Google Wave: too complicated for its own good

http://www.slate.com/id/2232311/pagenum/all

by adamhowell • 17 years ago

51 44 17 years ago

unalone• 17 years ago

What I find fascinatingly baffling about Google Wave is that it's partly one of the most impressive communications tools I've used, and partly a compilation of features I saw removed from other sites for being poor design.

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

I stopped playing with it when I realized that the option to turn off instant-typing-relay wasn't implemented yet. Sorry, instant deal breaker. I've ^H^H^H'ed far too many obscenities directed at friends and clients for that to fly.

jraines2• 17 years ago

Here are three things that really bother me:

1. You can't do a threaded reply to the last blip in a thread. You have to make a "footer" and then reply to the next-to-last item.

2. When you copy something to a new wave, it doesn't copy the children over.

3. The hide all replies feature doesn't work yet.

Anyone else find these annoying, or am I missing some settings or not thinking about the first two the right way?

swombat5• 17 years ago

1. You can't do a threaded reply to the last blip in a thread. You have to make a "footer" and then reply to the next-to-last item.

You can, actually... just select a bit of text in that last reply and you can branch off.

spydez• 17 years ago

That feature's already planned; that's what the "Draft" checkbox is for. I'm sure eventually you'll have a setting to default all blips to draft mode.

You can't expect every feature to be in and working flawlessly in the preview.

felixc• 17 years ago

I don't understand why instant-typing-display was implemented in the first place. Or rather, I understand that it's supposed to speed up communication, but the drawbacks to it seem so huge in comparison to the tiny benefit that it really just feels like engineering-porn; i.e. a "cool" feature that does more to showcase technical brilliance than to serve any real need.

wtallis• 17 years ago

I think it serves a very real need: discipline. By making it the most basic wave feature, they're committing to making sure that the system can always handle a constant stream of realtime updates from every user. If anybody breaks it or introduces a performance regression, everybody will notice. It also means that people writing robots and extensions can assume that they can deal with updates in realtime, on such a fine grained level. If extension writers had to worry that per-character updates might introduce too much overhead, it would hamper their creativity.

bemmu• 17 years ago

It really does speed up communication though. When I ran a BBS with a split-screen chat that had this feature, it saved a lot of typing when you could start to already reply the moment you understood what they meant, instead of having to wait them press enter.

msluyter• 17 years ago

I suppose that you could type into another text editor and then cut & paste into wave once you've made your edits. Really kludgy, of course, but if you had to use wave for some reason and were worried about it, then that'd give you the necessary buffer. If the instant-relay proves unpopular I bet they'll offer a way to disable it (or someone will release a plugin or whatnot.)

swombat5• 17 years ago

I think people who think Google Wave doesn't get it will be eating their words later, much like those who thought the same thing about the iPod (most of the geek communities turned their nose up at that too).

I can see instant usefulness to Wave. I have my invite, and one of my colleagues does too. I can't wait for my other cofounders to get access so that we can use it for real work. Email really just sucks in so many ways.

Edit: It's worth adding that a lot of articles and pundits seem to be comparing Wave and, say, Twitter. Wave is nothing like Twitter, nor does it aim to be anything like Twitter. No, we're not going to start using Wave instead of Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc... because that's not what it's for! Wave might end up being useful for social communications too, but the most important pain points that it resolves are business pains, problems that people encounter when they're trying to work together remotely.

icey3• 17 years ago

I think people are too caught up in the confusing UI. Wave is going to kill a lot of companies once it starts catching on. It may require some better front-end tools for Wave to get there, but it will happen. The way collaboration works in wave is really good; it's just a little unpolished right now.

andrerobot• 17 years ago

Yeah maybe if they dumb it down a little to be more similar to Gmail it would really catch on.

noelchurchill• 17 years ago

I think wave could kill twitter. The with:public option is already just like looking at the twitter stream.

Wave is very open for anyone to make their own clients to use wave in whatever way they see fit. With the right client, Wave could be a much more powerful twitter.

dflock• 17 years ago

I think you're correct - but I think that almost everyone is missing the point and just talking about the client. The current Google supplied client is optional, and will change. What's more, other clients will emerge that do different things, are simpler, more complex or just different. You could - and I'm sure someone probably will - write email-like clients, or even IMAP-Wave gateways which enable you to use Outlook/Evolution/Whatever and participate in waves via traditional email paradigms. Clients that looks like twitter, pidgin backends (hey - it's just XMPP, this is probably already there), clients that just lifeblog everything you do into your personal life-stream wave (tsunami?) Wave is a platform. It would be pretty amazing if that platforms killer app. happened to also be the very first client anyone wrote for it. I would imagine that a lot of conversation like interactions that we now have by other means - placing orders, technical support, supply chain management, etc... will become waves, but I don't know what will be the killer app.

dkarl• 17 years ago

Unless every client is just as free-form and chaotic as Google Wave, each kind of client will have a different community and a different communications style. There's not much to get excited about until one of those yet-to-be-invented (and presumably more structured, less free-form) paradigms actually emerges and catches on.

axod3• 17 years ago

>> "I think people who think Google Wave doesn't get it will be eating their words later, much like those who thought the same thing about the iPod (most of the geek communities turned their nose up at that too)."

I'd somewhat bet the opposite. Geeks will be raving about wave and how it's realtime, XMPP federated, technically impressive etc etc, whilst the average person on the street will have no clue what it does and why they need it.

icey3• 17 years ago

So the question is whether or not it remains a niche tool like RSS (which is to say only used by the technically savvy) or does it get abstracted into a transparent technology and used as a leverage tool like AJAX?

swombat5• 17 years ago

Haven't you noticed though? It's precisely all the geeks who don't see the point of it. That's practically a success factor for this kind of technology, I'd say.

The average geek is equipped with many methods of communication and collaboration... So of course this just seems like a marginal improvement. The average normal person, though, uses mostly email, and so will find this client exceptionally useful. The average person will just see (perhaps not even explicitly) that it makes it easier to add people to ongoing email conversations, and that it's easy to attach files to the conversation, and that it's easier to branch off sub-conversations, etc.

DomesticMouse• 17 years ago

I'm seeing more interest in my Wave user group from business folks than geeks. Kinda the opposite to what I expected.

kyro• 17 years ago

Can you then explain what it's for? Genuinely curious here. I consider myself relatively open minded and understanding of new web concepts, but I just don't quite get it with Wave.

joeyo• 17 years ago

I almost wonder if "Google Everything" would have been a better name for it--some aspects of just about every social website could be replaced with waves. It overlaps a lot with the functionality of Facebook, Twitter and 4chan just to name a few. It also overlaps strongly with services such as email, newsgroups and instant messaging.

I don't know if wave will ultimately be compelling enough to draw people away from those other sites and services, but I don't think it will be a complete flop (I'm looking at you, VRML).

swombat5• 17 years ago

Sure.

Wave is for solving the key problems with email in a corporate environment:

1) It's hard to track (will presumably offer an API or be trackable by widgets)

2) It's hard to use it to collaborate on a piece of text to be sent out to someone else or included in a document (which is what it's used for half the time...)

3) When adding new people, it's hard to ensure that they have a clear view of the beginning of the conversation - often they get a garbled, over-indented mess in reverse chronological order, that's hard to follow.

4) When adding new people, often they get dropped again if someone replies to all from the wrong email.

5) It's hard to keep multiple conversation branches going. If you're collaborating with 5 people (hardly extraordinary) on a 2-page document, and they each have 1 distinct comment, and each of these comments requires a brief exchange (back and forth 3 times, let's say) before it's sorted out, you'll end up with a fairly messy conversation once it's all flattened out.

6) It's hard to attach files (particularly large or numerous files). And when you add extra people to the conversation, they don't see those files anymore. If there were multiple files sent at different time, sending all of them to the new participant is a pain in the ass.

7) When discussing, say, a document, correcting even a small typo requires a full email instead of being able to just dive in and correct the typo.

There are no doubt more, but this is what I can come up with fresh out of bed.

misuba• 17 years ago

Google needs to do two things with the GWT client UI:

1) clear up the confusion between collaboration spaces and conversation spaces, by making each wave have one collaboration space at the top and conversation space below it;

2) confine live typing and editing of the contributions of others to the collaboration space.

I wouldn't apply these same strictures to gadgets necessarily.

Also, they need to stop trying to use the Wave brand to mean two things. It's stuck as the name of this one client experience; the protocol should get an acronym or something.

gfodor• 17 years ago

Yup. This nails it. The biggest problem with wave is I think they took it just one baby step too far in abstraction. The thing needs to clearly separate these two uses (collaboration, conversation), and all of my main gripes of the thing will disappear. Not sure of the best way (one could imagine a fixed layout as you suggest, another way would be to allow users to filter things more easily, whatever) but without this Waves (at least, the big ones) degrade to the least-common-denominator of the various use cases: chat rooms.

megaduck2• 17 years ago

I think for Wave to be ultimately successful, they'll have to ditch the "live typing" feature. Typing is a low-bandwidth form of communication, because you lose all of the other conversational cues (tone of voice, facial expression, etc.) that make sure your proper meaning comes across. Thus, when you're typing to somebody, you often have to double-check what you've written to make sure that it's not taken the wrong way. With live typing, you don't have that option. The cat's already out of the bag before you can reach for the delete key.

I can't count the number of times I've retyped a sentence on IM because the original was too ambiguous and could be misconstrued.

They're going to have to either kill the feature, or turn it off by default.

ellyagg• 17 years ago

I wish they wouldn't. I always missed that feature from icq and I've never felt self-conscious about missteps and corrections. That is, after all, how talking works.

tetha• 17 years ago

Even if we talk face to face, you will not be able to read my mind, and how my mind constructs whatever I try to say. Certainly, sometimes I will talk nonsense without enough thought in there, but this happens far less often than _thinking_ nonsense.

megaduck2• 17 years ago

Unless you talk in a monotone, talking and typing are inherently different. Talking has a dramatically higher bandwidth, because you can alter the pitch, stress, and semantic meaning simultaneously.

For example, sarcasm is trivial with spoken communication, and remarkably hard in written.

fjabre• 17 years ago

Posted on this yesterday: http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-creepy-feature...

Definitely agree with the OP. Wave should allow this feature to be disabled easily for chat.. I can see it being used for doc collab but for chat it's a horrible idea for a number of reasons.

Is it that hard to get a conference call going via Google Voice and actually talk to other users in real time using your voice?

vlod• 17 years ago

I think we'll see high level abstractions of a wave. My bet is google will introduce it to the generally population with most of the features turned off, so they don't even notice.

For example: - In Gmail, when you hit reply it will be in a wave. When you hit replay-all, it will create a wave, auto-invite the recipients and it just looks like Gmail version 2.0.

- In GoogleDocs, the document can be shared now, but you'll be able to rewind the stack and see peoples changes. There will be commenting on documents (dunno is there is now?).

So I think most of googles apps will be wave-ified gradually and most people wont really notice. I think at the moment, you have the full wave hose turned on and people are getting a little freaked out.

m0digital• 17 years ago

I think Google Wave will succeed...eventually. I'm not sure if they are aiming it as a replacement for GMail. Most non-technical people I talk to have no clue what Google Wave is and when I explain it to them, they usually could care less.

The concept is a big change from what we people are familiar with today and I think the only way for Google to try to make it a household name like GMail is to slowly merge the features into GMail. Once they get a large enough population raving about it, these people will usually make their friends/family/colleagues try it out, and from there adoption will gradually increase. But if Wave is not a replacement for GMail, I'm not sure people will go out of their way to use another service that most of the time their email program will do just fine.

Now, if you like the Google Wave concept, I ask you to give MooGroups (http://moogroups.com) a try. You get the power of centralized discussions directly in your inbox, without ever having to leave your inbox, without having to create an account, and while using any email program. Plus a polls gadget based on free-form text.

CamperBob• 17 years ago

Google Wave is the next Zombo.com, as far as I can tell.

sebastianavina• 17 years ago

It reminds me of ICQ...

Google Wave: too complicated for its own good

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