GOOGLE WAVE, DISCUSSION ONLY *NO INVITE REQUESTS*

scudzilla

Hope it's ok to make a new thread for discussion on Wave only as the other thread seems inundated with requests for invites.

***PLEASE DO NOT REQUEST INVITES HERE***


So what do peeps think of it, i'm enjoying it so far, a few niggles in the programming, unsure of the public release date at present

oeb

scudzilla wrote: »

Hope it's ok to make a new thread for discussion on Wave only as the other thread seems inundated with requests for invites.

***PLEASE DO NOT REQUEST INVITES HERE***


So what do peeps think of it, i'm enjoying it so far, a few niggles in the programming, unsure of the public release date at present

The main problem I have with it is I know hardly anyone on it

I only have three friends on it, and no invites to get more friends!

scudzilla

oeb wrote: »

The main problem I have with it is I know hardly anyone on it

I only have three friends on it, and no invites to get more friends!

send me a pm with your username, makes sense to mess about with quite a few peeps and get ready for general release.

One thing i've found, the green dot that says you're buddies are online isn't working yet, so they could be on but ya can't see.

Also the maps and poll options have been temporarily removed

Patchy

eoincasey08@googlewave.com

Cant test alone

The extension integration is fun, but it is still very buggy and missing a lot of features. It ran up a 1Gb memory leak on my machine during early testing, and appears very sluggish, although I think much of this is down to data transfer. I have it running on an ancient Ubuntu laptop with minimal RAM, and that's nearly as responsive as my newish Vista machine.

I'm already finding interesting stuff on it using the "with: public" search. I think I'll forget about it for a month or so, until the make a few tweaks.

scudzilla

Patchy wrote: »

eoincasey08@googlewave.com

Cant test alone

Just requested ya, keep it clean

Cringer

Just started a Dublin, Ireland wave. Come along and join in. Only me and another person on it now. Search Dublin, Ireland

Thoie

Cringer wrote: »

Just started a Dublin, Ireland wave. Come along and join in. Only me and another person on it now. Search Dublin, Ireland

Um, how do I do that? It just seems to be searching my own existing waves.

Cringer

Thoie wrote: »

Um, how do I do that? It just seems to be searching my own existing waves.

Try this in the search:

with: public ireland

This video is pretty good http://screenr.com/yBN

Bob_Harris

Google Wave: A load of hype about nothing much.

It won't replace any of the technologies it has so ungracefully mashed together.

Blowfish

Right so, first impressions after using it for just over a week.

It's an interesting mash of IM/Email/forums/blog/social sites. It has the potential to take on all of them, but to do it it'll have to make some changes so it can replicate properly what the other services do, plus it's going to face some inevitable challenges of it's own.

I'm not quite sure why some people are saying it's a Facebook/Myspace/Bebo killer. A couple of the concepts just don't work as well with Wave. The whole 'bio', 'My pictures', 'My videos' idea doesn't exist. Wave could probably replicate that, but at the minute it just wouldn't be as intuitive.

To take on Twitter/Blogs or forums, it badly needs to implement access rights. Not much point people putting up their thoughts if they can't stop people editing what they say to say something else, plus people would only want to see just the authors Waves/blips and not everyone who has commented on them.

The public waves are interesting. Right now, there are some decent and intelligent conversations floating around. It reminds me a bit of Usenet, in that there are interesting nuggets, but as there's currently no moderation/monitoring it'll be tough to keep it from becoming a spamfest or replica of the idiocy found in youtube comments.

tl;dr: Has potential but needs more work.

Thoie

Blowfish wrote: »

tl;dr: Has potential but needs more work.

My review (for summary, just read Blowfish's comment).

One of the best potential uses for it that I've seen so far is a comment from a friend who's involved in organising an annual international "thing". All the organisers are volunteers, and while Google docs currently allows multi editing of documents, Wave would be useful for them all. They currently hold some meetings via Skype, etc, so combining Skype, with on screen edits etc would be convenient - particularly as someone who missed the meeting could playback the edits later and get an idea of some of the reasoning of things. Their current problem is that not all the organisers have invites yet, so the usefulness is limited at the moment.

A colleague and I were messing around doing something similar using a "fake" document. At the moment we use things like LiveMeeting to collaborate on realtime files. It's a bit tedious as only one person has control at a time, and the refresh rate across continents is a bit slow. Sadly, while Google Wave would in some ways be ideal for the kind of thing we do about once a month, keeping company documents on what is essentially an unsecure third party server isn't going to be popular.

I used it yesterday to talk to the same colleague who'll be visiting in a few weeks time - I stuck in a map and was able to point out points of interest for her (like pubs ), and information about the hotel and taxis with my own comments. It's nothing that we couldn't have done with existing applications/technologies, but it was a little more convenient. It also means that when she's travelling she can log into the Wave from anywhere (without necessarily logging in to work VPN) and see some of the details, including copies of her itinerary.

At the moment a lot of the public waves seem to be full of people just saying "Hello". I assume it will settle down after a while.

corkie

Cringer wrote: »

Just started a Dublin, Ireland wave. Come along and join in. Only me and another person on it now. Search Dublin, Ireland

Thanks for the wave search Tips.

Handy Guide available here: - The_Complete_Guide_to_Google_Wave

Regards,
John

>> After Creating a "Cork, Ireland. Public Wave" if anyone is interested <<

MOH

Only started using it today, first real use I've found for it is as a to do list/dropbox - start a "To do" wave for just myself, drag in any useful links I find that I want to review later, or any docs I want to bring between home and work.

Ironically, for me it looks more like a Google Docs killer than anything else. Why bother with G Docs when I can share and edit my docs in Excel?

[edit]
Obviously, the answer is I can't. Dragged some Excel docs in but they were read only when I opened them from the wave.

1huge1

ya I got no invited to give around so also dont know that many people on it.

Its only a beta so I guess thats why its a little bit slow sometimes.

Anyway add me if you want.

eugenemitchell@googlewave.com

long_b

Initial impressions are it's good but fierce confusing. Very hard to track replies to your blips etc ..
Looks like what you get when you give developers too much free reign IMHO.
E.g. it took me about 10 minutes to find out that you can't actually *delete* a wave in real time.

CuLT

Looks more like a GoToMeeting killer than an anything else killer.

The whole "update as you type" thing is just a bit too real time for me, making it a non-starter.

Webmonkey

CuLT wrote: »

Looks more like a GoToMeeting killer than an anything else killer.

The whole "update as you type" thing is just a bit too real time for me, making it a non-starter.

I don't really like the real time typing also. It's just something to hype up Googlewave. Apparently you can turn it off though, well according to the conference presentation they done there a few months back but I don't see any settings yet. The only settings is the settings wave that is under construction and has no functionality.

Having your settings page/panel in a wave is a bit much I think. They are really getting carried away.

I've got a good few friends on it now but it is still useless to me. People do not like change and email seems to be doing it's job still even if it's well out dated. Waves require a new learning curve for people and are only useful for big group discussions which may rarely happen.

IMO, it will be a long time before people start using wave properly.

What I think they should have done is integrated it with gmail incrementally and allow the transition to progress over time rather than instantly.

They moved too quick and over hyped it.

I'm surprized at google. They always kept things simple and simple is what results people using it and resulted in Google being where it is today.

Kila

I think that there's a lot of potential for google wave, and I've been using it since it first opened its beta. Now a good few of my friends are on it, and we're beginning to use it to organise group things (shared notes, committees, etc.).

I think where wave will fall down is when people use it expecting one thing, and find that it's another. It's a tool for a number of purposes, but it's never purported to do everything. As a collaboration tool, it'll be fantastic. As a facebook killer - well, I'm not sure that that's really their intention, to be honest.

I wrote a review of it (so far) on my blog. I'm happy to keep using it, and looking forward to watching it change as time goes on