Google Wave
I’ve read 3 or 4 Google Wave reviews but none of them really prepared me for the wonder that is the Wave. The reviews I read were pretty short and sweet, explaining that Wave is an online collaboration tool (which, in all fairness, it is) and that was pretty much it.
At this point, most of them decided to go about explaining the layout of Wave and which box does what, none of them, however, actually sold Wave.
For a few weeks I’d pondered whether to bother asking Google for a beta invite or not and many a time filled in the required form, but never got round to submitting the request, mainly because I don’t know anyone else that has Wave access and thought it was pretty useless without knowing someone to collaborate with. How wrong.
Today I randomly played around with Twitter, searching for XMPP mentions and decided to give a quick search to Wave to see what people thought of it, luckily enough I stumbled upon (no, not StumbleUpon!) a lady who had just tweeted that she had some invites available and I sent her a quick message to see if she would be so kind to invite me so I could finally put my mind to rest (I’m like a kid at Christmas when it comes to new geek toys), luckily enough she did (I won’t mention your name incase you get invite-request bombed, but thanks again!) and 10 minutes later I logged into Wave for the first time.
At this point I was quite disappointed, I’ve seen screenshots before so knew what Wave looked like but mine was so empty! The only contact I had was the kind lady who invited me in the first place (who I don’t actually know) and she was no longer online so effectively, I had absolutely no one to test this thing with. I did what geeks do best, googled for articles on Wave to see how to use it more efficiently, that is when my disappointment turned into amazement.
With a simple search for “with:public” in the Wave search field, I was a-flood with public waves I could intrude on, who needs friends on contact lists when you just opened up a can of whoop-ass.
I gave up looking at public waves around the 471 mark, at which point I’d found a few I was interested in to start off my Wave career. I chose a sudoku wave, a “We’re from the UK” wave and decided to hop onto a few RPG (role playing game) waves.
The whole picture
Wave is, first and foremost, a collaboration tool, a tool for like minded people to get together and discuss, plot and plan on any subject they so desire. As with many ‘tools’, they can be used in ways they weren’t necessarily built for, but work non the less, and this is where the whole public wave thing comes in.
Waves don’t have a limit per se but can quite easily get out of hand, if you try viewing a wave that has 300 or 400 messages on it, you will soon get lost and bogged down by your browser trying to compute it all, this is where it struggles as a “public” not-what-wave-was-built-for-but-still-works application. At this time, public waves can be edited by anyone without rules, so in theory, someone can really piss on your parade by deleting everything or writing a bucket load of faff, alas, Google is working on this and while it is possible to “play back” who has done what, once waves get this big, the playback feature will just die a horrible death.
I see a lot of people talk about Wave as a replacement to IM and email. While Wave does have similar features, for example, I had written something earlier and actually saw the person replying to me typing, letter for letter, typo for typo, I don’t think it is meant to replace anything at all, I think its main feature is as previously mentioned, to make it easier for teams to work on projects or ideas as a closed entity, behind the scenes tool.
As a closed collaboration tool, Wave is exceedingly good, even in beta form. Everyone can edit everything (closed waves will only have people you invite as members) and I can see this being a very useful, much required tool for development teams of all kinds.
The thing that makes Wave special, in my eyes, is not only can people of a wave access everything (unless options change later) and there is a clear timeline of who has done what, there are also gadgets and robots! I won’t go into massive detail here but the basic difference between gadgets and bots are gadgets are ‘client interactive’ (such as maps, etc) and bots are ‘server side’ (they work on waves without your interaction).
Gadgets can be simple things like highlighting tools or, as mentioned, maps plugins. Bots work “behind the scenes” and can do any number of tasks such as turn @word into a link to twitters’ @username automatically or send you an IM when a wave has been updated or edited. People have no “say” in what robots do, once a robot is added to a wave, it does what it does best (depending on which bot you invite, depends on what actions it takes).
Google are obviously, first and foremost, search giants, and it is quite obvious when it comes to Wave, there are atleast 20 different search terms to get the best out of Wave, whether this will decrease or increase once Wave is finally received is yet to be seen.
The current truth
Wave is still in beta and by my reckoning still has a good 3 months hard coding before it is released properly, the main problem with it at this moment in time is the sheer lag everyone experiences. It does feel a bit like I’m trying to interweb on a 56k modem all over again, one minute everything is running smoothly, the next everything is frozen while it buffers or updates or whatever it is doing.
If you are lucky enough to get an invite and use firefox, I suggest leaving firefox to your normal browsing and download Chrome just to run Wave. For whatever reason, firefox seriously struggles with running Wave after the first few minutes while Chrome seems to be able to handle it better.
As with most beta software, there are lots of things that need ironing out currently, such as random “crashes” (you’ll be asked to refresh, not restart your browser), the fact that there are no “settings” yet and there needs to be a few more thousand servers added to make things quicker but all in all, I’m impressed.
Verdict
As a project/team collab. tool, Wave will work wonders, it already does and it’s not finished. I can’t wait to see more bots and more gadgets and the super smooth response times/useability that we have come to demand and respect from Google.
As a public chat tool, it won’t replace IM or forums or email but it will compliment them nicely, people are already coming up with unique and cool ways of using Wave (such as the Wave Adventure RPG (Role Playing Game)) that already has players.
I use StumbleUpon like it’s going out of business, I’ve now just added Google Wave to that list.
Category: Tech | Tagged: November 24th, 2009