Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings
Google Wave is one of the most-hyped new product launches in recent memory, but now that thousands of lucky people are getting to try it out - early reactions are mixed. If the hard-core geeks aren't sure if they like it, that could spell serious trouble for mainstream adoption.
Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are three tech blogger geeks that love to use new tools and all got to test Google's new real-time communication platform Wave today. It's possible that when the rush is over the Wave experience will seem less overwhelming, but the kinds of initial reactions these three had aren't good.
We've covered Wave extensively in the weeks leading up to today, Frederic Lardinois has been covering this beat and wrote up his initial impressions earlier this summer. We must confess though that few members of our team have received an invite to the live app. They are slowly trickling in, through "nominations" and delayed invites, but I thought I'd share some other writers' initial reactions below, followed by some general observations about the challenges of a real-time communication experience.
For a good introduction to Google Wave, see enthusiast hacker Gina Trapani's Wave Highlight Reel.
Steve Rubel summarizes his thoughts like this:
I have had a Google Wave sandbox account since late July. It's slick to be sure. However, what I keep asking myself is this: what problem does it solve? In many ways it's overly complex. In fact it's too complex for the era of the Attention Crash where all of us, especially knowledge workers, are crying for simplicity.
Robert Scoble is not a fan:
I just got my Google Wave invite. No, I'm already out, so I can't send one to you, sorry. But this service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave. That's really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.
But it's a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people. It also ignores the productivity gains that we've gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
Louis Gray has a long, detailed review that concludes like this:
I would bet that after the initial surge of curiosity, normal conversations and information exchange will eventually take over, so this initial spike may be an exception rather than the new rule. But if you're diving into this new technology, expect to be exerting a lot of energy to stay on top of it, because messaging just got accelerated.
Have you had a chance to try Wave yet? We have high hopes for the Real-Time Web in general, but in the many conversations we've been having with other companies in this broad market one concern has loomed large: user experience. Wave is an ambitious effort and is technically impressive, but user experience, strategic content filtering and concurrent/complimentary use of static information display are all important as well.
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Since I didn't get the invite I will have to wait and see. By the reviews is sound to me like Google came in to late with the idea, and tried overcompensating by going to techy
I've been trying it out since about 10am GMT today.
I'm not so critical. It is certainly early days and you won't use it like Twitter BUT it has HUGE potential in group scenarios.
Typical email groups i am on are very hard to follow but the idea of being able to trace and playback what was added - as well as move into new threaded "waves" has huge potential.
In addition the real-time rich media support may be useful.
I can *see* where it may be useful in realtime conversations but to be honest until there are more people i know having *real* conversations it is going to be hard to tell.
I have had a few very good (and long) conversations involving everything from Wikipedia to maps, videos and games but it's all been playing around.
Still, the idea i can export and save a conversation (and associated files) may prove to be very useful indeed.
Posted by: https://openid.org/steven
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October 1, 2009 4:13 PM
Don't have it yet, so take everything I saw with a grain of salt.
I don't see how it could ever live up to the expectations. In addition, these folks that you quote are the exception to the rule. They are just not "regular" folks. So-called regular people might like it, or they may hate it even more. And the product may change and evolve over time once Google gets some real-time feedback. It's way to early to say, well that didn't work, next
Thanks for including the summary Marshall. Like most new products, it will take some getting used to. I didn't immediately take to Twitter, and many people never got FriendFeed. Others hate RSS. But the innovation behind Wave is very interesting. I am eager to see what happens. It's already very good for a pre-release rev.
I have an account since July and I made a blog in a wave. I do not know if the complexity is the key in this case. Ten years ago the e-mail was very difficult to understand. I believe we are in front of a new stage in the web where all the knowledge (the scientific and the common sense) will have to work side by side.
I acknowledge it's potential and effort and openness of the protocol. But I have had a developer sandbox account since July and I have logged in a few times a week to give a chance. It is very buggy/alpha so that has to be taken into consideration... even though it has been actively developed for over 2 years now (that alone might say something). But everytime, I leave overwhelmed and underwhelmed.
I agree that it is non-obvious what problems this aims to solve. I don't think it solves any. It's a grand experiment that tries to push realtime communication to its absolute limits. That is the core of it... multi-user real-time communication. The other features are more of the norm. Embeddable wave/widget, embed/upload rich media, folders, search, profiles, extensions etc... nothing new there. You almost have to expect such features today in any app/service. So to reiterate, it's squarely about the real-time discussions. And it's that core feature that may be overkill and what ultimately steers many users away.
Every letter someone types is seen in realtime. That is achievable in many ways and has no real value. It's more of an experiment in stress testing the system than it is an actual useful feature. I think they will allow that to be disabled and will probably improve overal performance and usability. But the multi-user real-time discussion threads are still going to be chaotic..more so with more than 2 users but even with just two participants, it quickly turns into some sort of anxiety producing read/write experience that makes me want to sing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I mean really, are our brains ready for this kind of experience? I've tried. Really, I have. It's not for me.
The UI as a whole is not great. It's showing its age actually... This project started a few years ago and I bet this UI has not changed too drastically. And like most of Google, UI is fairly poor. Google Reader is horrid. But I do like Gmail.
Now everyone has to remember that this is Google's own interpretation of their invented open Wave protocol. So some other company can implement the protocol and server in a very different way. This is actually important to realize. Because I think the gold is in the wiring under the board. It is fairly complicated technology, largely based on XMPP and Java. But it would be very interesting to see another version of Wave, maybe a lite version that is less chaotic... with a different GUI. That could spark a fresh discussion on what this all means.
For now, i admire the effort. It's not everyday that an open source project of this magnitude is unleashed. Like it or not, it's a great gift from Google. And now with many more test users... feedback will be used to steer this thing forward. It's a brilliant mess ;)
I think that the hype period will be followed with one of considerable tweaking to the user experience, based on precisely that kind of expected negative feedback. All will be well and the power of the technology will become more apparent as more applications are developed and integrated into the wave to solve specific use cases. Google Wave in itself is a framework, not a solution.
Still waiting for my invite. No matter what the experts say, it will be the masses that will determine whether Google Wave succeeds.
So tech people can't wait until the real-time web is everywhere: blog posts are instantaneously posted, comments are immediate, twitter updates are searchable and crawled by the web in less than a second after posting, and all of it is available for aggregation by friendfeed/facebook instantaneously. But actually communicating and exchanging/editing documents directly and in real-time with groups of people gets a "what problem does this solve?"
Then isn't the question what problem does any real-time web service solve?
I received the wave last night at 11:33pm and didn't try it until this morning. My settings still aren't working and I haven't spoken to anyone, all I did was watch the stupid videos. I am hoping it gets better.
Just got my invite on Google Wave but I haven't try this one yet.
I don't have an invite yet, (hint, hint) but I really wonder how it handles communication with non-wave users via email. Can you do this at all? What does it look like ot the email side?
Received an invite today and after waiting for others I know to get theirs, used Wave for the first time. The interface is a cross between e-mail and IM as Robert Scoble indicated, but I certainly don't see that it encourages unproductiveness. I think that it will take time for people to adapt to multiple things happening at once in a message stream but once they do, it has the potential to be a much more effective way to collaborate on things like documents, agendas and the like. In fact I think it is better than the Twitter interface for at least one reason: one of the most maddening things about Twitter conversations is that they are absolutely sequential but threaded at the same time. Only problem is that the interface doesn't really facilitate threaded conversations. I think Wave actually overcomes this problem in the simplest fashion possible.
Oh and one other thing. The playback feature is genius.
Can Joe The Plumber use it?
Probaly not.
Then FAIL Google Wave.
Hey I need a Google wave invite..I saw its video and it looks awesome ... please send me an invitation soon...
I've been using it for a 24 hours now and I must admit that it looks slick and has nice functionalities but I at this moment I see it as a chat extraordinaire. I need to have more friends / co-workers so that I can actually use it in a day-to-day situation.
@Engago Team: IMHO the current implementation serves as a reference implementation which shows off all the capabilities of the underlying technology. There will be UIs for average Joe to leech and manage p00rn as well as even more sophisticated UIs for researchers or knowledge workers in general.
I am still waiting for my invite
I just don't get it. I don't get many things Google comes out with to be honest. They just don't have the same vision as someone like Apple. They give the geeks what they want but in the real world I doubt people would use this. Most people still use Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Google needs to employ more quality designers who can meet the needs of real people.
Regardless how you feel about Google Wave......You might check this out FIRST before using it.....
http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Alerts/3486.aspx
If even the geeks think that Google wave is overly complex, it's definitely not going to do well with the non-geek mainstream audience.
I've posted my impressions after a day of using Wave: Google's Wave is a Tsunami of Conversation.
Bottom line- Ok, it's buggy, but if not Wave, then what? SuperTwitter? SpaceBook? MagicForce?
send me one if you have one prettttttttttttttyy plz
my email is portiava10@gmail.com send me an invite plz
I wonder when ANYBODY is going to actually see the truth lol, Wave is what Chrome OS is going to be built upon as the operating system's platform, its not a communication platform as you all think, its their testbed to scale their distributed data transform algorithms (shared mutable state) in controllable environments to make sure its rock solid to use as the process isolation and content distribution model built INSIDE their OS they have planned :)
Point being, the 2 products have the same goal,but have been hyped as separate products when they truly rely upon each-other
enjoy
Posted by: heavensrevenge.myopenid.com
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October 3, 2009 8:24 AM
Google Wave seems promising a new digital interactivity and created high expectations among surfers. I like some features such as ability to reproduce the talks (playback), Translate in real time when we communicate with someone speaking another language, and it's integration with Twitter and other social networks. Google Wave really can turn into a revolution in social conversation!
For once, this is a Google product that really deserves the "Beta" tagline. It all seems so bare bones at the moment.
I've been playing in the sandbox and writing little gadgets and bots for about 6(?) months now. The only thing I'd really say about these 'mixed feelings' is that you have to look at Wave as a collaborative platform rather than complete tool. It's not enough to look at wave and say 'what problems will this solve for me here and now', because out of the box it'll just run along like a glorified xmpp client and not solve anything. Wave will find traction as (mostly) developers start to realise its creative potential, intrinsic value is already covered, tangible value is still to follow. I think people might be expecting a little too much wow factor so early on.
i havent yet got any invitation from Google :(
Hi there, anyone got a spare invite? Please share! ;)
Cheers!