6 ms·

Google Wave: too complicated for its own good

51 points by adamhowell 17y ago

unalone 17y 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 17y 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.
- jraines 17y 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?
  - swombat 17y 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.
    - jraines 17y ago
      That's cool, but it goes inside the blip instead of under it.
- spydez 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.)
swombat 17y 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.
- icey 17y 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 17y ago
    Yeah maybe if they dumb it down a little to be more similar to Gmail it would really catch on.
- noelchurchill 17y 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 17y 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.
misuba 17y 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 17y 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.
megaduck 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.
  - megaduck 17y 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 17y ago
Posted on this yesterday: http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-creepy-feature/ 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 17y 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 17y 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 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 17y ago
Google Wave is the next Zombo.com, as far as I can tell.
sebastianavina 17y ago
It reminds me of ICQ...

51 points by adamhowell 17y 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 17y 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.

jraines 17y 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?
- swombat 17y 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.
  - jraines 17y ago
    That's cool, but it goes inside the blip instead of under it.
spydez 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.)

swombat 17y 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.

icey 17y 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 17y ago
  Yeah maybe if they dumb it down a little to be more similar to Gmail it would really catch on.
noelchurchill 17y 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 17y 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.

misuba 17y 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 17y 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.

megaduck 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.
- megaduck 17y 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 17y ago

Posted on this yesterday: http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-creepy-feature/ 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 17y 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 17y 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 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 17y ago

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

sebastianavina 17y ago

It reminds me of ICQ...