October 9th, 2009
Thoughts On Riding My First Wave
The following is based on just an hour or so of usage. I chose not to watch the training videos, nor read dozens of other blog reviews, as I wanted to capture what my own first impressions were. So here we go...
My first reaction regarding Wave is kudus to Google for trying to improve some of the processes and tools we struggle with today. I'm just not sure which processes those are, which tools, and with which audience.
At first glance, Wave is obviously an email client. It has in inbox, and folders, and a preview pane.
But wait, that is wrong. They don't want it to be an email client. So is it a word processor? A wiki? A chat tool? Web conference? Yes to all of those, sort of. And while that is interesting and has huge potential, it is also the problem. When do I use it? Perhaps if this takes off, years from now it will be second nature and we'll just always use it. There won't be silos of email, chat, and content creation. It will all be combined and we'll think back and wonder why we ever used more than one tool. But that time is not today.
Falling Back On Old Habits
I have about five "Here is my first wave" type conversations going with different groups of friends. All of them broke down within 10 seconds to something akin to a group chat. Not once did we see if we could work together to author a document. Perhaps that is just normal growing pains of a new tool, fall back to what you know. But I think that is a fundamental Google flaw. By making Wave look like Gmail 2.0 our first reaction was to use it as such, a communication tool. In my opinion if Wave was designed to be Google Sites 2.0 (web site/wiki), it would lead more instinctively to it being used to create content, not cluttered conversations.
Will it scale?
With just 7 people in a Wave, at close to midnight, my browser stopped responding.
How will this work with a dozen coworkers as we try and crunch through a project deadline in the middle of the day? I know, this is not even beta, it is preview, so I am sure performance will be improved considerably.
Similarly, Playback while interesting, also quickly grows out of control. In just a few minutes, the seven of us created a conversation with 143 edits. Again, that was probably due more to growing pains of us using this as chat, and this will probably not happen as a group of people work to collaborative co-author content. The idea of Playback is great. It is not new however, as wikis have had revision histories for a decade, but it does provide a more modern spin on it, and I like that. I think we'll see lots of spinoffs on the playback metaphor popping up in other products.
Information Overload
My biggest concern is about organizing/managing content. One of the main plagues of email is inbox overflow. Five minutes into using Wave, with only a dozen people I know on there, and I already have 1/2 of the inbox screen filled. Looking at the subject lines (are they still called that) does nothing to help me know which Wave is about which topic, what it contains, etc. It just looks like the typical inbox mess. In a business environment, how will I create, store, and most importantly discover new Marketing specific information vs that from Sales vs Engineering?
Just Blurt It Out
There has been lots of hype about how you can watch someone type in real-time. I pray there is an option to turn this off. It is extremely annoying, especially with more than a few people. Oh joy, I get to watch as people type, backspace, correct a typo, change their mind, rearrange a sentence, etc. No thanks. We had a tool like this internally at IBM many years ago. It was cool to demo, but had no real business use.
I'll Keep Surfing
There are some really nice things about Wave, for example how easy it is to embed content like photos, videos, maps, etc. I will certainly keep trying it, as I am sure I only understand a tiny fraction of what it can do. As I said at the beginning, I'm glad to see Google trying something new. The hype around Wave will certainly help other products, including my employer's, improve and innovate, and that is a great thing for the industry and for the people using the products.
