Google Wave, First thoughts?

bibbly

Just wondering what people think about the latest from Google, Google wave.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

I reckon you can kiss facebook bebo and perhaps twitter good bye..

like a wiki, except real time, would be cool if you had 1000 people working out a script for a movie, for example..

any thoughts..

Villain

Can you invite ppl? Like they had when gmail was launched?

marknoonan1974

I think it looks cool, I have not been invited yet tho

If anybody has an invite, can they PM me please? I'll send invites back here.

dubmick

Villain wrote: »

Can you invite ppl? Like they had when gmail was launched?

yes you get 8 invites. Got any spare?

StickyMcGinty

would also love an invite

looking at the preview on engadget et al its looks really slick...

Villain

dubmick wrote: »

yes you get 8 invites. Got any spare?

lol I was looking for one

madmoe

Me too would love and invite, anyone got one?

LookingFor

I've been on the developer preview since it was announced.

I've devved a couple of gadgets, and from a developer point-of-view I think it's very nice. They basically give you much of the plumbing you need to make concurrent multi-user applications.

However, I think there's much overselling of it going on. I heard Darragh of Boards on This Morning and I think he was going way over the top with his commentary on how this would impact services like facebook and twitter.

I can see some impact on facebook if this gains traction and extensions etc. become popular. However, I see a number of barriers to adoption here. First of all, and this was more obvious in the developer preview, but this thing is busy. It's complex. If you have a number of waves going on in your inbox, that are active, then there's lots of stuff going on that demands your attention. It feels like brain-overload. If you then open a wave and there are a number of particpants in there contributing to the wave simultaneously, then it gets 'busier' still. Suddenly you have all this stuff going on competing for your attention. If I put my mother in front of that kind of wave inbox, a reasonably busy wave inbox, I think she'd be scrambling back to gmail.

I've seen suggestions out there that this could change 'everything', even forums like this. Tosh, I say. Putting a large group of people in a wave ala a forum and have them all editing and posting and so on all together, live, would just be way, way too much for anyone person to consume. This works well in a small group but just does not scale, from a human comprehension point of view, to larger groups. Anything beyond 3 or 4 people in my experience, contributing live to a wave, and I just close it down and come back later when it has 'settled'. It's not like IRC chat where you can follow pretty easily, because things are added neatly to the bottom of the chatroom. People can click and type anywhere in the wave, indeed start deleting stuff right before your eyes as your reading and so on and so forth. When you have more than a couple of people doing this in a wave it becomes impossible to follow it all 'live'.

I think for larger groups the killer apps here will be in other applications made by other developers that allow for input by a large number of users, but filter the live output on the wave to a very manageable level. That'll be wave's strength, in concurrent multiuser applications built on wave that carefully manage their feedback to the user. Character-by-character 'push' technology isn't the optimum model for many types of communication, as neat as it sounds from a techie-point-view. It wouldn't work in a context like boards for example - therein old-fashioned 'pull' models are much more efficient and manageable from a user point of view. For other types of app though, I think live sharing of data is a broader win - like games for example. It's a pity google don't really have anything that really capitalises on that in those types of apps yet though.

In terms of twitter, for example, impact on twitter - this isn't a good way to share simple status updates with other people. Twitter is much, much, simpler and that's its strength. I don't see any added value here for status update type usage.

Anyway, sorry if this seems like a rant. I just see lots of overly enthusiastic commentary on Wave that seems to miss a lot of the subtleties that come out from actually using it.

Villain

Great post LookingFor

68 lost souls

Hey Im looking for an invite aswel. After watching the hour and a hlaf presentation I really like the way it works. Really great development. I would really appreciate if someone could PM me with one. Thanks.

moochie

Really looking forward to using this. Has anyone got an invite to spare?

bravo

Hi Guys,
Looks interesting, also looking for an invite if anyone has a spare, will post here if google accept my request and give me some.