Sunday, October 25, 2009

Surfing on waves

Yesterday I got my Google Wave invitation. Of course I immediately signed-in and started digging around. Actually, there isn't much to see, especially since I have only 6 contacts there, and I'm in real contact with only 2 of them. That's not enough people to "wave" with, so I send some invites to some more people which requested invites before, and didn't get them. It appears that the invite process is taking a few days, so I'm still quite alone there.

Anyway, along with this other person, I started checking out all of those features promised in the intro video. Many features aren't implemented yet, which makes the experience very incomplete. Most importantly, I was hoping to publish this post from Google Wave, but the plug-in simply does nothing.

After a few hours of blipping, we got this one giant wave, which is very much not readable, and there's no way of understanding what's going on within. The fact you can post replies in the middle and anywhere else makes it very difficult to follow. Also, you must use keyboard shortcuts if you really want an uncrippled experience.

Finally, I can say that while I am excited to be part of this beta, I think this platform isn't revolutionary. It's a nicer way to have email (like GMail interface is better than Outlook), and an awful way to do IM. Perhaps when the plugins would work it'll be better.

9 comments:

  1. Could you please spare an invitation? I kindly thank you. :)

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  2. Moca, make your profile public or share your e-mail so I could invite you should I have an invitation left.

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  3. Sorry, this is my e-mail:

    alex.moca [@t] gmail [.dot.] com

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  4. care to share another invite with an old chap? :)

    rudy.attias [@t] gmail [.dot.] com

    I love the format lol

    thanks in advance

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  5. Should arrive in few days. Welcome rudy.attias.

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  6. A little late reading your post, but i think it's part of the point. Why, when travelling, can i still use gmail but not try out wave? Because i can truly switch to it (and dump gmail) only when all my contacts switch (somewhat of a chicken and egg problem). Otherwise I will still have to use email and wave in parallel which is quite an investment of time and effort which I don't have now. And since most non-geeks wont bother with it even when they have time, the acceptance of this idea is going to be quite slow unfortunately.
    It tooks so many years for at least a large number of businesses and institutions to just adopt email, with clear advantages and relative ease of use, i feel this concept will take even longer to catch on.

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  7. Yevgeny, don't forget Wave is supposed to be a platform (and even more importantly - a protocol) and not just this one program, which kinda sucks.
    Users won't migrate from email to Wave, they'll get this nice bridge where appropriate.
    Anyway, for your email, describing your trip, I'm not sure Wave is the right way of communication. Don't forget Wave means "sharing" and "collaborating" which means I could have the ability to modify your descriptions of the trip. I don't think you'd want that.
    Still thinking of good usage for this platform...

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