Thanks to one friendly and helpful Michael Henriksen I was invited to the Google Wave preview about three weeks ago. It is a very interesting communication and collaboration tool that has the potential to change the way we interact with others online, but it is not without it’s flaws.
What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is aimed to improve synchronous and asynchronous communication on the web. The service is built around the concept of a hosted communique called a wave. A wave is equal parts conversation and document, and participants can collaborate via rich text, images, video, Google Maps, and other types of data. In addition, a participant can jump in anywhere within the message to edit or add content, or even add new participants to the wave. There is a playback feature that allows new users to catch up on what they missed by rewinding the wave to the start and view how it developed. On top of all that, a wave is a live transmission in addition to being a hosted record of previous exchanges. Any participants on a wave can see edits made by other participants in real-time if they happen to be logged in simultaneously.
In addition, Google is planning on releasing Wave as an open-source protocol. Service providers will be able to offer their own hosted Wave services for users who don’t wish for Google to host their communications.
Umm… what?
It quickly becomes obvious from the above explanation that Google Wave is complex, which is a departure from most Google products. The overarching theme of Google’s services to date has been one of power through simplicity. Google’s search dominance was built on a powerful algorithm beneath a spartan white HTML form. GMail became the webmail king with massive storage, free POP3 support, and a simple blue and white interface. So when an excited Google user gets their invite to the Wave preview and sees this:
…it’s understandable that they’re going to be slightly overwhelmed.
It is far easier to understand Google Wave’s complexity by understanding the depth of the problem it is attempting to solve: e-mail. In both work and personal exchanges, folks have lengthy discussions over e-mail with pieces of important work flying to and fro for days or weeks before things get nailed down. New participants are added to the e-mail exchange later and later into the process, and catching up on what’s transpired prior to your participation is a study in text-only archaeology. To make matters worse, the conversation fragments into multiple parallel shards that make it far too easy for participants to be out-of-sync. It’s a huge pain, and it has caused many delays and headaches in hundreds of team projects.
Or more succinctly:
Addressing e-mail’s inability to elegantly handle the communications logistics of growing collaborative projects is the goal of Google Wave. From my own casual usage, it seems to do a good job at fixing the major problems. My Dungeons & Dragons group has been using waves to disseminate background information and enter into light role-play exchanges between our monthly play sessions in ways that a traditional e-mail thread or even a web forum couldn’t easily emulate. In fact, waves solve the collaboration problem so thoroughly that entire role-playing games have sprung up on the service that allow folks to play remotely and at their own leisure. The use-case extends easily from the hobbyist’s play to the salaryman’s work, though, and that’s just scratching the surface.
So what’s wrong with it?
Google Wave is clearly an alpha product. It lacks the stability and polish of Google’s other services, and its complex interface could probably stand to be simplified further with user feedback. Simple actions like moving waves into folders (akin to the same action in GMail) is spotty. The longer you keep a Wave session open in your browser, the slower it seems to get as tons of Javascript and asynchronous XHR traffic flows behind the scenes. When I first started using the service, there was a persistent problem with “unsynced waves,” but that seems to have been addressed. Once a user is added to a wave, there is currently no way to remove them from it, so compartmentalizing information is difficult without starting a new wave or a private reply. As I think on it, though, information compartmentalization is one of the problems the service is meant to prevent.
These problems are not condemning. Google Wave attempts to do what no serious contender has done in the last forty years: replace our aging e-mail system. More thoughts to come as I continue to use Wave and the folks at Google continue to develop and refine the service.