GeekLad - Latest Comments in 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:37:06 -0000

I understand Google Wave is just a preview. It doesn't change the fact there are still some missing key features. That being said, Google Wave has come a long way since I wrote this article last October.

They have since added some group functionality as well as revision control, which is definitely a step in the right direction. They've also added email notifications, so that at least now there is one direction of legacy support. I have been using Google Wave to track progress with the Android on HTC project, and it has been great. Google Wave is excellent for use in specific collaborative projects.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Ian Dunn — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:19:30 -0000

1 reason why your article is pointless - wave is in limited preview. Advanced new web technologies always go through a rough start, just go hit twitter right now and see if the servers are crashed to see what i mean. you're not doing anything productive about it, just whining about something you want to add, enjoying a ride on the google-bashing bandwagon (they're not Windows ME just yet, here), and enjoying some nice web traffic off of people's google wave searches because of your catchy "5 things" gimmick. sometimes numbered lists work, and sometimes you look like the MSN homepage.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

shade777 — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 05:16:57 -0000

All absolutely true, but as Google says, it's a PREVIEW, and can be BUGGY!
It's like alpha code. No-one expects it to be perfect.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:09:17 -0000

lol

No, I didn't see that. It still boggles me how and why it ever became such
a popular service.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Terence — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:53:14 -0000

Just as long as something kills it... 8^)

Did you see the pole that Guy Kawasaki ran about, if they decided to charge for it, how much would people be prepared to pay? Do you know what 60%+ of the respondents said? They'd pay for it not to exist at all.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:42:01 -0000

Yeah, lack of notification is another issue as well.

I wouldn't call Google Wave a "Twitter killer" though. Wave and Twitter
serve different purposes. Twitter is a poor communication tool for the
reasons you mentioned. If you want an open dialogue with someone, Twitter
is not the medium to use. You would probably use email or instant
messaging, or Wave.

Twitter is really more for sharing small bits information than it is
collaboration and communication. If Twitter ever dies, it won't be because
Google Wave killed it.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Terence — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:02:01 -0000

A really great post, well written, bang on target and very informative. But it missed the MOST important point. Unless you sit here glued to it (like a really need another program like that), it doesn't announce the arrival of a new message. It needs something like the TweetDeck ping, maybe a sort of soft whooshing noise (since its a a wave), but something, ANYTHING, to let you know there's been some activity. Then with this MOST important point, and all the other irrelevancies you mention, its a 'Twitter Killer'. Why put up with all that meaningless crap in 140 characters or less, from anyone and his dog, when you can have meaningless crap from only those you decide in as many characters as the buffers will transmit. Which, by the way, something tells me is going to be its downfall. Buffering several hundred thousand messages is one thing. Buffering several gazillion keystrokes is quite something else. We shall see.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

NJM — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:25:17 -0000

I agree with your suggestion, but your headline? Come on... Co-creation is the basis for a lot of software development. Google is putting a product out there and letting people test it out so they can do exactly what you are doing: identify its shortcomings so that Google can make it a better product. To that end, Google Wave clearly IS ready. The groundwork is set and now Wave is ready to be tested by early adopters who can help identify the features of the product that should change/be added/be removed.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Sylvain Poirier — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:18:38 -0000

You missed an essential point of my concept. Maybe I should insist that, in what I envision, email users could reply by accessing the wave by a simple click, with no need of any formality of wave account creation. I define this as another use (a marginal one, just for the transition to the end of email), of the very foundational feature of my project, which is that any user of any site of the federation could directly access and use all the other sites of the federation, with the illimited accumulation of possibilities every specific site can develop in itself, with no need to create more accounts. This is a very new feature as compared to the whole hassle of the web we are all used to bear as a fatality (creating as many accounts as you need to use independent services). But this usual hassle is not a fatality, since a general technical solution is possible as I explain, and can be directly developed (in fact, it is supposed to have already been done by the developers who previously worked on my project, but I'm afraid this code may not be good enough for reuse). This can first be used as another way to have conversations between users of different sites, but its usefulness can be much wider. As I explained in my article, this feature would also solve the currently pending dead-end of Wave, which is that any link to a public wave you would like to include on a web site of blog, pointing to a different host's than the visitor's provider, would not technically let them directly access it with their usual account.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:41:32 -0000

Your article is quite comprehensive indeed. My thoughts still remain very much the same on the topics I've discussed here.

For one, I think that email needs to be better integrated than what you've described. You are proposing that someone could be invited via email to a wave. However, in order to participate in the conversation they still need to join the wave. If they don't have a wave account (somewhere, assuming we are talking about a federated environment) yet, this is a big hassle.

It is a lot like if you get an email from someone sending you pictures posted on XYZ Picture Hosting service. However, if you want to see the pictures you need to sign up for an account. This is a major pain and a lot of people won't bother with it, so you will lose a lot of participants.

I think your idea of creating a "tsunami" for containing other waves for use within a group will work. It is definitely better than using a single wave and continually overwriting it. It would still be better to have group contact management, but the tsunami concept is a good workaround to use until Google (or someone else) implements better contact management.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Sylvain Poirier — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:34:37 -0000

OK I integrated your remark in my article. Now, as for my other ideas, what do you think ?

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

parent5446 — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:34:19 -0000

I agree that Google Wave has poor contact management (especially as far as grouping is concerned). As far as access control is concerned, as must as I would like to see it implemented (it would be a great feature), it does not make Google Wave "not ready". Email in its current form does not have access control. You can send the email to whoever you please. Furthermore, the nature of email does not allow you to remove participants. Yet all of this does not make email not ready for release. Revision control is the same thing.

In other words, while I must agree all the features you listed would be really helpful if they were implemented, but it does not make Google Wave any less "ready" for the public.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:32:29 -0000

You could build a wave with the group and just continually modify it.
However, if you're working in a collaborative group, it is unlikely you'll
only ever work on a single topic. If the entire subject matter changes, or
you're working on a new project with those folks, you would lose all the
work on the previous project if you were to use the same wave and overwrite
it with the new project/content.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Sylvain Poirier — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 08:09:45 -0000

I wrote an article with other ideas, including some hints related to what you mentioned, but going much further : http://spoirier.lautre.net/...
But I don't agree with your claim: "Google Wave has no way to group your contacts together to build the equivalent of mailing lists". Indeed, you can form the equivalent of a mailing list in the form of a single wave: you can then bring more news to the list by adding contents to the wave, with no need to create another wave.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Ratel Dajer — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:52:51 -0000

I agree completely and there are many more things missing besides: not being able to remove people from a wave, to delete a wave, editing large waves, not just making responses crashes it, search filters as buttons rather than as search keywords, making a wave unpublic after making it public...its just not ready for wide release yet. They risk ruining a really good idea by hyping it so quickly.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Seif Sallam — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:05:08 -0000

email support isn't something big, its just done by adding a no edit permission, reply is available, the conversation way is available too, maybe support for HTML, therefore i think wave is ready. BUT Google won't do it this way, first they will use the wave interface in all their applications (Gmail, Docs, ..etc) so people get used to it then they would feel like home when they merge everything with wave :)

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:09:32 -0000

I'm right there with you Gordon. I think you're spot on with the annoyances
you mentioned, as well as the way email integration should work. Being able
to receive @googlewave.com would be perfect, because then I we can just
forward all mail to that address and have all communication happen in one
place.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Gordon D. Bonnar — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:45:33 -0000

I actually found this post after doing some work in Wave and being really frustrated once again with contact management. I will give you an example from my usage.

The first thing that really bothers me is that (like you mentioned) contact management users Google Contacts. This should be fine as I use it (and it syncs to mobile devices, etc). Great. Except, like you said, the fact that it lumps everyone together with no way to discern who is a Wave user and who is regular contact. I like that they're trying to integrate Wave participants as regular contacts, but they should create a group in GContacts and have everyone who is added in Wave automatically added to that group. For me that would facilitate the management of my thirty some odd Wave users from the sea of some 600 contacts.

A nit-picky point, but major usability issue is that when you click the + in the contacts pane, the focus doesn't automatically go to the input box. So you type into nothingness until you click. It's little, but really annoying.

Not being able to remove people really bothers me as well.

I thought when I saw the Playback feature demoed that while playing back, you could go back at any point to a previous version. I have had people really mess up the structure of a Wave (by accident, although maliciousness is possible too) and there is no way to go back.

I'd like to comment on the "Ping" feature. If you use this from within a Wave it makes a private blip between you and the person you pinged. The next time they log on (or if they are online) they get a pop-up. This is all great. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot delete these ping-related blips, even if they are empty. This is a source of major frustration for me as it often destroys the flow of collaborative documents.

Finally, the e-mail situation: why can't blah@gmail.com be our Wave address (or, once federated, user@domain.com)? Barring this, at the VERY least, I think that e-mails to blah@googlwave.com become a new wave in the inbox with the contents of the e-mail, if the mailer is a Wave user, they are added as a participant. I don't even need any back-and-forth functionality to start. I just think this would be a great way of getting info from current systems into wave without having to copy paste. The other e-mail functionality, which I'm sure to come, can happen later.

Great post, well written, bang on, and very informative.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:24:30 -0000

I don't know that I would call it a resounding fail. Afterall, it is just a
preview. Assuming that preview is the equivalent to what everyone else
calls "alpha", it should eventually move into beta which should be much
better. When it does eventually get there, they will need to include
support for email in some fashion if they expect mass adoption.

The good news is that being a federated protocol, someone else may beat
Google to reverse compatibility and develop some kind of Wave client/service
that integrates both email and Wave.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

hmm — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:16:15 -0000

You're absolutely spot on. Lack of legacy support is a real killer from my perspective.

I've got my invite and am now twiddling my thumbs waiting for other people I know to get their wave invites. I have no interest in 'waving' people I don't know. In addition I want to email them from and receive emails in wave but have to move between services to do so.

My overall impression leads to a resounding fail for google at this point.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:39:23 -0000

They could probably do a bit better than just bringing a gmail inbox into it (although that would be a start). I envision that yourlogin@googlewave.com would actually behave as an email address. Emails could just appear in your inbox just as any other wave does, and you respond by adding response blips.

The big differences would be that of course there would be no real-time interaction, and you wouldn't be able to edit blips, only add new ones. I suppose some provisions can be made for editing blips. When the wave user modifies a blip, the email user could receive an email with the modifications. But of course, the email user will not be able to modify the wave.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Dan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:42:45 -0000

Maybe they could just add an optional gmail inbox window to the wave page, this way all your messages are in one place and this seems like the most practical way to combine the two.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

Dan — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:40:28 -0000

I agree with everything you said about access control, which hopefully will be coming soon. I also agree with what you said about contact management. Google should also add a way to find people like you can on facebook, and through a privacy page, select which aspects of your profile such as name, address, image you want visible to people who are not yet one of your contacts.

I also don't like how when you view a public wave it goes into your inbox, even if you don't add yourself to it or reply in it. The best you can do is hide it in your trash but I did not realize this when I was playing around with it and now have a ton of waves I can't get rid of but only hide. I also accidentally left a reply on my profile settings page which I now am unable to delete.

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

DarthKaul — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:29:51 -0000

Actually I got to partially agree with both of you on this matter.. there are many things missing from GW but also we need to remember that its really in alpha stage...I'm not sure about the access control system cz it might beat the purpose of it..

Re: 5 Reasons Google Wave Is Not Ready

GeekLad — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:13:29 -0000

Thanks for the link Mark. We do seem to share some of the same thoughts,
particularly on the lack of email integration. I think you're spot-on in
stating that lack of email integration is going to be a major roadblock for
mass adoption.