So I got my Google Wave invite a couple weeks ago. I have been fairly skeptical of all the Wave hype lately, but I was still intrigued and very much looking forward to seeing what it had to offer. I logged in, and…didn’t know what to do. I felt like the first guy in the world to have email – it sounds like a cool idea, but there’s nothing to do until you know other people who have email, too.
Wave allows you to send invites out to 9 friends, so I sent some out. And waited. A week later, finally they started showing up, and I could really see what Wave had in store.
Wave is slick, and pretty, and for the most part fairly easy to start using, but it has too many flaws that will keep it out of the hands of mainstream users and limit its adoption to tech-savvy user groups. My biggest issues with it are:
- No email integration. This is supposed to be the communication tool for the next century, but it isn’t backwards compatible with the communication tool(s) for the last century. Surely someone will write an extension to allow it to interface with email, but at that point you’ll lose all the cool Wave features, making the whole exercise moot.
- Nothing to do until you know people who have it. Adding an email extension would alleviate this.
- Built by programmers, for programmers. As Lifehacker points out, “the first search command every Wave newbie needs to know (is):
with:public” which will allow you to see public waves and is very useful when you have no friends using Wave yet. Really guys? Resorting to cryptic command lines in a supposedly mainstream web app? Let me guess, was this documented somewhere in your man pages? - No notifier application. If you’re not in Wave, there’s no way to know you have new Waves waiting for you. There is a third-party app to do this, but it’s annoying that I have to have a notifier for my email and Wave.
- Watching people type in real time. Internet “old-timers” will remember that the original tools for instant messaging over the Internet (like “talk”) worked like this. Surprisingly, it’s not much fun to watch other people type and correct their own typos. Really. ICQ and AIM popularized the “wait until they’re done to send the message” model, and no one looked back (until Wave.)
- Editing other people’s messages. If I want to collaborate on something with my friends, I’ll tell you. Don’t just let other people edit my messages willy-nilly. It’s fun for a few minutes to edit what your friends said, but threads can quickly become chaotic and impossible to follow. There’s a reason message boards don’t have this feature.
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Un-novative thread presentation. In a giant leap back to 1997, Wavelets are organized by thread first and not by date. This means that responses to any message within the wave get indented directly below that message rather than showing at the bottom of the Wave, so new messages end up located all over the place within the thread. In long threads, you may have to scroll up and down for several pages to find the new messages. For ‘net old-timers, you may remember that many of the first, primitive online forums were arranged like this, but somewhere along the lines everyone discovered that it was easier to follow a conversation by always posting new messages at the bottom and just quoting the message it was in response to. It’s not as elegant from a purist perspective, but it’s much easier for the user to follow.
- Replay. The only reasons the Replay feature needs to exist are 1) the flawed thread presentation mentioned above and 2) the fact that anyone on the thread can edit any message. Using replay isn’t fun or interesting – it’s tedious, and it’s there to compensate for unintuitive UI and unnecessary features.
- Worst offense: Too many things in one. Wave seemingly tries to replace your email, your IM, and your Google Docs, but doesn’t do a great job on any of them. I much prefer using my IM client to talk to my friends, so I’m not giving that up. Gmail is a better email client, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets are pretty great for collaboration, so I’m not giving those up. (Gmail and Docs already have messaging built-in, and it’s executed rather nicely, btw.) By trying to do so much, it doesn’t do anything well.
I should have known we were in trouble when this was the first line of the “Getting Started” wave: A wave can be both a document and a conversation. For how many users would a statement like this make any kind of sense? For someone like myself, that’s a pretty deep statement and worth some pondering, but how would that help my mom figure out what’s going on?
Wave is truly a technical marvel, and the fact that it works as well as it does is impressive. It’s easy to see why the room full of developers at the Wave unveiling was in awe. But, you must do more than impress developers to build a tool that the mass market will adopt.
Ultimately I think Wave will find some fans within tech-savvy organizations because it could be useful for collaboration and communication in situations where everyone in the company is using it (competing with Yammer), but it won’t gain any significant market penetration compared to email or IM.
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