-
Website
http://www.scobleizer.com/ -
Original page
http://scobleizer.com/2009/10/01/google-wave-crashes-on-beach-of-overhype/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
All Comments
When I wrote what I did, I was careful to suggest that Wave is being compared most to e-mail, and that's how I addressed it. I don't believe it's a replacement for any social network.
There's nothing wrong with being an edge case unless you don't realize it.
Robert, you should take a look at my extremely messy Lotus Notes enterprise installation, clogged by hundreds of emails with hilarious subjects like "Re: Rif: R: Fwd: Rif: Re: Artwork XYZ". You would understand for sure how more effective and ordered could be a Wave in these situations, where all the replies are listed inside the same thread, where thanks to the playback you can rewind the wave, and where actions are extremely flexible.
Google Wave is not trying to be Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.; it is not attempting to replace them. They are towers in the city of social networking residing on the continent of collaborative publishing, which is only one of the many "continents" that Wave is attempting to be the ground that they can be connected by.
The above is a fairly poor metaphor that can't bear much scrutiny, but I say it because I know of no other way to express how big and overarching that Wave is; how much it can do.
I think it's going to take some time to fully understand its potential. Announcements that say it is useless or doesn't bring anything new to the table seem to me to be fairly myopic.
Consider its usage purely as a translation machine, or as a way to keep ongoing track of a subject using a Wave as a "feed reader plus", where not only can you include RSS feeds but have it be bot-populated by Tweets, blog posts and more that match keyword criteria--including ones that are foreign languages, thanks to its translator (I understand that there is a search engine that largely already does this. However, you can now use have a bot populate your wave with that engine's output and then do things with *it*).
So give it some time. There's going to be some mind-blowing uses of this thing to come in the coming weeks, months and years.
You should compare google wave with wiki's or google docs.
It is pretty usefull and it can boost productivity a lot - if you look at the right use-case.
Think of people who work on the same document and send emails between themselfs back and forth to discuss the document.
Google Wave has nothing to do with Lifestreaming or conversation about a single asset (like on FF) - it's about collaboration on a document - like wikis or google docs does - and the conversatino around it. (which now often takes place via email)
And for that use-case it might be a big win situation and not disappointing at all :)
But, yes, there is a use case there. I'm just not quite sure what it is and because of the productivity killing noise I'd only use it with small groups that I care about an awful lot.
That is exactly how I was expecting to use wave. I never though of it as a replacement to twitter, FF, or even email completely. I expected it to replace emailing word documents around to my project teams.
But Robert, I think it's healthy to push the discussion in that direction: what is really the difference between wave and google docs?
(and tbh I don't have an good short answer yet)
Just a few bullet points:
- you have a "structured" way to leave comments and discuss
- you can run applications within a wave and collaborate with apps
- you can embbed waves elsewhere
- google wave is build based upon an open protocol
- the replay function gives you a nice way to understand the process
- waves might be more visible to you than google docs ;)
- it combines email and google docs in a better way I think
Yeah maybe that's it. You will never rely on a conversation within a google doc, but will have an email conversatin around it. Waves does combine this?
I am really just "brainstorming" :) So - does this convince you, Robert?
No doubt that matters quite a lot!
Well, I also use Google Chat, Skype or any other IM to talk about stuff on the web. The interesting thing is to get the conversation in a close relation to the stuff we talk about.
That is the reason you use friedfeed, isn't it? You have the conversation directly related to the content you talk about, and not somewhere on an IM tool, where it will disappear after a couple of seconds ;)
So you have a kind of persistance and presence on Goolge Wave - compared to the google docs and google chat combo, you have mentioned before.
Thanks a lot Robert for pushing the conversation into a direction that makes us think about the real value of it - I still think, that Wave has more added value, than you argue here in the comments at the moment, but that is also just an impression and time will tell ;)
Looking forward to see you at the Gillmor Gang :)
Google knows that Wave is no big app killer at the moment. They are risking this uber-early release in order to foster as much API innovation as fast as possible. The real stories here are this very aggressive developer/prosumer strategy and Wave as an API.
I agree with Sebastian here that the comparison of wave with twitter/facebook/friendfeed is not correct. Judging it for something it is not would surely not lead to a positive response.
Google Wave is a mix of different protocols to enable real-time collaboration. The current Google Wave Client is Google's window into using that service.
In the future there may be lots of different clients that are based on Google Wave. E.g., instead of the current Wikipedia text entry box there may be a much richer edit-tool based on Google Wave where editors can invite their collaborators, see proposed changes in real-time, add translation bots.
Or imagine Google Docs enriched with Google Wave: invite participants that do not have a google docs account, replay the discussion that led to a specific bit of text.
You've made an important point in pointing out that wave is great tech for developers to leverage. I'd love to see collaborative media editing or music recording done using wave state.
Wave is much more than a text editor, it's a way for groups of people to manipulate data together.
That you can get spammed is really a huge problem and that is close to email, because you have an unique identifier, that enables everybody to "spam" you easily - absolutely a problem - agree with you totally on this point. Especially as you unfold your identity to every wave participant in the moment you get added to one ;)
I agree with you on this small groups focus. It will work in teams that you know and which are commited to some "rules of participation" well. I use wave since the developer alpha and "big wave surfing" (with hundrets of devs in one wave) is a really a big mess and it simply doesn't scale.
So if the expectation of the masses goes towards the direction of a friendfeed / lifestreamig / real-time-conversation-focused like tool, it will be disappointing and will crash on the beach for sure ;)
So let's highlight the collaboration aspect in this discussion :)
Anyone who was expecting something other than email 2.0 was misinformed. Sure, you could use email a bit like Twitter, for instance, but all your friends would get angry at you for cluttering their inbox. Just use Twitter. Don't use a hammer as a screwdriver.
And on that note, unsubscribed. Scoble hasn't said anything useful for months if not years.
You may as well say Facebook is 'email 2.0'.
protocol, and a command-line Wave client.
The whole structure of the Wave system is federated too, just like
email.
As many people can write clients as want to, it's just early days now.
E-mail is already trained into people, along with a whole stack of architecture that is built aroud it: boring things like mailing lists, authentication, directory services, LDAP, corporate VPNs, anti-spam/anti-virus, attachment handling and so on. We've got stacks of logic around it. And it's damn simple: you can write an app that reads mail from POP3/IMAP in about five or six lines in a high-level scripting language like Perl, Python or Ruby. All the niche uses that e-mail has gotten will never get moved over to Wave. There's not a compelling reason for someone like me to rewrite all the crufty little scripts that run just fine on top of e-mail.
the ground. Email has the advantage of coming from the earliest days
of the Internet, so it started ubiquitous and has only grown from there.
I very much doubt it's going to go away either. Doesn't mean it's not
a flawed technology, coming as it does from the era when everyone
trusted each other and spoofing and spam weren't problems.
That's the mission statement of Wave, to build an e-mail system from
the ground up with today's technology. Necessarily it's more complex.
At the start it's probably going to be buggy, slow and have a rubbish
ecosystem. Doesn't mean it's not worth having a go, and I've still got
gmail while I wait.
Yes, Email is currently everywhere and very ingrained in everything we do. But does that mean we HAVE to keep using email forever? Do we want to keep using email forever? Technology is getting better and better yet email is pretty much the same as it always was.
Of course, noone would expect the system can be changed overnight and everyone weened off into something new. It would take years to evolve into a new system, but that doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't happen. Personally I like the idea that someone is actually giving this a go and seeing what they can do. The guys at Wave had an idea, and aren't afraid to go for it and see what happens. Personally, I welcome the idea of a new communication system to take over from email. Will it work? Who knows. This is after all just the beginning. It's a preview and a first release. Many many things can change and evolve, and people will develop for the platform and help to mould it into something better.
Inventing your niche uses required a certain ingenuity innately present in the human brain. It's still there. Re-engage this quality to produce a new solution to the problem using the tools available. You will be amazed at what you come up with.
The natural result of Twitter rules would be that, if you don't follow your followers back, the best of them will unfollow as they approach their 2000 follow limit because they'd be otherwise boxed in. IMHO one is not using Twitter properly if one doesn't follow back everyone he cares about keeping as followers.
So I would disagree that Robert misused Twitter before he got "overloaded" and then started to use Twitter properly when he unfollowed everyone.
If Pepsi did that, it would hurt their brand. They follow everyone as we have to as well (the 60% that aren't outright spammers). @UnitedAirlines is only following 1200 of 36000 potential customers back and that may be a huge mistake. Do they really think that the dissed people are going to think "We understand. United needs to see everything those 1200 VIPs write."
Who actually tries to read their Twitter river (not a stream after you follow 100+)? If one wants to read a selected stream, there are plenty of filter apps for that or one can open a new account, make it look respectable enough not to be blocked, and then follow the select group of ppl you want to keep track of.
The only productivity-inducing technology are those of a different software generation: email and IM.
Maybe you should get your basic facts straight (from someone who lives a non-hype life), before you go ranting about things.
--Kyle
And Twitter/Friendfeed/Facebook/et cetera *can* improve productivity, if you have the willpower restrict yourself to a couple of minutes out of every hour (something which, unfortunately, I do not possess). Scientific research suggests that two-minute breaks every hour can significantly improve concentration.
It's been used by programmers for a very long time as a quick way to communicate about issues - why do you think IRC was so popular and still exists? AIM, XMPP, etc. are just modern versions of that, and now New Media-ites have joined the ranks of those that use it for work-related purposes.
Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed absolutely does not. There's no arguing this point - they do not contribute valuable, productive data or resources.
--Kyle
But on Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed: There *is* arguing that point. Like this. And then there's the fact that it can be excellent in marketing, even if you can't work it into production. Et cetera.
you either had an over inflated opinion of Wave before you used it, or you went in thinking "it better jump out at me as completely revolutionary or it sucks". Get over yourself man
Anyway, I know that being one of the first to write down your thoughts on something new is good for the clicks and so forth, but you're judging way to quickly.
Yes, currently everybody does have their eyes on Wave so it's a natural thing to watch everybody type down their lines in real time. That will settle down. As soon as people will get used to the product, this part of the noise issue isn't going to matter anymore.
Also: I don't agree on the noise factor. Try building different folders for different kind of waves and they stop navigating like an email client and start using search. I found it quite liberating to split all the waves and at the same time to have access to them without doing a lot of navigation.
Furthermore, I think that Wave will create a lot new fresh ideas. Yes, the noise argument can be very valid, but I'm pretty sure that the productivity part is a stronger one with Wave. Writing blog postings, creating whole project centric waves, creating a photo set together (why didn't flickr think of that?), etc. etc.
I tried that line on thousands of people when I was evangelizing FriendFeed. It rarely worked there either. Sigh.
I agree with you, but first impressions do matter and I'm looking for tools to let me work with large numbers of people.
This is NOT Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed.
It's more like email and IM getting together and having a baby.
BUT. New tools tend to change the way we communicate. Blogs did that, Twitter did that especially. I think it will take a while for Wave to get actual attention from the mainstream, but when it will start getting a substantial number of users and we will see how company's and projects will start building their workflows in Wave ... well I think we will see another big change in the way we communicate. It doesn't necessarily compete with Twitter, but it might make it obsolete (just an idea, I'm not really saying that it will).
Wasn't that the initial idea though? At least the impression I got from watching the original demo, was that this was a way to refresh the email system and bring it more into the future. I could be completely wrong in that respect as i've not had chance to use Wave yet. I imagined using it like I use email, but with the added functionality of integrating chat if the other person is online, threaded conversations and the ease of sharing content. Since email is generally only used with either individuals or smaller groups of people I wouldn't imagine noise being an issue.
Could it be that people are over-hyping it themselves by trying to compare with other social networks? Should we actually be comparing it against email/im and what avantages/disadvantages it has over that system?
Back in 1994, while developing simulated open collaborative networks we ran up against the wall.
It's worse than a kid in a candy store -- here you realize that the candy you are looking at is being eaten and slurped on by 20 other kids while you're still deciding if you gonna buy it.
Google wave will make the term "unpublic" very popular soon.
(unpublic is a term I like for describing the intermix between wanting an item to be public, yet not quite modifiable, yet sharable, but retaining some sense of "ownership", a weird mix to be sure).
It is a BIG CONCEPT to digest, and will take years to master.
(I've been waiting for a WAVE-like system since 1994, it's going to be interesting :-)
Obviously it isn't going to pose any threat to Facebook or any other social network. Not yet at least anyway as you have pointed out with it's various kinks and so forth.
Another point is.......isn't this only a beta? I may have misunderstood but isn't this time between now and when they release it to the public supposed to be used by the Google Wave team and independent developers alike to improve it for when it is 'done'? How can you be so underwhelmed by an application in its early beta stages?
enjoy the super-Scoble-Multi-Life™
you are a communication powerplant. a super-human-aggregator, a wave.
Me
I find it hard to keep up with mail & chat & social networks.
(unlike you I'm rather picky > just 30 Facebook friends)
So
Since I'm not you I welcome aggregation within this select
group very much, it seems natural.
Or instead, why don't you try using Twitter for collaboration purposes? It's stupid, it's not what the tool was meant to do.
Who pigves there email address to everyone besides Scoble?
Other products growing bigger than Scoble's mind view point:
Android Mobile OS Platform
So, taking it from that point - do you give your phone number or e-mail address to everyone? Do you have email chit-chats with everyone on the internet about topics nobody cares (like for example about what kind of service email is, like you do it now on wave)? Woudn´t you get overwhelmed by all the incoming e-mail responses? Do you reply to every incoming spam mail?
Why do you use a service for the wrong things or overexpect and therefore overhype a service and then complain, that it does not deliver what you expected? I don´t get it ...
Wave isn't the Twitter killer - it is the Outlook/Exchange & Office killer. Google Apps offers a very compelling story for knowledge workers to make the move, but it isn't enough - for 'email is email' is often the case against change. Change is a difficult sale. Wave changes the discussion entirely and provides another spearhead for Google to drive through the heart of MSFT in the enterprise.
Wave must be applied to a specific task (or set of tasks) to be useful - a specific task with specific people. Do you email, IM, collaborate on docs, and make decisions with 'everyone'?
Google Wave offers the speed, flexibility, and freedom of collaboration we all enjoy online to the knowledge worker of the enterprise who still suffers at the hands of the Cruel King - Outlook. For all the hype around Google Apps, MSFT's war chest is as strong as they come. Wave + Apps provides David his stone.
You completely miss the point my friend!
If I was you I'd take this post off the net, it ridiculous!
Of couirse it's not a Twitter killer, it never was intended for it.
And I really thought you would realise what you're looking at. This app is still developing, for developers and people to deliver input to the team. What is it that you have actually seen?
To call this "review" premature is an understatement. Rather give some useful input on the forums or other channels, that would be real contr4ibution.
You wrote an absolutely tunnel-visioned and upset post about something great new thing.
Maybe you just want some more visitors with this unfair post. But i think you should stop posting crap!!!
The Wave infrastructure is going to be utilized for something actually useful by the API developers and users. This use is yet to be find.
So there is no overhype, because not the GUI is hyped, but rather the protocol.
However, the final word on the whole thing was this: Google wave has a learning curve. That's right, when people first use it they tend to try to use it as an e-mail or IM replacement. This is WRONG, and it isn't anywhere near where the power of wave lies.
Don't write it off just yet, when we get the federation of APIs working more closely together, and we get this puppy embedded on more sites, then you'll see how great it really is. :)
ALSO THIS ISN'T TWITTER WTF
Thanks for clarifying for us that email-like systems don't replace Twitter, and that having to many open chats sucks. Brilliant observations.
This is going to replace forums and OSS is going to fly forward with this kind of dev tool.
I dont want email after seeing this!
I think it takes forums to a whole new level and it's an evolutionary step they've needed for quite some time.
Adding more than 10 people to a wave may not be the best idea, or maybe you need to set up some ground rules for each wave.
For example if you are working on a single document you can easily see what several people are saying and so on. However it depends on how you use it. It is good for collaboration but may not exactly be good for fun.
The key here is that at the moment not everyone you might want to communicate with is on Wave. So people are making public waves - which are not productive. Private waves (the default) are quiet and can be very productive. Like you suggested in your post - make some private waves with friends if they have invites.
You kinda lost a bit of respect for not standing back, taking a deep breath, and looking at the bigger picture. Not because it is the perfect tool for everything - but because it isn't. What IS it good for?
I suggest creating another wave account - with a nice quiet/secret username - and inviting your colleagues, for work related discussions.
Rinse, Repeat. Rewrite. Constructive Criticism.
Re: Real time world comment: YOU are the one who can't take your eyes off the screen to filter the real time inundation. I've got a handle on mine, pal.
Wasn't so long ago "They" also thought the telephone would be good for listening to concerts.
Turn off your concert mode - turn on stereo headphones and you'll see.
It'll be cool as soon as we all figure it out and stop trying to use it for something it doesn't do well.
I can't help but wonder if you can filter your wave inbox to only show you your 20 most contacted buddies/coworkers? Would seem to me that is a good place to start.
I still say: Being the first to off-handedly poo-poo this platform without actually making an effort to try it - is nothing less than being first to market - and thats page-hit whoring, my friend.
~jake
Now, you did tell everyone to invite you at googlewave... are you starting to feel like using your new twitter strategy with GW will be better?
No, Twitter lets me listen to who +I+ choose and it's in a simple river. Google Wave is like trying to listen to a noisy cocktail party and keep up with all conversations. Twitter is also public, so I can repurpose everything. Google Wave? I can't repurpose anything there and, it even creates yet another silo where information will go to disappear.
When i got into the GoogleWave Developer Sandbox this was the first thing I realized. It compartmentalizes information just like things have been before the advent of Twitter.
Watch the demo video from Google I/O when they first introduced the product - *that* is how it is supposed to be used (as it stands).
Of course, you will get many people that use it as an email/IM replacement which has the potential to be a huge productivity drain. In my view though, having the ability to create these little mini-communities called Waves for different projects could be hugely beneficial if you use it in a way that is productive for you.
I agree that it is a bit "busy" and all over the place, but can see the potential of selectively enabling certain features to get what you as an individual find useful.
It's different from most things out there which is why (I think so at least) people are not ready to embrace it. The wave will go on and it will become very useful to some while it might not represent anything past another beta test for the rest. Same as you raving about FriendFeed, I know plenty of people who find it useless and even borderline annoying, different flavors for different people.
I think in general the public has heard over and over that Wave is the Twitter killer and you're right it is not. But what it does offer is a great way for like minded people to easily share ideas and work together to solve problems.
About your advices - you can't control (and that's the most annoying thing ever) who's your new Wave friends, whether you invited them or not, they can reach you (no delete, block, nothing)
And, cause there's no setting, I'm always online :-\
1. When anyone updates a Wave that you are participating in, it does pop to the top of the page.
2. Wave will make everyone 10 times more productive than Email, Facebook, Twitter and Frienfeed. Basically it's going to be one place to monitor updates and response to all your online activities.
3. The killer app in Wave are the public Waves. Basically this is much better than Disqus and Friendfeed to keep track of all your online activities. Basically it makes all your online activities much more relevant by them not just disappearing in the web, but you storing, monitoring, updating, creating all your online activities through waves.
Try it again..
Now imagine having that wave in your wave client simply showing up to the top of your "list of blog posts that you follow" (also can be filtered by which type of blogs), click on an updated wave and it jumps you directly to the new content.
I predict that Wave Clients will soon be the RSS/comment reader of choice, and the blog publisher of choice for most people. Want to post a new entry on your blog? Simply create a new wave, then monitor all comments inside of it, done deal. If you want, you can let your blog visitors or your wave feed subscribers see while you are editing a new blog entry in real-time and they can even comment and chat with you while you are writing it to actually help you write better blog posts. And then also everyone can see your changes in real-time and play them back.
That wiki collaboration function of wave does not have to be everywhere. Comments are edited by commenters, while the blog post can be written by one or several bloggers according to the creator of that blog post. And obviously you need to login to your blog using a remote Wordpress login process.
Great post Robert.
Now I'm not so excited about getting my hands on an invite...I'm working towards greater productivity, not away from it...
Hmmm....
I think it has huge potential in groups but there is no way this could scale ... at least the way it is just now.
I had similar impressions. I was using and hacking little bit with the dev sandbox. I felt it was too confusing for conversations but I do see a lot of power coming in the form of robots and gadgets. I wrote a little about liaise and google wave as a sample. http://bit.ly/q6MHZ
perhaps you meant "the rocky shore of overhype"?
I have 8 available invites, the first eight to email just your email to worldlifesite@gmail.com will get them.
I like email. It lets me decide who is important when I should read their emails. I don't want to see them typing in real time. If I want an instant reply I'll IM the person. The only possible use I see for Google Wave is collaborative document creation -- like for school or work. That's it. That being said, better options exist already for collaboration.
It's not just document collaboration, it's updating websites (you can paste a wave into any web page using a widget, and it will auto-update whenever the wave is updated). Robert could write each of his blog posts as a wave from his wave client (Google aren't the only people providing these, by the way - it's an open protocol so anyone can), and edit them if necessary. Replies/comments could come in as part of the wave too, so he can manage all of them in one piece of software, along with any other public conversations on the web that he's been participating that are also part of a wave, as well as his privates one with his family, friends etc., maybe with some cool tech PR peeps, or whatever.
Also there is the wave playback/review facility which I don't think I've seen anywhere else done in the same way (literally works like playing a YouTube video, but not in the confines of a stream of video/audio - instead all of the updates that have been made, so you can step through them, like you might when you're debugging code).
There's also the whole concept of wavelets, which are the updates within a wave - info at http://www.waveprotocol.org/presentations - and waves and wavelets each individually belong on a server, like a web page, or a Google Doc. This means companies can run their own wave server, just like they currently run their own mail servers, but now all communications within a particular conversation are managed/grouped/linked all together (as a wave), instead of disjointed individual e-mails that get messy etc. and mangled between different e-mail systems.
Like you said I think Google Wave will take off with the fact that developers can use it as a platform for other things. I plan on doing some work with a few apps using the wave api. Certainly not a Twitter killer. The only real innovation is what they did on the developers end. There are some amazing innovations with the construction of the app itself.
I just don't see it being widely used and advantageous for the general public.
Thanks for the accurate review :)
Chris Lorenz
New Media Developer
Pacific Dental Services
http://www.pacificdentalservices.com/blog
Productivity is a human limitation, not a technical one. Wave gives you access to much more realtime information but it's really up to the person to make sure they're on track and using any tool effectively.
I'd say give it some time to grow :)
Thanks again.
Just like it took 2+ years for a critical mass of people to understand Twitter and create all kinds of use cases for it, we'll see something similar with Google Wave.
And why? I don't understand the arbitrary 100k number. That's enough to "know someone" who has an invite, but you maybe didn't. That's a bummer. And it's a real bummer when you know people who got one, send a "nomination" and even that isn't getting to you. To lump on, you see people getting them and not using them, or panning it and moving on.
Why not have a set number of users per session or per hour and let all of us try it? At least Microsoft let everyone play with Windows 7, and that's no trivial matter. This isn't even 37signals grade yet, but somehow we're supposed to take it on faith that it's so amazing...
Anyway, as a person who could have spent more time with his kids today instead of messing about with other collaboration tools, perhaps I'm just being a crank. But this sort of insidious elitism is becoming the defining characteristic of the valley. For those of us outside that little bubble, it feels crappy.
So far I'm still "on my own" with my Wave account, as apparently I'm the only one in my contacts who already has a Wave account. So I'll still have to be "overwhelmed" by massive parallel edits :-)
Olivier Biot
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=ts-nAAAA...
Google Wave seems to be a pretty implementation of these concepts.
http://tommorris.org/blog/2009/08/08#When:15:50:47
The whole thing is so stupid. I mean, it's supposed to be an e-mail killer. As I said in the review, every dumb phone on the market has POP3/IMAP/SMTP support. Everything talks e-mail. The only problem with e-mail is some people are too stupid to use it correctly. Well, I have a simple solution to that: stop talking to them. E-mail, if everyone does it right, is quicker and more flexible than Wave.
From what I have seen so far, if Wave is aimed at replacing email, it will fail. I do see use-cases in niche scenarios for tight groups working on projects that have tons of real-time activity streams. However, other than that, the product appears way too noisy to be an effective replacement for email.
Email succeeded - and has continued to succeed several decades hence - because it is SIMPLE.
In contrast, just staring at screen-shots of Wave gives me a headache due to visual pollution and noise. That is a very bad sign.
But so are you!
Anyway, I am still waiting for an invite.
It seems we've gotten overhyped on one aspect - the "real time" aspect, that's not what this is (though it does demo well). this is "Google Docs" for email - the point is the message doesn't "bounce and fork", I send a wave to a couple of people and all the conversation stays in the wave - I don't get a forked set of responses. This is the powerful part. The "real time" aspect is actually born of necessity - I might reply when someone else is replying, as forks aren't allowed the developers have two choices: "lock" a wave, or make it "real time", they chose the latter. (Actually "locking" wouldn't work anyway - imagine someone opened a wave to reply then got distracted, how long would the wave be locked for?)
Probably we'll all need to learn some discipline: don't create too many waves, keep the conversation in a wave, and don't add too many participants. But committees have been paralyzed by these conversational problems long before anyone even invented email!
The developer aspects seem the most exciting, and I'm sure integration with Twitter et al will help put Google Wave into it's proper context (which is probably more like email than anything else). My worry is wave spam, and wave malware - it's bound to happen and could swamp the system really easily.
So is it "overhyped"? Well I think too much attention has been paid to the "real time" aspect, which is a necessity of its "non-bouncing" nature, and not really a feature in itself.
I don't really get much noise from the IM.. and the good thing about e-mail is that the noise I get I can organize it and ignore what I'm not interested in ... I imagine that if you're a teenager things might be different.
However, there are some serious problems with the wave approach if you want to use it for project management. The first being that you need to add accountability eg make sure someone is responsible for driving the work forward (Kalexo uses a soccer ball metaphor for that). And second, you need to priotize waves and set deadlines etc.
So it is pretty clear to me that waves won't make much inroad into the project management space - it does only part of what is required, and focuses on the wrong angle (real-time collaboration).
Once the hype dies down, this will become a truely powerful communication and collaboration platform. I'm particularly excited about its potential within the enterprise.
I do agree the app is overhyped. Let's hope it gets launched soon so we can stop the madness.
I was never too excited about wave (not to knock on google) anyway..Lets see how it evolves. Appreciate your honesty about wave Robert and this time i really don't feel this was a marketing strategy, or as someone put it "A post just to get clicks, etc. etc."
But why would people switch from Facebook (or Friendfeed) to Wave if they have all their friends already in other places? Haven't figured it out yet. Still trying.
And btw, Google -- please add Wave to Google Docs! This is a real world scenario where it could be helpful.
It's such a big idea, I think the folks at Google were smart in opening it up to the Developer community to beat it up and get their help on figuring out specific applications to make it manageable, relevant and productive.
So now, you've beat it up a little. How WOULD you use it to be productive?
John Coonen
It was presented as a revolutionary idea that needs community input to work. "Over-hyped" I would save for stuff like the Segway, the GM Chevy Volt and most of the James bond movies in the last 20 years.
- John Coonen
For this reason alone, I took his "negativity" with a grain of salt. If I were Google I would be absolutely thrilled with this blog post (and the Louis Gray post here http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/10/google-wa... + the Jacinta and Jesse post here http://www.freelancesocialmedia.com/google-wave....
Oscar Wilde said "The only thing worse than being talked about is NOT being talked about". Robert would be persona non grata at Google only if he completely *ignored* this launch.
This is dream coverage...at least with the long and lively comment section.
For those who talk about "too much noise" what about the fact that I often get overwhelmed because I have to constantly visit Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, IM, etc, etc? If I comment on blogs or in a bulletin board, I also have to remember to keep checking to see if anyone has commented back to me. Wave is not meant to supplement all of the disparate services. It's meant to integrate them!
It may take a while, but I welcome the day that I can post on someone's Facebook wall, send someone else an email, post a tweet, and comment on some obscure blog, and then be able to track ALL responses IN ONE PLACE while chatting live with my Mom (and also see that someone just commented on that Flickr photo I just posted). It all matters on how you use it.
I fear Robert that you try to have too many conversations and see this as yet another service to add to the overload. Again, my hope is that it will someday integrate them. I know it's a huge paradigm shift - and it may never come to pass. But it is an evolution that I think needs to happen.
With Google Docs, it's difficult to discuss points within the document without people adding their name followed by their comment (and often some highlights so you can notice the comment) to certain sections under discussion. The result is a colourful mess that has to be hand edited out, which means that information is now harder to get to (need to look in history).
With email tennis as you put it, you're constantly trying to maintain the document as some people will write replies in one place while others will reply based on the last email and so on. The end result is often long threads of emails with comments totally unstructured and very difficult to go back and consult.
Google Wave seems to be a solution to this problem and probably many other similar use cases. I don't see at all what it has to do with twitter or facebook where you're simply broadcasting and not really collaborating on a document.
http://freegooglewaveinvites.com/google-wave-in...
I think that is the primary use case for Wave. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to bootstrap collaboration in a new collaborative service like Wave.
It requires a critical mass of your collaborative team to agree to migrate to the new service. It also means you need to abandon what can be years of content and start with a blank slate or for the new service to provide power import facilities. At the moment, it appears Wave requires the former: starting from a blank slate. I personally was surprised the initial public alpha did not include better integration (at least a one way import) with Google Apps Premier for access to GMail, Contacts, Docs, and Sites.
New collaborative tools need powerful export facilities as well. They must recognize that even if a collaborative team successfully migrates and adopts a new service, it still needs to provide the resulting content to consumers outside of the service in traditional formats (eg. Microsoft Office, PDF, Web Pages, EMail, etc.)
Wave's underlying XMPP-based technology looks promising, but for Wave to be successful, it needs to address the adoption logistics.
If email were new and you exchanged email addresses with everyone you could, and then everyone proceeded to sit at their computers and just send random emails for several hours, it would be completely overwhelming too. (Wait--did I just describe an office?)
Cheers,
Marc
oh my... it's awesome,
just seen the video also on you tube, it simply rocks... wow
http://tinyurl.com/ybdtx6k
There are a few left
I think it's over hyped by bloggers and the media.
I would be alot happier if Google focused on products which weren't aimed at building huge distribution channels for adsense...
Have you been able to drag in any file and share it?
Have you dragged in your Twitter feed?
You can get free google wave invites from http://bit.ly/invitewave
well i tried and got mine after waiting 2 days.Feeling lucky lol
yes Google is still god with a little gee.
BTW, the above opinion is in response to Google's claim of Wave as a replacement for email. I do see potential as a collaboration tool utilized inside a company. However, that is an entirely different market from the one they claim to be focused on.
Obama of course, Eco-friendly printing brought peace to the world. The "Peace Prize" is Eco-friendly printing not so much Obama's praise, but rather that of the former American presidents, especially Bush's denial. In other words, an American president, as long as he bad war, Eco-friendly printing it means that brought peace to the world, it would give him "peace prize" bar. The majority of Eco-friendly printing people in the world, the eyes, of course, is not convincing, and it is Eco-friendly printing caused by vibration of the reasons for this news.
Connaught pvc cards
Committee commends Obama in strengthening international pvc cards cooperation to promote denuclearization and other aspects of the "outstanding pvc cards contribution", but pvc cards in fact his efforts on these matters are still at an pvc cards initial stage, pvc cards promote international cooperation,