aaron c beals

i received an invite to Google Wave a while back, but haven’t made the time to really try it out until now. there seem to be more people on it now, which is a good thing as makes it easier to test collaboration.

first impressions:
* the interface is a wee bit messy. it looks a lot like an email interface (even uses the terms “inbox” and “spam”), but there are a number of controls in the list and detail frames. it also seems as if i can move each frame around… but i can’t. i can just minimize them.
* i like the fact that it automatically pulled my contacts from Gmail into the contacts list, and just those people who have Wave.
* i dislike the fact that i received new wave content over the past few months, but never received an email letting me know. i realize that Wave is supposed to act as a sort of replacement for email, but why am i going to check it if there’s nothing yet going on? talk up your product a little more, Google.

my first wave:
* received a wave from my friend who invited me. it seems empty. is it weird that you can start an empty Wave?
* the playback option seems neat, but i’m not sure when it would be useful. perhaps from a mobile device…
* this wave doesn’t have a subject (or text, for that matter), so where i’d expect the subject to be, there’s a list of the avatars for the participants in the chat. pretty straightforward how to add other people to the discussion / wave.

my other waves:
* ok, now there’s some content. my friend sent me a wave that includes an embedded photo. he also references adding ‘robots’ to the wave, and it seems as it on this wave there is an ‘email notifications’ robot. doesn’t it seem silly that you have to add a robot to send you emails? shouldn’t that be one of the built-in options for Wave? couldn’t i just set that app-wide if i wanted? either that, or a follow/unfollow via email model would work.
* looks like they’re already using a follow/unfollow model to keep or remove things from your inbox. unfollow makes sense to me… it’s like ‘mute’ in Gmail. follow doesn’t make as much sense. the action exists in your inbox, and if something’s in your inbox, doesn’t that mean that you’re already following it?
* there’s a ‘draft’ checkbox on my reply, but it won’t let me check it. unfortunate.
* oh… i get it. playback shows the progression of the wave. when you make something look just like audio playback, with controls and everything, your users expect it to be audio. just saying.
* apparently, i can edit my friend’s post. when i do so, it says that that post is now by him and me, but otherwise, there’s no indication in the text about who wrote what. in that way, it acts a lot like a Wiki. interesting.
* almost constant saving of text means that you don’t lose what you’ve written. nice.

other:
* you control your Wave settings in a wave? i know that we’re all supposed to buy into the Wave model of the world, but can’t you just put settings up in the top right nav, like every other Google app?
* when i click on my avatar in a wave, i see my info: an email address and a website. apparently i have a wave (@googlewave.com) email address? that’s news to me — haven’t seen that listed anywhere else on the page. if i can email info to myself and then discuss it with others, isn’t that an important feature?
* i tried emailing my own google wave email address. after 5 minutes, still no new waves.
* why is so much real estate dedicated to the list of waves? i would prefer the Gmail model, where the list of waves is the default but is replaced by the content when you click on one. This 3-column approach is very Outlook.

contacts:
* my contacts list looks a lot like google chat — i can even set a status (by clicking on my avatar). but it’s not chat. if you click on a contact, you can start a new wave with them, find waves by them, and ‘ping’ them, which i assumed was like ‘poking’ someone in Facebook.
* the ‘ping’ is actually just a wave, but one that renders itself initially as a chat, a sort of inverted version of the Facebook chat.

praise:
* Wave is an interesting concept, sitting at the collaborative intersection of chat, email, wiki, and document editing.
* there are collaborative elements here that could be split off and re-purposed elsewhere, perhaps integrated into other websites or applications. from what the Wave team has said in the past, it appears an API of this nature is forthcoming.
* i think the real value in Wave comes from the real-time aspect — being able to very rapidly interact with your fellow collaborators.

criticism:
* let’s assume that Gmail let you embed objects (images, maps, etc) right into your emails. let’s also assume that editing someone else’s text is something you’d rather do in fully-featured app like Google Docs. what value is Wave adding? it’s a confusing email client (compared to Gmail), sub-par document editor (compared to Google Docs), and a middle-of-the-road wiki (compared to MediaWiki, PBWiki, et al).
* Wave is still pretty rough around the edges, and while Google has been good at generating hype (hour+ presentation, limiting invites, getting good press via major news outlets), they have been operating in a “here’s a tool — figure out what it means for you” model. not a terrible model, but certainly not the way you’re going to revolutionize email and overthrow the status quo.

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update:

let me preface this update by letting you know that when it comes to software, i’m a notorious non-instruction-reader. i believe that most software should be intuitive, so i wrote my review before reading or watching any of the instructional information. after writing the initial review, i watched some videos from the Wave team and learned some things:
* apparently you can reply within a Wave ‘blip’ (creating a sub-’blip’) by double-clicking on the blip. pretty cool for in-line comments.
* there are some Wave use cases listed by the Wave team: organizing events (ok, but i’d rather have it tied into my calendar); meeting notes (i’m not a huge fan of extensive meeting notes, but this would work well for those who are); group reports and writing projects (as i mentioned before, i’d rather use Google Docs); brainstorming (yes, yes, yes!); photo sharing (meh. i’d rather use Picasa, Facebook albums, Flickr, etc)
* i sent that email in to my account a while back, and still don’t have a new wave. i even tried sending from another email account, but no dice.
* robots seem pretty powerful (Blogger, Twitter, email notifications, etc), but i can’t seem to see an easy way to add these robots to my contact list. the UI doesn’t make it clear, and the short tutorial videos all assume that you already have the robots in your contacts (which i don’t, in case that wasn’t clear).
* Rosy the robot does automatic translation, so people who speak different languages can communicate — ok, that’s just amazing.