back to article Google Wave invites stack up - who's still playing?

Now that the hype about Google’s minimalist and actually quite fragile real-time collaboration tool has died down, the ad broker is readying common task extensions that might make it a little easier to fiddle with. Google Wave is, of course, currently at an unstable, preview stage. But that didn't stop hordes of people last …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hey!

    Web 2.0 is just so last decade. I want nothing to do with it. When can we upgrade to Web 3.0?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Grenade

      Quit using that word already

      It's just a buzzword. Even sarcastic and unfunny jokes about it do not make it a pleasant word.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    google wave

    so slow once you get past a few dozen waves, even slower if you embed content in them. Slow slow slow. And the search is a piece of retarded crap. It's unusable to anyone that isn't a geek of some sort.

    Here's waiting till it does something useful.

    Things it needs, a nice central store for getting extensions and gadgets.

    A none retarded search feature.

    To be less slow.

    Some security features.

    We shall wait and see. It is a preview but it's hardly a shinning testimate to googles abilities.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      sigh

      You have to love people who ask for "a none retarded search feature"

      1. Jerome 0

        shinning testimate

        I don't know - personally I think his post was a shinning testimate to his intelligence.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          le sigh

          and how is having to add "with:public search term" a user friendly mechanism? Come back when it's sensible.

  3. fifi
    FAIL

    almost useable.

    It would be a good tool for me, where I want to communicate, collaborate and chat to colleagues that I never, or very rarely see face to face. But, it's just too slow and flaky to be usable yet. Search doesn't always work. Can take hours, if not days, for a wave to appear in a new folder when it's been moved, adding new members to an existing wave means they sometimes can't see the historic content... the list goes on.

    I know it's in preview, but a lot of these are pretty fundamental problems, and unless some changes start to show, it's not going to go anywhere.

  4. Gerard Krupa

    Fizzled out

    I think it took 2 or 3 weeks for my invitees to all lose interest and go back to Facebook despite my efforts to woo them with a custom LOLcat extension.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Wave goodbye?

    Google did a great job of hyping up wave. Me and couple of colleagues played with it for a couple of weeks and then the novelty died off big time.

    The only thing Google can possibly do with wave is take it down the business route and hope companies will embrace a new collaboration tool, or open it up to all Gmail users and get everyone up and running.

    The 3rd possibility (in this age of interaction) is interoperability with other sites. Everyone these days has a twitter / facebook plugin, and if google can harness this, you could get all your feeds into wave and never have to visit another web app again.

    Whatever google's intentions, there are a few avenue's to explore, it just depends on how widespread this goes and willingness of people to adopt it.

  6. Jamie Kitson

    I don't know why...

    ...they haven't already integrated it with normal email and chat, then people would use it, because they wouldn't have to chose between the two.

  7. Neil Hoskins
    Badgers

    Unfortunately...

    ...it's been a bit like the time Dilbert bought the first video phone in the city... then waited for somebody to call him... and waited... and waited.

  8. Chris Haynes
    Badgers

    Erm...

    I. Just. Don't. Get. It.

    I've had an account for ages and it's utter crud.

    Like fitting wheels to a tomato, it's time-consuming and completely pointless.

  9. davenewman
    Unhappy

    Too few people on Wave

    Because I just have 14 invites spare, I cannot invite a whole class onto Google Wave to do a proper scientific test of how it helps or hinders group working.

    Virtual groups of random people are no good - I need to discuss issues with existing communities of practice of people who work together, not just those lucky enough to have a Wave account. But short of taking the train to Dublin and knocking on their door, there is no way of getting from Google enough accounts to seriously evaluate it and publish a paper on the extent to which it supports critical thinking.

    1. John 62
      Badgers

      so?

      invite a few of them and tell your invitees to invite the other ones.

    2. Sellotaped to Insanity
      Joke

      I'm sure ...

      there are plenty of people out there with invites to spare - just ask around :)

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      control group

      Surely if you were trying to do a 'proper scientific test' you would only invite half the class and the other group would be the control to compare it to

    4. Hutch

      good point!

      Based on the comments here, it seems that if you were able to get enough folks to do a "real world" test.. the performance would be very poor. This is just a "beta" though and possibly the system performance will increase in production.

      No way to tell unless you get a bunch of users willing to all test at the same time.

  10. Acitta

    Not unified messageing

    When Google introduced it, I understood it to be a unified messaging application in which I could gather together all of my email contacts and IM contacts for Jabber, ICQ, MSN, etc. But it turns out to be just another messaging silo, disconnected from everything else. I can see how it may be useful for people collaborating on a project, but unless you manage to persuade everyone you know to make Google applications their preferred ones for everything, it doesn't seem so useful. On the positive side, kudos to Google for trying to rethink Internet messaging. New ideas that start off small can change the way everyone does things.

  11. Neil Gerstenberg

    It's not bad...

    ... but I admit it's sometimes slow and not exactly 100% reliable. I'm currently using it to collaborate on an iPhone app project, and it's very useful to be able to set up waves for different aspects of development, and insert comments, ideas and graphics at any point in the wave without duplicating everything and getting into a mess as you would with email.

    That said, nobody else I know is remotely interested, so I''ll donate 24 invites for the davenewman wavefund :-)

  12. Big-nosed Pengie

    I don't get it

    Why does it invite a stack up?

  13. Law
    Unhappy

    I want to love it...

    ... but nobody else I know does... playing by myself in the Wave is lonely, so my Wave account has been idle since maybe 2 weeks after my invite. :'(

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Used my beta account for about 60 seconds

    Then I got bored. I'm clearly not visionary enough to see why I should care about it or want to use it.

  15. Neoc

    Someone explain to me...

    ...what it is that Google Wave does that cannot be achieved by already-existing tools? No, really, I must have missed the "new and ground-breaking" bit...

  16. Greg J Preece

    We downloaded the server, oh yes

    That gave us the wave protocol and absolutely nothing else. Not having Google's own front-end (which it pushes as being Google Wave, even though it's not) is what you'd expect, to be fair, but from the polish of their preview to the command line hackery of the server was a jolt. It's actually not a bad protocol, and we will integrate it with our products at some point.

  17. Trixr
    Badgers

    I agree it's at alpha stage

    But once they get a proper permissionings model and fix up the stability, this is going to be the new email. And I'm saying that as an email administrator. SMTP has done sterling service, but the no-security model that it evolved from means that we're always playing catch-up to keep ahead of spammers. Also, sending discrete little SMTP packets around seems somehow retro.

    Like Usenet, it was great in the day and still functions well, but who uses Usenet now that we have the WWW? (Well, I still use Usenet, but at a rate of 1000:1 compared to my web browsing). Businesses will host their own Wave-like services (or, god help us, it may actually live in the cloud), and all the punters will connect to each instance to do their communications. The divide between email and IM will become completely arbitrary: it'll be the difference between real time and near time communication, that is all.

  18. Iggle Piggle

    Riding the crest

    Well my experience of wave is that it is a brilliant idea. I love that we can collaborate live on documents and add widgets such as maps. However there is a problem. What would you say to me if I said I've invented an brand new mobile phone with 3D holographic viewing for the parties involved. What if I said it was the latest thing that was going to replace the normal phone! What if you then signed up and I had forgot to mention that you can only call other people with the same kind of phone.

    Well that is wave. Great it's a bit like email but you cannot actually send or receive email so you are still going to need your email client. It's a bit like instant messaging but not compatible with any existing messaging system so you will still need that.

    I've not really noticed the speed problem as being too serious an issue although I know that others have. For me the idea that you can see a document updating is great but I'm not sure that all the network admins are going to be too happy in the bigger companies if Wave takes off.

    I fear that Wave will either need another round of hyping or it will vanish.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh.

    The UI seems innovative and is potentially very usable, once some kind of netiquette forms around it. But it is also very easy to mess up the flow of a conversation.

    I also dislike the "real time" typing feature - who wants to see all the spelling mistakes I make?

    We've not tried to use it for anything "proper", even the jokes list stopped using it. Just seems to be a solution looking for a problem IMHO.

    Also, are "chats" company records just like emails? Should they not be stored in a retrieval system? I know we sometimes make important decisions over chat (I happen to store my own logs).

  20. Ministry of Truth

    Chrome

    I would use it at work to, erm, work (or chat, or whatever it can do) but it needs a chrome plug in on the browser. Trying to get IT to upgrade that sort of thing can be a pain when you have to explain you want it for a messaging service.

    Personally, I'm holding out hopes that they will integrate it with Android, and I can use it on my phone in some cool and amazing way. I think that's got a lot of potential - we already spam texts at all our friends in this way, being able to pull that all together would be wicked.

    Of course, phone companies might object to that a little.

    Now I just need some friends...

  21. Jolyon Ralph
    FAIL

    No-one ever waved back

    So I was sat all alone, waving at myself. Which I've had some practice in to be honest.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Boss got all excited, everyone got invites, shelved

    My 'boss' got all a-quiver about this exciting new concept from Google - the supposed substitute for email 'collaboration' - he waxed lyrical about how it's going to help us run the business.

    Ho hum.

    Sometime later, he got an invite and got all excited again!

    "Don't worry", he chimed, "I'll invite you all when I can!"

    Whoop de doo. I'm so excited too. You can hear it in my dull monotone. Ho hum.

    In due course, we all got invites, logged in and went "So, is this it? What now?"

    We waved at each other for about a minute, conscious of the fact we're all in the same office anyway.

    It died a death. The Boss stopped waxing lyrical about it - or in fact, with his 2 second attention span, completely forgot it exists. "Oooh, pretty butterfly, ooh look, shiny thing..."

    We've decided that talking, email, scribbling on bits of paper and running around like headless chickens is more exciting than Google Wave.

    ... waves goodbye ...

  23. -tim

    Wrong conversationalist?

    Google's wave strength is yet to be uncovered as its real strength is in letting non-humans hold meaningful conversations that can be consolidated into something that person can understand.

  24. bygjohn
    Thumb Down

    Total waste of time

    A small group of us tried it at the behest of an enthusiastic colleague to see if it had anything useful to offer. Short answer: nope.

    Looks like a perfect vector for XSS scams and other scripting horrors, does nothing particularly useful.

    Only innovation I could see was real-time typing and frankly I'd rather other people didn't see the mess I make with my two fingers and a thumb. Classic solution looking for a problem.

  25. Hutch

    I can see it's usefullness...

    for a small, geographically diverse workgroup. I would be surprised if the open source community does not pick up on this for projects. I can also see wave being used in small businesses (less than 20 employees working from different locations) or church groups that need to corroborate on projects.

    My church office is a heavy user of google docs (mail and calendar). I sent out invites to some of the church staff, mentioned it to some of them then, about a week later got emails saying "What is this thing?"

    I would really like to see Wave take off and be a useful tool. The best idea I have heard is to integrate other social media tools (twitter, FB, etc) into Wave. Now THAT would be useful.

    Hutch

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