What problems does Google Wave solve?

http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html

by swombat • 17 years ago

213 67 17 years ago

axod3• 17 years ago

Isn't that all pretty much taken care of with forums, google groups? (Attaching files, giving everyone the same view, keeping people added, etc)

Why would you use wave over a forum/google group etc?

swombat6• 17 years ago

Forums, Google groups, etc, don't have the "edit other people's posts" Etherpad-like collaborative editing. Most of them aren't branchable in the same way Wave is. They generally don't have the privacy controls of a Wave. They don't weave from email-like to IM-like like Wave can. They're not built to allow native clients to interact. And they don't have any federation ability.

You could say that Wave is a bit like Email, Basecamp, Campfire, Etherpad, and a bunch of other collaboration tools, all merged into one unified interface. I'd be scared if I was 37-Signals. From everything I've heard, the feature Basecamp users most like is the discussion system... with Wave, that becomes a lot less worth paying for.

bbgm• 17 years ago

I haven't bought into Wave yet, although it has more to do with the current UI than anything else. In addition to what's mentioned above, there are plugins for LaTeX, for rendering molecules, etc which make collaborative editing very powerful, potentially at least.

gnoupi2• 17 years ago

A forum doesn't pop in your mailbox, I would say, simply? And it's not personal, it's public.

axod3• 17 years ago

You can tell google groups to send emails. Not sure if you can set them to private. Obviously you can do a private install of a forum and restrict access.

jaaron3• 17 years ago

Have you ever tried to use forums or Google Groups in a Fortune 500 company? Plenty of office workers have trouble with basic email. Getting them to use a forum or Google Groups is a lot of work for an IT staff. This is why you have products from Microsoft like SharePoint.

Google Wave is, IMHO, a godsend to corporate IT staff. It's a single application that solves several, very real office collaboration problems. Moreover, you can (or soon will) deploy it in-house, so you don't have to worry about a third-party hosted solution.

As far as I'm concerned, Google Wave solves all the problems of "intranets" and with a few robots and extensions makes a pretty decent project management tool too.

pasbesoin2• 17 years ago

I hadn't heard this, yet. It will be deployable/hostable locally/privately? I see this as a big obstacle to corporate use.

justlearning• 17 years ago

I didn't find anything new in this article.

But to have a few use-cases, I found this lifehacker article better (http://lifehacker.com/5381219/google-waves-best-use-cases) (it is a crowdsourced collection from users on how they would use google wave, rather than one person speculating on various uses).

The use-case from the air traffic controller seems to be the best - as if wave was an app made for traffic controllers!

jlees• 17 years ago

I found the lifehacker article to be a rosy-eyed view of what people would use their idea of what Wave is for. Some of them just wouldn't fly with the current UI and so on. swombat's more on the button as to what Wave actually is.

notlisted2• 17 years ago

Exactly. That lifehacker article was terrible. People were buying the spin and the promise or real-time collaboration.

The OP article made great points, and in principle google wave (client and the underlying protocol) should provide everything the article outlines, HOWEVER, as is, the web client solves little or nothing.

The interface is sluggish, mysteriously buggy, overly complex and it actually exacerbates one of the MAIN problems it was going to resolve, ie the endless indentations. It fails #miserably# at that, because of the incredible amount of "chrome" (icons, borders, etc etc) used in the interface, especially in large public waves, but even with a very limited set of co-workers, you'll end up with a sea of bordered bubbles impossible to read for an ordinary human being.

I've used wave for 2 weeks now, I'm fully aware of all the browser short-cuts and features and my appreciation for it has waned.

Contrast this with etherpad (http://www.etherpad.com). It has its own issues (e.g. no indication of age of edits) but it actually works and #everyone# I've introduced to that site keeps using it and I've received many kudos.

Since google wave is both a client and a protocol.Perhaps an independent group can create a wave client that actually works...

smikhanov2• 17 years ago

Google Wave does not solve problems directly, just like SMTP/POP/IMAP per se does not solve the problem of communication. You need email client to communicate over SMTP/POP/IMAP, and the better your client is the better you deal with your problems (e.g. Outlook's feature of transmitting the messages of predefined format over SMTP to all the appointment participants helps you manage appointments).

When Wave will be public, I expect plenty of different Wave bots, clients and other type of software appearing out there. This Wave-based software will solve real problems, not Wave itself.

swombat6• 17 years ago

Granted - but I would say the default Wave client already solves a whole host of problems. Remember, Wave is composed of the protocol, the server, and the client as well. If the Google Wave client as it is now is used as a starting point for future Wave clients, then they will all benefit from these features. Conversely, clients that don't solve the problems that Google's reference client solves are effectively inferior.

jaaron3• 17 years ago

I think you're mixing up wave.

Wave _is_ an actual application, not a protocol. It uses several protocols to get its job done, but it _is_ an application.

And the wave code is already public: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

smikhanov2• 17 years ago

Sure it's an application, not a protocol.

However, I still think that it's not the current application that will deliver most of the Wave's value. Just like it's not the Twitter website that delivers most of the value of Twitter, but the ecosystem of the clients using its API.

elblanco2• 17 years ago

Protocol Specs http://www.waveprotocol.org/

junklight• 17 years ago

Yep - I think that article gets it spot on. I got my invitation yesterday morning and the first thing I used it for was to work with one of my co-founders to work up an agenda and discussion points for a more formal meeting later in the day while talking on skype. During the day before the meeting we were able to polish it up and make points not to forget.

Perfect - something that has been missing from our working methods since we all work remotely.

and yes we have kind of been using google docs for this kind of thing - but wave is a much better fit

amichail• 17 years ago

But it seems that Wave is currently marketed to people who won't find it particularly useful.

One could argue that social media types are more concerned with public communication than private collaboration.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

It's a huge marketing problem. If your app can't connect with the early adopters, it will never reach its target market.

Perhaps Google needs to try seeding entire companies at once -- preferably not companies composed entirely of geeks who know what Etherpad is -- instead of handing out invites to random folks. On the other hand, such a strategy would limit their growth rate and constrain their feedback in a different way. It's tricky.

stcredzero• 17 years ago

One of the problems with the current collection of apps and protocols currently used for networking is the very imperfect seamlessness. This is one of the most confusing things to mainstream end users, perhaps the single most confusing thing. They are already confused by the distinctions between the browser, search engines, the desktop, the OS. For example, when a user can drag and drop a picture from one app into an IM, but not into their blog comments, this is incomprehensible if they don't know how the underlying mechanisms work. (And, frankly, irrelevant to what they want to do, which might be to share their vacation photos.)

Something which can let you do a small, but consistent and very useful set of operations everywhere will eventually attract the largest body of users. This is what Google should be aiming for with the Chrome OS. They should make sure that the Wave protocol is throughout that product, and everything else that they do. If they can eliminate the dozens or hundreds of minor frustrations faced daily by users due to the imperfect seamlessness of the current OS/browser/apps toolset, Google will garner tons of mainstream love.

crux• 17 years ago

But given that the people who might end up using Google Wave the most—office workers—are also terribly conservative when it comes to the tools they use, it's not surprising that Google has started with the bloggers. The fact is, the vast majority of the internet has no interest in early adoption.

In any case, it seems clear that Google Wave is still in heavy development. More than any other Google app, Wave deserves and needs its 'preview' appelation. The early adopters are the ones who are going to provide feedback. And even if most people are wrong in comparing Wave to Twitter (I'll be honest, I have not seen that comparison made once, but I don't read Scoble either), it's true that the Wave interface is not the most graceful or immediately-obvious thing to ever roll out of the Google garage.

Jaykul3• 17 years ago

It wasn't MARKETED to them ... it was release to people who signed up expressing interest. Now, perhaps Google could have found a better place to initially announce it than at their own conference full of developers and social media geeks... but let's face it: they don't want your average office worker trying to use this yet -- it's too freaking buggy, they'll get turned off.

Geeks and early adopters are the only people who Google could expect to stick with it in it's current state (or to at least try it again later).

mseebach• 17 years ago

I think the biggest problem is that invites don't work here. If I had access, and wanted to check it out, I'd need invites for all my colleagues, too.

You can't test a collaboration tool if the people you collaborate with can't frigging access it.

elblanco2• 17 years ago

That's exactly the kind of use case I have envisioned for it as well. Collaborative document creation where the conversation becomes the document.

10ren• 17 years ago

Crossing the Chasm had a distinction between applications and platforms. The latter are harder to sell, but scale horizontally, leading to massive adoption. Potentially.

Wave seems to be a platform. It needs a killer app in order to be adopted. Often, this happens through hitching a ride on some bigger change, like faster hardware.

There are plenty of great technologies that never got adopted. It actually seems common for a second-rate but good-enough version of a technology to win, because actual adoption is a huge challenge in itself. Perhaps a greater challenge than creating the technology in the first place. In pg-land, it's the "people want" part of "make something people want".

There's great opportunity here for the one who can apply Wave to alleviate a felt pain.

jaaron3• 17 years ago

Only geeks see it as a platform. The current Google Wave client feels like a single, unified application just like GMail (compared to a platform like 'email'). The current wave client _is_ the killer app.

notlisted2• 17 years ago

Or rather... it fails to convince as the killer app.

5park• 17 years ago

I completely agree with the author of the article. And he even introduced me to a new, possibly better, way of describing Wave to friends of mine: "it solves the problems with email".

I'm also relieved to see someone else pointing to Scoble's article and noting that he doesn't understand what Wave is about. When I read that article, my respect for the 'king of tech-bloggers' took quite a dive.

Anyways, kudos to you for writing about Wave more sensibly!

njharman• 17 years ago

The problem google wave solves is that Google doesn't have easy way to slurp/index all the world's emails, text messages and similar communications.

This is also why Google Voice exists.

Google is serious when they say they want to search everything.

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

I'm anxiously awaiting GoogleDresser, so I can find those missing socks and one of my favorite t-shirts.

richardw2• 17 years ago

You will never find your socks. Google wants you to buy new socks. From them.

hazzen• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if your comment is sarcastic or not - but isn't Gmail a way to slurp/index all the world's emails, text messages, and similar communications? It isn't like a bunch of engineers were sitting around and thinking "Gmail doesn't get us enough user information, how can we make a new one to get more?". Their thought process was (conceivably) more along the lines of "Gmail doesn't quite work how we want it to, what can we do to fix that?". Slurping all of the information out of it is just a nice benefit.

That said, I haven't actually tried to do any work on Wave, so I can't speak for its usefulness. As a pure email replacement, I find it comparable to Gmail, minus the inferior keyboard shortcuts in Wave.

mcantelon• 17 years ago

Wave is an open protocol and third-party wave servers, which Google won't be able to search, will be peers in the wave network. So I don't see Google Wave giving any more access to raw communication than they have already.

legooolas• 17 years ago

It is open, but most[1] people are going to use the Google-provided servers. Businesses who want to keep their data safe can have an internal wave server, but these aren't the kind of places which would allow employees to use Gmail for their business communications...

[1] Wild assumption, but I expect that the numbers will bear this out.

kloncks2• 17 years ago

Thanks for that insightful article. I only just recently got my Google Wave invitation (finally) and I for the first time logged on and was a bit lost.

I knew I might be on the initial phase of the next direction of communication/email and knowing that this might one day replace Email and/or IM kept me thinking that I am visiting something grand, even if I still had a small idea of what it actually does.

Google Wave is such a hard thing to explain to friends/family and non-techies...this article really helped me try and stitch a clearer picture.

I am, however, worried about the amount of spam/bots that might come with these waves as soon as they're made public.

e40• 17 years ago

"To most geeks, the main problem with email is spam."

He lost me right there. You are not a geek if you have a problem with spam. Spam? I never see it. It all goes into my +inbox-spam folder and I spend < 1m/day scanning it before I delete the contents.

The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I must read and deal with.

pohl• 17 years ago

"It all goes into my..."

This is where you lost me, because it just supports the real intent of the author's statement, which is that spam is a problem that results from design flaws in email. Despite the author's use of the word 'geek' being unnecessary, not all geeks are happy with myriad sometimes-adequate workarounds to fundamental design flaws. I'm glad you've made your peace with spam, though.

enobrev• 17 years ago

Agreed, although I don't think I've actually looked through my spam folder in at least a couple years. GMail's filters are pretty damned good. If an email didn't make it through, I consider it the same as the old "lost in the mail."

swombat6• 17 years ago

I didn't suggest that geeks have a problem with spam. On the contrary, because that problem has been on the geek radar for many years, it is largely resolved. And because most of the other problems have not been on the geek radar, they're not resolved yet.

The problem with email is there is too much of it. Actually damn messages I must read and deal with.

And my point is that Wave can help reduce the clutter and chaos of these messages by presenting them in a more structured, intuitive, and versatile form. So instead of having 50 emails discussing the text for the new homepage, you can have just one Wave.

andreyf• 17 years ago

To most geeks, the main problem with email is spam. ... I didn't suggest that geeks have a problem with spam.

You certainly could have phrased that better :-P

seunosewa• 17 years ago

"And my point is that Wave can help reduce the clutter and chaos of these messages by presenting them in a more structured, intuitive, and versatile form. So instead of having 50 emails discussing the text for the new homepage, you can have just one Wave."

Gmail already does that. See 'Gmail Conversations': http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

mediaman• 17 years ago

He clarifies what he means by spam immediately after the sentence you quote:

"So the main problems for geeks are that they’re signed up to so many services that they get inundated with notifications, monthly newsletters, automated messages, and shreds of spam that manage to get through GMail’s spam filters."

"Spam" was probably the wrong word to describe emails that are automated or informational, but requested; however, your view doesn't appear to disagree with his.

If your problem is that you have too much email from real people that must be evaluated and responded to, your problem is not with email at all, but rather with human organization. You have too many people relying on your input for too many things and that has nothing to do with technology. Offload work to an assistant, or outsource some functions, or grant increased decision making responsibility.

fjabre• 17 years ago

So then: Wave is an Outlook killer.

It definitely seems to fit much more than what we've been hearing over the last few months.

He's right. We've all been looking at this the wrong way.. Brilliant piece.

swombat6• 17 years ago

Yep. Outlook killer is a great way to put it. I guess Google tried to do that with GMail, and Google Apps for your Domain, but only managed to kill off Exchange (in small businesses). GMail still suffers from many of the same issues as Outlook, in terms of collaboration (though it did solve both the spam and the storage problem). This is a more complete solution that has a chance of replacing Outlook because it's just a lot better.

Then again, Microsoft doesn't need to ditch Outlook - they could just release Outlook Wave - after all, it's all open-source. That would be nice - we'd all win from such a move.

kashif• 17 years ago

The needless "beta" limits how many people I can converse with using Google Wave - the invitations don't propagate soon enough to hold my interest.

Google wave = Jabber Client + glorified logging

pasbesoin2• 17 years ago

This closely mirrors my own reaction, after five minutes of examining the introductory videos Google has placed on YouTube. Wave solves a number of problems I've faced for years in corporate environments, and in a much more integrated fashion than the piecemeal approaches that have previously been available.

It also provides a single point of integration. In the past, I've advocated for e.g. bulletin boards to replace email exchanges where information tends to "submarine" into private exchanges. But getting corporate IS to even consider a deployment -- even just a small one for a single team -- was a non-starter. Going rogue would be a termination offense.

If you can get Wave adopted, you solve a whole bunch of problems all at once.

I remain extremely skeptical, though, about the compatibility of Wave as it currently exists with many businesses' requirements for both confidentiality and guaranteed information access -- uptime, an unlimited timeframe into to future, and not becoming locked in to a single vendor platform to the extent that Wave currently seems to imply. A Wave failure on any of these points could quickly destroy a business; so much would be locked up in its data, and if there is no alternative -- even if imperfect -- means of access...

Maktab• 17 years ago

The potential ability to install and maintain your own Wave server would presumably nullify a lot of the objections that would exist if it were only available in a Google-hosted form.

Poiesis• 17 years ago

Yes, this. In a corporate setup, you need a messaging system that, for lack of a better description, is like email but persists like a message board. Targeted to a particular user/users but available for the next person to join the team without someone digging through their mail looking for the message.

The problems with adoption of current solutions (wikis, hosted stuff like Basecamp) are that many corporations don't let you host proprietary data offsite, and adding another server is something that is so difficult as to be essentially impossible. Not to mention "another server" could be one of 50 alternatives, all incompatible.

There still will adoption issues, as it doesn't seem like Google is aggressive in pursuing business customers, and I don't know if they have good answers for the questions that will come up. But I see Wave as essentially a protocol designed to solve the same sorts of problems as Basecamp et. al.

netsp• 17 years ago

Basecamp, sure.

But I think the best example is a customer support ticketing system. This is pretty much an attempt to record email conversations in a structured way and be able to attach files to them.

ct4ul4u• 17 years ago

I think the problem Google Wave is intended to solve is Facebook. Facebook being a problem for Google, rather than a problem for the user.

jv2222• 17 years ago

Ok, if this article is correct then it's a big problem for Google. Because their entire revenue model is based on earning money from from advertising... I can't imagine enterprise level organisations allowing Google to Earn money via advertising.

I know that Google have made some efforts to make money by directly charging Enterprises but that represents a tiny part of their revenue to date.

In other words, is Wave a much smaller opportunity than they had hoped? And if so, it might just end up being a "side project"...

gloob• 17 years ago

I can't imagine enterprise level organisations allowing Google to Earn money via advertising.

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this. I would take you literally, but taking that sentence literally would be mad (Google does earn money via advertising, and every enterprise-level organization "allows" it in the sense that they don't explicitly "disallow" it (what would that look like, anyway?)). Could you clarify?

ashishb4u• 17 years ago

i hope i can "wave" people who are'nt on Google Wave... If only it can convert wave-traditionalEmail & vice-versa, it would be cool...

Also, i guess that should be fine as Google should be intrested in information-base rather than user-base...

known• 17 years ago

synchronous, asynchronous & broadcast communication.

JBiserkov• 17 years ago

Google Wave will force me to learn to touch type to avoid embarrassment in front of my geek friends!

CulturalNgineer• 17 years ago

This is a good analysis... I also now have Wave account and can very quickly see that it's as a "much-improved" system of email that it's real strength lies.

My only problem right now is I don't have enough fellow friends and associates with a Wave account to use it more and do better evaluation.

I'm looking forward to its spread!

tdubya• 17 years ago

It was given to the wrong group, it should have been given to a collaboration of people working toward a common goal.

What problems does Google Wave solve?

Related Stories