I’ve stayed away from writing technology on the the sh.it since I started. Any techie thought usually lands up at that big blog no one knows about. However here’s something that doesn’t quite fit into the whole Apple thing, yet I want to rant about it. Wave, the latest services from the internet overlords, Google.
Google Wave is said to be the next evolution of email. I watched the demo, and was pretty excited about the possibilities. To understand what Wave is, you have to either use it or watch the video; it’s impossible to explain. Well I’ll try to anyway. It all starts by creating a new ‘wave’. Think of it as an idea. The idea is sent to a recipient (so far so email). The recipient then looks at the idea, and contributes to it in his own way. He can reply to certain bits, add ’stuff’ to it, and return the idea. However, unlike email, he doesn’t return the idea back to the sender, as the idea is out of the hands of the creator the moment it’s created. It’s just an idea floating around in the cloud. So either parties can add people to the idea, much like a brainstorming session calls in additional members into the team. The team members can look at the idea, see what the original recipient had contributed, and add their own comments. More importantly, they can even ‘replay’ the wave as it was formed. It’s still a single idea, a single wave. Sounds brilliant? It’s not.
As soon as I got the Wave invite, I got into the system hoping to reinvent my system of communication. I was just set for disappointment. I’ll mention the sluggishness just in passing, as I know this is a ‘Preview’ and they’ll eventually get things sorted out. My complaints are more conceptual, which probably won’t get fixed even if and when it gets out of beta.
First up, is Wave is a mess. The UI is splattered across the window. New and updated waves show up bold in your inbox. But unlike email where you have incoming messages, there is no obvious way to tell what part of the wave is new. Sure the replay thing is there, but it’s kind of a roundtrip compared to just reading the new content in your mailbox. Next, is the idiots using Wave. I have a bunch of waves in my inbox, with over 60 people added into the conversation. Why the fuck would I be interested in some discussion about some tech project? I can remove myself from the conversation, but that’s just like saying I can remove spam from my Hotmail inbox—sucks. This is mainly because adding people into waves is so darn easy, and you don’t have to explain why the person is added—they can read the whole wave. This kind of choothyagiri would never happen with email.
One other trend I’ve noticed with Wave, is that it’s treated more like an offline IM conversation rather than email. The current waves are like mini social networks. Small >140 character messages, which I refuse to accept as a meaningful way to communicate (case to point: twitter). Add to that Wave supports apps. Don’t we have enough of those on facebook already that I have to play Sodoku inside my email client?
The third part of Wave, which is touted as one of the more significant features, is live-type. As you’re typing the other parties can see it. I’ll quote Farhad Manjoo [Slate] as he explains it best:
Chatting on Wave is like talking to an overcurious mind reader. On a conventional IM, you only see what other people say once they hit Enter. (True, the IM program will tell your partner whether or not you’re typing, but this is too little information to get embarrassed about.) On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you’d think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it’s a feature—indeed, it’s one of the Wave team’s proudest accomplishments.
It scares the crap out of me. I usually don’t type badly, but with Wave I always end up making mistakes, and having to correct them with someone watching is unnerving. There’s a mute button, but it’s not yet enabled. I will stay away from wave until that button breathes pixels.
At the end of the day, Wave is an interesting concept, and might just make sense after Google has fixed the sluggishness, and more people start using it. But it will not replace email. Not in this lifetime at least. What Google Wave will serve, is for those few people who come across projects they want to collaborate on. That’s correct. It’s a good tool for collaboration, not communication. I can see Preshit, Avner, and myself discussing affairs of the big blog I mentioned earlier, but for regular communication, email still serves the best bytes. The one way I can see this working, and it’s possible that Google already has this in their roadmap, is integrating Wave into Gmail. That way you have the option of both services, as you slowly move towards waving. Till then, I’ll be waving something totally different. I should also note that I’m fairly unreceptive to new services, but eventually get hooked to them. That salt will come in handy right about now.
So, if there’s an obnoxious jackass shouting “Wave!” on twitter or facebook, know that “Yeah? Go fuck yourself” is the right answer.
ha! Got my Wave invite minutes back and started ranting about it on twitter.What was Google thinking?
I haven’t even used Google Wave yet and I can honestly say that I haven’t heard anyone I respect say anything good about it. The fact of the matter is, Google Wave isn’t good for much, it is a bloated tool that could be useful for teams collaborating on a project, but how often do those come up?
Google appears to be positioning Wave as an email killer, but if it’s only good use case is in collaboration it will fail miserably for all but the very select few who work in team environments day in and day out.
Till now I have failed to make productive use of Google Wave and their is also no kind of reminder, if you are included in a new wave or not.
I think it will take time to get used to..
Err… This is a preview for god’s sake. Their keynote specifically stated the point where they will add an option to disable character bouncing (the see as you type function).
Just wait till it’s in beta at least. If it’s not good, I will join the rant group… already a member of many other
I haven’t used wave myself yet, (no invite
) and this is about the third negative review that I have come across.
Character bouncing is determinately a huge turnoff for me, because I modify, moderate and censure my IM about thrice before hitting the enter button.
Even after turning character bouncing (who the fuck coined this term?) it makes little or no sense.
*OFF
@manan: The very fact that one has to explain the term every time it’s mentioned shows that it’s only a dufus fuckhead who coined it. Probably Ballmer.
@Aditya: Even I specifically mentioned that it’s an option that’s currently disabled. Stupid move IMO. Second, Google’s ‘beta’ ‘preview’ and whatever else they come up with is just a way of shirking any responsibility in case they put out crap—in this case it is. We owe it to technology, for technology’s sake, that we criticise new services and features to the fullest, so that the developers realise that there is something fucked up—in this case it is. If we sit quiet and wait for bug reports to be filled in, the ’sheep’ will have to deal with slapped on turds like this.
About the idiots using Wave and removing yourself from uninteresting waves: isn’t that the same with email? I’ve been in hundreds (if not thousands) of totally uninteresting email-discussions, which it was almost impossible to get out of, because every contributer does it’s own reply-to-all. In a wave, at least, I can remove myself en I won’t be back in it unless someone actively puts me back in it again.
I’m wondering if you did any attempt to RTFM? The life-type function can be turned off (“Draft”), so that’s not a real problem.
You sound like the ‘horseless carriage’-type. Too bad, but those people didn’t stop the car.
I didn’t read the fucking manual, but I’m pretty sure the draft button isn’t enabled yet. In fact I even mentioned it in the writeup above. I suppose all you did was read the fucking manual.
About the spam, thankfully I don’t share your misfortunes with email, as I have only the most considerate contacts who never spam me with crap. If I’m included in the discussion, well and good, I’m cool with “Reply All”. Better still, for those purposes like project collaboration, it’s best to use something like Basecamp which offers a much better organizational structure for group collaboration.
To quote Steve Jobs, “Nobody wants a car with six wheels”.
Well, if you say that in your Wave the button isn’t enabled, yet, then so be it. I’m not going to ‘is so – is not’ over it.
Having an interesting job can lead to your email adres being distributed outside your ‘most considerate contacts’. Working in a large organisation does that anyway.
Any senior executive can tell you that all kinds of people want you to be in the loop, just to be sure. So, if something comes up, they can say “I mailed you that, didn’t I”. Resulting in 60% of your mail not being formally spam, but stitill rather useless. Now, if that starts being replied to all, the useless non-spam gets up to 90% of your mail. So it still is handy to get yourself out of the loop.
Thing is that Google Wave potentially offers a way to organize the information flow of a process (and not only stupid little projects), while the content is made up in all kinds of formats and forms and distributed over numerous channels and platforms. And if a wave then looks like a mini social network: I couldn’t be more pleased.
As long as you call a 6-wheel vehicle a familycar and not an armoured car, your still in some kind of horseless carriage stage.
(Steve Jobs, isn’t that the guy who sells music and cellphones? What does he knows about cars? Or armoured vehicles?)
I’m sick of hearing about it to be honest. Maybe it is the next big thing, but at the moment it doesn’t seem to offer a better way of doing things than I would do at the moment.
I don’t want to put it down or say I won’t try it, but I’m not as excited as the rest of the web is at the moment, and this is the first thing about wave that actually offered meaningful insight into your experience with it. Everyone else just seems to over-praise it without really explaining why.
Thanks!
I agree totally with the article, I have been using it at work and I cannot see it taking over email at all. I think the next wave (bad term) of MS office apps will smash this with their enhanced collaboration out of the box – seen some previews and it looks much better than this – and it can live in corporate and not out in the ‘cloud’ at google
It feels to me that the developers of this went walkabout and dreamed up the idea that email, IM, and group chat could be integrated. And they dreamed up that the interactions could be more interactive. Brilliant idea, or so it seems, so off they got to implementation. Arrogantly, they didn’t test their ideas. Instead, they even more arrogantly chose to proclaim their invention as the next big thing and a replacement fo email, IM, and group chat. As their arrogance grew, they simply chose to build in the hype rather than work out the problems with their concept. The result is not a step forward – it’s a disaster.
A “googol” is 10 to the 100th degree. I think that Wave is Google to the most arrogant degree.