A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave 197
rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."
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A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave
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Rebuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
* What happens when you have conversation with more than say five people.
It becomes harder to manage, just like an IRC, IM or real-life conversation with more than 5 people. It gets noisy, confusing and you will probably miss quite a bit. Wave isn't magic, it will have limitations just like anything else does. Or perhaps I am wrong and it will have tools to manage this, either way it's a non-point.
* Key Stroke by Key Stroke View Could Be Annoying
Could be useful too. Turn it off if you don't like it. Another non-point.
* Editing Ability Could Get Out of Control
There is a history bar. Presumably there will be a history tab/page. What exactly do you want from Wave? Something that allow the entire playerbase of WoW to interact in a single document or something to allow collaberation between 1-20 people working on a FOSS project, or in a business?
* Too Complicated for the Masses
Email is too complicated for the masses. The Internet is too complicated for the masses. The ones that picked up email and internet will pick up Wave, if they have to.
Essentially, this "look at Wave" made me remember this comic [penny-arcade.com] (the bottom one).
Too integrated (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems every company seeks the holy grail of integrated software. One interface to do everything and time and again the general public ignores these "advances" (anyone remember GEOS?)
Why? Let's look at the latest massively successful "product", Twitter. Summary of twitter: Send 140 Characters to the world. Wow. Stunningly complex (from the user's perspective), huh?
What made Google so successful was doing one thing and doing it well. Wave holds 0 interest for me (disclaimer: neither does twitter but at least I get it). Another integrated communication method to take all my avenues of communication and point it to one. Oof. Sorry. If there is one thing we have too much of these days is communications. At least having to use separate programs or channels slows it down just a little. Who wants more mail, more IMs or more anything?
-Joe
40 minutes (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everyone keep saying to watch the first 40 minutes. The most exciting part and rarely mentioned in articles comes at the end. They plan to make the entire protocol and the majority of their implementations open source so that anybody can install their own wave servers. Thus it can be a full replacement for email as you can have your own corporate wave server independent from google with all the features and people on your system can send out a wave to someone on google system just as they can with corporate email.
What about spam? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I am really concerned about is SPAM.
Real time bayesian filtering? Not really. And that's the most common solution.
Re:Please repost your article. (Score:2, Insightful)
Geeze FF with adblock and some half decent filters.
Re:Too integrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Wave holds 0 interest for me
I'm not all that interested in the latest Porsche. Is that because Porsches are bad cars or because I'm not in the target audience?
If there is one thing we have too much of these days is communications. At least having to use separate programs or channels slows it down just a little.
I agree, we use computers too often as well, at least downgrading the RAM from 2GB to 256MB slows it down just a little. And the Internet, gosh darn how I hate it, at least I can cripple it by downloading ad/spyware.
Who wants more mail, more IMs or more anything?
I don't want more, I want the same amount in the same unified program.
What made Google so successful was doing one thing and doing it well.
Geese, I wouldn't want "What did Google do right" for the million dollar question.
Re:Rebuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
It becomes harder to manage, just like an IRC, IM or real-life conversation with more than 5 people. It gets noisy, confusing and you will probably miss quite a bit. Wave isn't magic, it will have limitations just like anything else does. Or perhaps I am wrong and it will have tools to manage this, either way it's a non-point.
It's non-point also because he criticized the default, reference implementation interface. No one said this the only possible way you can look at waves. I can imagine an interface which is much more stripped down, maybe even by disallowing some features of the protocol to keep it simple.
Since the main point is the protocol I expect several different GUIs developed for it, each with a slightly different philosophy. The most important thing is the protocol right now. A good interface is not here yet, and it will surely require several trial and errors until someone finally gets it right.
Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too integrated (Score:5, Insightful)
He lost me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, at the behest of one of my online friends I looked at the first 40 minutes of the 1 hour and 20 minute presentation from last week's Google I/O conference, and I finally had an inkling of the potential.
I tuned out right after the opening where he talks about not even bothering to watch the whole presentation. I can form my own poorly researched opinions.
Re:Please repost your article. (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox with the proper extensions just makes the web better.
Noscript/adblock doesn't solve the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
That's no different than saying "spam isn't a problem, my spam filters get almost all of it".
And I'm sure that's a few antisocial psychopaths who will immediately pop up and say "yeh, spam isn't a problem", well, I say arseholes to the lot of you.
Re:Noscript/adblock doesn't solve the problem (Score:1, Insightful)
He didn't say Noscript was the one-size-fits-all solution, he just said "Noscript." It won't solve the problem, but it will get it out of your face, which is good enough for most people.
Re:Rebuttle (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too integrated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rebuttle (Score:4, Insightful)
I can imagine an interface which is much more stripped down, maybe even by disallowing some features of the protocol to keep it simple.
Absolutely. If the author had actually watched the entire demo (rather than just the first 40 minutes), he would have seen that developers are free to design their own GUI implementations. (The demo showed a text-based, stripped down version.) And, of course, the other thing to remember is that Wave is currently a developer preview (alpha? pre-alpha?). There is a lot left to do/create/work on.
I agree with the GP post...this article addresses issues that aren't really issues.
Re:Rebuttle (Score:4, Insightful)
The author states he only watched 20 out of the 80 minute presentation. Thus his whole post ends up being a bunch of pointless nitpicking.
But at least the article does follow the There-Can-Be-Only-One mantra of Slashdotism. This will, after all, replace all email, IM, mailing lists, forums, documents, etc. You will not be able to do anything else once Wave launches later this year.
No more complex that things already are (Score:3, Insightful)
The article needs to make a better case for why wave is more complicated.
Myself, I find the status quo hugely complicated:
Switching between various native and web applications with different log-ins, hugely different ways of doing things and no easy way to search and aggregate all the information or transition between them.
I don't twitter, facebook, wiki or blog much because of the amount of effort to partipate in all of them and 'context switching' between them. It's simply to complicated.
If wave brings all these different things together under a consistent workflow, that is simplifying things greatly.
Re:Rebuttle (Score:3, Insightful)
Check the video on youtube of the Google Wave demo at Google IO conference, they show several reference implementations including one that is CLI.
Is that the same demo as the one at wave.google.com [google.com]? Because that one had one reference implementation, another server that used a copy of that with cosmetic changes, and one complete re-implementation as an ascii interface. I don't think that last one was a reference implementation (although I'm not sure), and while it was plain ascii, it didn't look like a cli either. Not everything ascii is cli, you know.
Anyway, the existence of various implementations, and the fact that you can operate your own wave server completely independent from Google's wave server, is I think the blow that makes a real killer app. It's just as decentralised as email and usenet are. You don't have to put everything on google's server. If Google ever goes down (yeah right), then other servers can just continue independent from them. It's completely unlike Facebook, Skype and many other modern not-quite killer apps, and very much like email, usenet, web and classics like that.