not-so-cool-and-new service.
    Agree with startup & MS part :)
  • I agree with darknewt on this one. Gwave is slow and buggy but it's still in a invite-only mode.

    I would dare to argue that it's a bit ahead of it's time and will take quite a bit of time for us to adopt to the product. The interface design is not half that bad as you say; it's clearly designed with having in mind that already today most of the screens are widescreen and have more horizontal real-estate than vertical.

    I think greater part of this weird gwave feeling is that it's still a very closed environment due to invite-only mode, so you are limited to interaction with your friends. So for the most part people are just chatting and writing about not liking it and not understanding it. But I think all of this is just a great opportunity for us to explore the tool and learn how to change our ways and perception of the online communication and not use it like facebook/twitter for it is not the same and offers so much more.
  • Hey Natan, thanks for the comment.

    Like I said, I believe that the underlying protocol has a lot of potential, but Google Wave as an application is not a drastic improvement of my life by itself.

    I can say that I gave Wave more than a fair try. I did not limit myself to chatting with friends (even if I have already over 50 contact on Wave) as I engaged in the eComm conference backlog for three days, I explored other public waves, I worked on a wave gadget...

    You are certainly more entitled to comment on the design than I am, but nevertheless I still feel very frustrated each time I try to use Google Wave because of some pretty obvious usability issues.

    I think that eventually most of the communication might migrate to Google Wave, but I do not think that it will be drastically different from todays communication.
  • glad to see I'm not the only one

    then again.... google is not a startup anymore, and has significant trust in the future of all their early adopted applications

    http://bit.ly/2BrqAZ
  • i think it's even too early for such a (rather negative) review. yeah, gwave still sorta sucks at its present stage, but it's not something to be too concerned about. i liked the point "if this were Microsoft's service, it would probably be publicly torn to shreds", but let's not forget we're still at invite-only stage, and that the product was not yet officially launched as such. i have no doubt that over time Wave will evolve into something generally more useful and user-friendly. As for desktop or mobile apps, we'll probably start seeing more of them (and not from google) once Wave is out of preview and closer to release version. I certainly would like to see also a more lightly structured (less JS), less-graphics intensive and therefore faster browser version + support for Google Gears and an option to turn live-typing off.
  • As I said - I like the protocol. It will enable some really sweet scenarios. Google Wave (the web application) is a bad solution to a non existing problem at the moment. Would you use it if a small startup would have launched it?
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