Google Wave.
If you’ve been living anywhere except under a rock or somewhere in a cave on the Afghan/Pakistan border (which would count as being under a rock), you’ve heard the hype.
Is Google Wave really “the wave of the future” – as it’s been touted?
No.
Why do I say that? Let’s take a walk through the Google Wave preview.
Problem Solving
The first thing you do when designing a new piece of software (or any business) is sit down and figure out what problem it’s going to solve.
The Wave engineers must have skipped that meeting.
Wave’s main problem is that it is not cut from whole cloth. It has no cohesive purpose. Yes, you can send emails and edit documents and have IM conversations and do conference calls and give directions – all from one product!
Wave tries to be everything to everyone. It has 50 different possible uses – none of which it accomplishes particularly well, especially when compared to Google’s extensive suite of other products.
Slooooooooooooooooow.
I’m using Firefox 3.5 running on Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
Wave plods along at a sub-glacial pace on my machine.
This holds true for friends who are using Windows XP and Vista, and the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers.
The only configuration which seems to eliminate the slowness and memory resources hogging of Wave is running the Chrome browser on OSX. (Of course.)
Changing Settings
Possibly the oddest thing about Google Wave is that its settings (your profile information, etc) are contained – not in a Settings tab as in Gmail – but in their own individual Waves.
This would be fine, except any time you change a setting, the individual Waves are moved out of the “Settings” folder. This means that if you want to change something else, you have to hunt down the missing Wave by going to your “By Me” folder. (Confused yet?)
Not all of the "settings" waves are actually in here!
Editing Messages
Google Wave has a fairly handy “Edit Message” feature which allows you to (wait for it!) edit messages! This comes in handy when you’re editing a document (though there are other Google products which do this better)
The problem with this feature is that – while it shows a colored pop-up with the person’s name while they’re changing your message – Wave doesn’t give you any way to differentiate after the fact who edited what.
Three people edited this message. Can you tell which text belongs to whom?
No Separate Subject Lines
Whenever you start a new Wave, the first line that you type will be your subject line. (Click here to see what I mean.)
In Waves where every message has been read, the subject lines won’t be bolded in the preview pane any more. And all the replies are jumbled together after the subject line, making it hard to see what people are talking about.
Can you tell where the subject lines are? Look at the difference between the Waves,
In-Conversation Widgets
There are several different kinds of widgets you can insert into your Wave. Development is currently under way, no doubt, for thousands of interesting ones. Right now, the choice is pretty much limited to Google Maps, a yes/no voting widget, and a conference call widget which has a large “System access is limited!” (i.e. “This doesn’t work”) warning at the bottom.
Inserting any of these widgets burns through tons of memory and bandwidth. (That means: it slows your computer and the rest of your internet browsing experience down.)
This Google Maps widget will also allow you to show your friends driving directions, etc. And it'll allow you to crash your friends' computers.
Minor Annoyances
On long Waves with high numbers of people (say, 10) it becomes impossible to scroll through the conversation cleanly as you would with an email thread in Gmail. The scrollbar jumps, accelerates, slows down, and generally makes a nuisance of itself when you try to find one particular message in a conversation.
Unless you turn it off (which I’ve heard can be done, but I’m still searching for where to do it), your friends can see you typing. Live. And if your keyboard has a sticky H key like mine does, this leads to a lot of laughs (for your friends) and a lot of furious blushing for you.
Main Issues Recap:
It doesn’t identify or fix any problems for the vast majority of users. (A good case has been made for its use within a project team context – but that’s definitely not the majority of people.)
Operation is glacially slow and eats a huge amount of system resources.
There is a way to edit messages – but no way to tell who the editing has been done by.
Changing settings is unnecessarily complex and confusing.
There is no separate place to add or edit subject lines in new Waves.
Widgets hog memory and viewing space, and are not well-integrated into the Wave viewing pane.
You seem to really hate Wave. Is there anything you like about it?
The things I like about Wave (threaded conversations, the ability to insert comments inline) are already present in Gmail.
So honestly, no – there’s nothing I like about Wave qua Wave. And I won’t be using it (unless my friends initiate another conversation using it) till the Google engineers fix these defects.
The Verdict
It’s early days yet – so I can only pass a verdict on the beta version. And remember, the beta version is just that – incomplete. So this is not a final verdict.
Right now, though, I think that Google Wave is the most undeservedly overhyped software in recent memory. They shouldn’t have released it to public beta so soon.
Verdict in one word: Janky.
I’ll let the brilliant Stefan have the last word:
