Google Wave Review: First Impressions
There doesn’t actually seem to that much of a buzz about Wave, other than the usual pleas for invites and the occasional shrug. I know Dave kind of looked at it and went ‘meh’. I’ve been using it now for a little over a week and here’s my initial thoughts.
This isn’t a game changer. But…
Email and IM are broken. Both date back to a simpler era and predominately work best as a format for two-way conversation. I’m watching an email exchange grow in my inbox between me and some guys at a client site and its fascinating to see how some people reply to all, and some people just reply to the sender. That makes for a messy, messy interchange.
I’ve literally no idea what three of the emails mean – and I started the conversation! Add to that the absolute mess of formatting you get with footer disclaimers, signatures and the mix of rich text/plain text respondees and you start to see some real potential inherent in Wave.
IM is the same – you get 3 people all typing at once and responding to different messages and before long there’s 2 people chatting and everyone else is either ignoring the window or has left the conversation.

Wave takes the best features of both and brings them together in one space. You can reply in line to any comment – no matter how old – and the structure of the conversation is maintained. Whether that represents a quantum leap over trusty old threaded forum software is the real question here and I’d say the jury’s still out on that.
The ability to drop in and out of live chat alongside archived posts is pretty cool, because you can maintain that level of spontaneity.
But, of course, not everyone has a Google account. Everyone does have an email account and email conversations are agnostic about where that account sits. To use Wave means signing up for a Google account, and I don’t think that many people outside the industry even really know that there is such a thing
Getting traction outside Google fanbois and early adopters is the only way that Wave is going to become part of the wider web infrastructure.
Some features are way promising…
The convergence between the trad desktop and cloud computing is getting a little bit more profound every week. Wave has many potential examples of this – the most obvious being the ability to drag and drop items from your desktop straight into a Wave, where it can be accessed immediately. While it might not seem that big a deal, think of the hassle when someone forgets to attach a document in an email thread….
…and some are duds. For now.
One glorious feature of email is that it is at least easy to see when you’ve got new messages to respond to. Currently, Wave’s “inbox” is pretty much crud. New messages are difficult to locate and as far as I can tell, messages made directly to you aren’t flagged in any way differently to new posts in the flow.

The ability to edit posts after the fact seems pretty cool – but actually you can totally mess with meanings and render a conversation useless. You can even change things that other people have said and there’s no obvious highlighting of who’s done what. So yeah, on the collaboration front that sounds good, but it does mean you can commit evil. It would only take two people called Paul Carpenter to be involved in a Wave and a catfight would probably break out in minutes about who said what (I’d win).
The much-touted ‘playback’ feature that lets you watch how the Wave grew over time is a still a little bit clunky as you have to keep pressing a button to find out what happened next. A smooth single click playback with variable speed would probably work a little bit better for bigger Waves.
SEO knock on?
One of the most interesting features is that Waves will be embeddable in web pages (there still seems to be a lot of patchiness in actual implementations of this). That means a discussion taking place here could show up on a dozen different sites. That’s quite an exciting idea for those of us interested in developing readerships and mindshare. But there’s potential canonicalisation issues because the same Wave could exist at many different URLs simultaneously.
Of course, the content is all API’d and Ajaxed to the max, but as a Google proprietary format you figure it’s probably indexable. The question is: will Waves be treated as discrete objects in themselves and indexed separately? Or will they just be counted as content on the original page where it was embedded? I don’t see a clear answer to that as yet.
How to make best use of Wave
I’m sure the first guys to ever use newsgroups peppered their opening exchanges with “Hi, welcome to my ‘thread’ – whatever that means” and similar inanities so we can probably ignore the noise to signal ratio at this stage of the game.
Where I think it will score heavily is in the realm of expert discussion. The video demos used examples of people agreeing a night out, but the problem of low take-up of Google accounts means that’s probably going to be a pipedream for some time yet. However, it does open the possibility of a truly excellent level of conversation, with side-discussions taking place within a main debate yet retaining an overall structure.
I could see that working very well as a replacement for trad blog comments or some forum sites where the discussions are massive and complex. You could ask a question about a point I made 2 years ago and I could answer it there and everything would still make sense.
In conclusion
Wave has a lot of promise as a communication medium. There’s nothing technical there that isn’t fixable, and as a concept it’s fundamentally sound. What will be critical to its success is finding an audience. I can’t see it being compelling enough to drag site owners to implementing it en masse, but for certain niches where high-level discussion is required it will fulfill the job probably better than any other solution out there and find a pretty decent reputation for discerning site owners who don’t mind a limited audience.
22 Comments
David Whitehouse
I think Google have failed to implement ways of spreading the idea and encourage people to return to use it, unfortunately I think this is going to be a big flop…
paul carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
I think in terms of mass market you’re probably right. People are probably full up with Facebook, Twitter etc as it is to start bothering with a new communications medium. But like I say, I can imagine it working really well as a medium for good, high level, well-structured debates.
Also, for tooling around when you should be working.
David Whitehouse
Perhaps we should be using a Google Wave for the comments…
Roger Bert
Thanks for the overview. I am still trying to get an invite. It will be intersting to see how this evolves. It’s Google’s pet child and they won’t allow it to fail.
Chris Norton - http://www.deaddinosaur.co.uk
Wave sounds both interesting and difficult to use which is probably why it is still in Beta. I am looking forward to testing it out although some of the features do sound like they will have the traditional web user perplexed. Great review.
Justin Healy - http://www.realurban.com
I think Wave might replace some perfectly good “high-level” applications like Basecamp. Yeah, Wave doesn’t look like it will unseat Facebook or Twitter etc., but I’ve come across two potential applications just today where a small group of professionals could make really good use of it. Thinking of a Wave as an object, and that object is, say, a transportation planning project…Wave would kill as a document headquarters, a virtual meeting platform, and an outreach tool. The interface and capabilities would have to be seriously simplified to make it useful as a general-public sort of thing, which seems to be possible via a Federation…
David - http://thelostagency.wordpress.com
The problem is filtering the noise, if they follow the model of Google voice and allow for different users such as friends to not be able to contact you during work hours and work not be able to contact you outside it has potential.
The biggest problem is that you can now potentially monitor people’s responses and if you have live typing enabled you cannot take back quotes made to clients when estimating project work.
I can see if running well for certain projects such as has been suggested about customer support or collaboration but self-censorship is important to any business…
Mike - http://www.bandsforwedding.co.uk
Great review. Really nice to hear how you’ve got on! I definitely see this as a game changer. As the organiser of a band that plays at weddings, this sort of a tool will become invaluable. We’re often working on a set list for a forthcoming wedding, and being able to collaborate between band members would be awesome! As for facebook/twitter – I’d imagine, eventually, these sites being moved over to work on the wave. The wave protocol is ideal for making a site like facebook work as it should!
Dave Patterson - http://www.yourfreeadvertisingforum.com
Am I the only one who hasn’t even messed with wave yet? I have heard of it but I haven’t given it a try. Is it useful or is it too soon to tell how great it might become?
Matt
I agree with what Mike was saying at the end of his comment. I can see the protocol enhancing websites like twitter and facebook instead of replacing them. I am really excited to get my hands on wave and really look forward to getting my eventual invite.
randy
google wave is just too complex for the mass market to grasp… all google products that have become successful takes what is out in the market today and they make it easier to use e.g. gmail, search etc….
this one goes the other way and is nothing revlutionary… google now has 1 less year of survival… i predict 6-7years remaining…… they will definitely loose the search business hence looking actively for the next big thing….
Phil Bair
It’s a yawner. Does some tricks that a few pop bottle glasses nerds think are really cool, but eh. I watched the YouTube intro and I got so bored that I turned it off. There are a few programmers out there who think that if they create something that does somersaults, it’s going to be the next uber leap in technology that everyone will go “oooooh aaaaah” over. Niet. No one asked for it, everyone’s happy with facebook and texting and twitter and IM and email. Do we really need yet another “account???” We have too many already.
paul carpenter - http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk
“everyone’s happy with facebook and texting and twitter and IM and email.”
Really? Twitter blows as conversational format… email’s got serious problems as outlined…. texting only works two ways….
Not saying that Wave is the answer, but that doesn’t mean there’s no problem
Farghana - http://www.3smartcubes.com
That was a pretty good review. I am still trying to get an invite. 🙁
Anyone has one? please send to me.
Dave - http://www.yourfreeadvertisingforum.com
I kind of tend to agree with Phil Bair. I mean how many accounts does one person need? Im open minded though. Seems like so many different websites are cross linking (if thats the right term) like facebook, twitter and myspace for example being linked to other accounts. Seems like we are heading toward an internet where 1 site does all.
John Byrne - http://www.iwantworldpeace.com
This might be a really good way for companies to keep in touch with their clients, getting immediate feedback and access to the customers opinions, etc. A real thermometer into the client base. Whe will invites become unnecessary?
Bipin Jha
still getting to know the features,,,just got it accepted by google team.
But so far it looks very useful with my team to work and debate on different projects,,,still trying to get everyone invited.
Dev - http://www.kayasthasangam.com
well i dont think if something has come up as a challenge in the world will really be a challenge, until it can keep a normal man happy and keep him know what he is doing and what he wants to do
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sruiz
They need to test this on mobile phones asap. Creating a web app is one thing, but an actual application that will notify users when new messages in the wave come in would help attract most people. It seems right now, as far as I know, the only way to check for new waves is to visit the site.
unkle
Hey nice article,
I thinkthere is a lot of the potential of google’s wave. I have found some great uses at the moment using it to help edit a friends CV. Wrote a super fast specification for some software. The genius is in what happens when you have a lot of people brainstorming an idea.. there are new threads, dead ends and often what you end up with is very different from where you started it’s a great way to retain all that information and quite often what you find is gold dust.
spartax - http://conradsharry.blogspot.com
I see Google wave being an innovation for the sake of innovation. It doesn’t solve any particular problem. The technology behind it is interesting though but it would need some more creative & easy to use application.