Google Wave at London GTUG
October 28, 2009
The folks at Google Wave have been banging the jungle drums throughout Europe in their current tour, educating people about Wave and discussing plans for the future. We headed out to their London event for Wave-related excitement (plus beer and pizza, of course). Here is what we heard…
There are now many hundreds of thousands of active Google Wave users, showing that Google has been busy scaling since their release of 100,000 invites one month ago. There were about two million invite requests in the queue at the launch of the public preview.
The Google Wave team is aware of the existing problems, especially as they use Wave as their primary collaboration tool. For example, the “lonely waver” problem, where a new user will have no contacts. Also, users seem to be happy with the design of Google’s Wave interface, but speed and stability are known to be poor.
Unexpected uses of Wave have also emerged, such as the use of public waves for back-channel chat during TV shows (even though public waves only represent 5% of all activity). You can find public waves by searching for ‘with:public’, a feature that was not originally intended for the preview.
The Wave team also addressed their lack of involvement in the development of a client/server protocol, citing other priorities and limit resources. Although I understand that the focus is currently on the server/server federation protocol, I am concerned that the lack of client/server guidance will hamper progress.
I was also concerned by the lack of any clear distinction between features specific to Google Wave, and features that will be interoperable between future clients. For example, I am not convinced that the wave team have carefully considered the implications of deploying robots and gadgets to third party wave clients. I would hate to see Google Wave to become the Microsoft Exchange of the wave protocol.
Update: I have uploaded the event photos to Flickr.
Why Google Wave Sucks, and why Wave Rocks
October 2, 2009
Right now, 100,000 Google Wave invites are winging their way across the Internet. This means that around 100,000 wide-eyed enthusiasts are about to log in, have a few conversations and quickly proclaim: “Google Wave sucks!”
And it’s true – in many ways it does. Yes, Google Wave offers real-time chat, embedding gadgets, threaded conversations and private discussions. With this I do not argue. My gripe lies with the Google Wave client. I am very worried that Google’s buggy interface, loaded with showcase features, will disillusion a whole swathe of technology pioneers.
This would be a massive shame, as the underlying Wave technology offers a great step forward for online communication. Wave has potential to supersede our decades-old emailing systems, which offer no threading, no interactive content, no standards-compliant presentation system, and an excruciatingly limited support for binary data. Wave gives us a technology designed for today’s web. RIP email.
However, the majority of web-goers are not going realise these benefits for some time. I mean this quite literally.
We, as app developers, will be able to benefit from Wave almost immediately. We can now build apps with entire communication systems based upon Wave. Are you building a photo-sharing app? Well, each photo’s comments can be a Wave. Are you creating a social media app? Then each conversation can be a Wave. Once the Wave client libraries appear (soon), this will be just one less thing for developers to worry about.
The real prize for everyday users will come when we have two things:
- Some good Wave clients
- The first apps with Wave-based discussion
Then, we get to the cool part: you can now fire up your Wave client (a beautifully sculpted Mac app, perhaps). From there you can access, and participate in, every conversation you have been part of, from photo comments to that client brief you were waiting for.
Now your everyday, run-of-the-mill, users begin to realise the usefulness of Wave. No longer will they inevitably lose track of their dispersed conversations, as everything can be handled from a single, unified interface.
This is when Wave will start to eat away at email. Getting people to actually use Wave means the battle is almost won, and the path is paved for using Wave to communicate directly with friends, family and colleagues.
Now, developers, listen up. It is you that will make this happen, so think about building Wave support into your next app, or even start work on a killer Wave client. You may even make some cash in the process.
The wicked wonderful Wavetastic blog
October 2, 2009
Welcome to the new, and oh-so exciting, Wavetastic blog. We have created this blog to record our thoughts and ideas surrounding the Wave protocol, and the Google Wave interface. The idea for Wavetastic came after an informal get-together between a few web development, design, and user experience (UX) professionals. There were lots of great thoughts and ideas and we felt a blog would be a great place to promote some open discussion.
So, watch this space, the first post will be appearing shortly…
