A very small review of google wave

[liedra]

I received an invitation to Google Wave recently and went to have a play. Fortunately I know some people who are involved with Google so it meant I had a few people to fiddle around with things with but to be honest I am not hugely fussed by it.

My main thoughts on it, having played around for a little while without really knowing anything about it

Comments

[rocza]

How do you think it will work for writing papers with diversely located colleagues (or for general project-sharing)? I've heard that's what the main focus is supposed to be (collaborative project-works).

[liedra]

Not in its current state I think. You'd be better off with a wiki or google docs as it is. :( Maybe it will later! But yeah, not as it is currently :(

[douglasonlj]

I'm sure you've seen this already but:

Things Easier to Understand Than Google Wave: Metaphysics, Parseltongue, Our Own Existence

[liedra]

lol, I love the use of the Avril Lavigne song! :)

[liedra]

It's not really a new technology though... it's just another website, with some web 2.0 things that attempt to replicate things like AIM and forums and facebook in one spot. But maybe I've been writing about emerging technologies too much recently, lol. My gripe is more that the names are not actually very usefully descriptive. I mean I went to find some extensions to add, only to find that there are robots and gadgets and something else I've forgotten the name of. Why can't they all just be called "extensions"? It seems to me to add an unnecessary layer of complexity for people who don't really care about the guts of the thing.

I realise this is a pretty critical review, and I don't mean for anyone to take it personally of course! but I thought perhaps some constructive criticism would offset the glowing reports from some of the more enthusiastically hopeful websites ^^;

[liedra]

See and I think you've hit the nail on the head here -- this is really for developers, not users. Yet there's a need for users before, on a largeish scale, developers find the motivation to develop, etc. etc

[tau_iota_mu_c]

Gah! I don't even get the point of twitter! How am I going to see the point to Wave?

(Why, wired ran an article a week ago about how google groups' interface to the USENET archive has been broken in terms of search for at least a year, and then just ran an article about how google have now *finally* admitted there's a problem and they might work on it (despite thousands of us trying over the past year to contact non existant humans within google to tell them that search has been broken). Meanwhile, those of us who see no point in anything forum like since they're just poor copies of USENET, can't search for historical and still useful posts on comp.lang.c++, because google are too busy making their bastardised google groups thing suck less instead of concentration on their core business of "making all of the information on the web available" or whatever it is they claim their mission statement is. And then we wonder whether google should be trusted with important information in any of their other products, just in case they lose

[rorted]

Rar rar rar Google sucks!