Is Google Wave Cutting-Edge Communication or Just a Mess?

Image Credit: www.googlewavesucks.com

It’s new and it’s from Google, so it must be exciting, right? The Los Angeles Times said Google Wave will transform journalism. Some predict it will change how students learn. CNN says it may replace e-mail, and the search giant itself touts Google Wave as what e-mail would be if it were invented today. The platform is an amalgamation of e-mail, instant messaging, dynamic content creation, blog-style conversations, wiki-style group editing, and a slew of other communication tools in one. And whether or not it’s revolutionary or evolutionary, people are clamoring to try it out.

Since May of 2009, when it was first unveiled to a room of developers at the Google I/O conference, Google Wave has been a hot topic. The creators, Lars and Jens Rasmussen (also known for creating Google Maps), introduced the collaboration and communication platform during an 80-minute presentation at the conference. A video of this presentation gathered 3 million hits in its first two months of availability on YouTube. But five months later, with the first flood of public invites to the preview mode out, people were still left asking…

“What exactly is Google Wave and could it possibly be that revolutionary?”

What Wave Is

Instead of an electronic version of paper letters and memos, this communication and collaboration tool brings together multiple elements of online communication into one “wave,” resulting in robust methods for building, editing, and sharing information in real time.

How it Works

The main Wave window resembles Gmail. The left bar features boxes for Contacts and Navigation. In the center is a list of individual waves, and on the right is the window for working in one. Waves resemble a combination of blog post comments, instant messaging chat sessions, and Facebook news feeds. Users can create individual messages within waves called “blips.” Every user participating in a wave can reply to, make in-line comments inside of, or edit blips (even the blips of others). Wave contributors can watch others’ text appear character by character as they are typing (typos and all), similar to chat programs such as ICQ.

Blips are rich text environments that allow for simple formatting in addition to the insertion of several types of media, including images, interactive maps, polls, and YouTube videos. Theoretically this versatility allows users to do more than just leave successive messages for each other. As explained in Google’s introductory video, it’s possible to collaborate on rich documents, create itineraries, and plan group projects.

Wave has the potential to be the home base from which you experience other parts of the Web, too. Waves can be embedded into blog posts or Web pages without the user having to know code. If a wave is made public via a blog, anyone who has a Wave account can become part of the wave, allowing them to participate through the blog post’s URL or their Wave window. Developers are working on “robots,” which users will be able to add to a wave just like a contact. These robots act as participants in a wave and will allow for interaction between other services such as Twitter. In other words, you will be able to pull in your Twitter feed—each person’s update would resemble a blip—to keep track of trending topics. And you’ll be able to update your status from within Wave.

The Experience: A Bumpy Ride

After the initial announcement in May, Google started issuing public invitations to preview Wave in the fall of 2009. New users trickled in, eager to discover if the service lived up to the hype. Early adopters ran up against a fairly major problem right away: without other people using the product, Wave wasn’t very interesting. Communication and collaboration requires at least two users, and works best with larger groups.

In addition, many of the features mentioned in Google’s introductory video weren’t as easy to access or use as we expected. Just figuring out how to add bots and extensions that weren’t included in the introductory wave required a fair amount of digging in the forums and help topics. Wave did pull tweets from our timeline into a wave as blips when we figured out how to add Tweety the Twitbot, but it didn’t auto-refresh with new ones. Sometimes tweets didn’t show the user who sent them for up to ten minutes (all blips would appear as simply being from Tweety). Embedded waves in blog posts crashed multiple browsers. Some extensions, including maps, polls, and video chats, didn’t always play well with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Google flaunts Wave as a powerful platform for document creation due to the combination of collaborative editing and inline discussion. The demos provided a good look, but creating rich documents in Wave was a challenge. Documents currently need to be created from scratch within a blip instead of being imported from, or linked to, an existing file, such as a Google Doc. (The Google Wave team says importing features will be a future option.) Copying from Google Docs or Word didn’t bring over all of the formatting or embedded elements such as charts and images, so if your document existed already, you had to do most of the work over again to get it to look like the original document in the blip. Hardcore Wave enthusiasts have created a hack for inserting Google Docs into waves, but the functionality isn’t native yet.

Verdict

At press time, Google Wave was in preview stage, which means it is still under construction. There is potential for Wave to become the ground-breaking communications tool Google wants it to be, especially if there’s tighter, more intuitive integration with the Google services that millions are accustomed to using. Whether that will happen in the next few months or the next few years is an open question. For now, Google Wave remains an interesting toy to play with, but not something we’d use for real workIt’s new and it’s from Google, so it must be exciting, right? The Los Angeles Times said Google Wave will transform journalism. Some predict it will change how students learn. CNN says it may replace e-mail, and the search giant itself touts Google Wave as what e-mail would be if it were invented today. The platform is an amalgamation of e-mail, instant messaging, dynamic content creation, blog-style conversations, wiki-style group editing, and a slew of other communication tools in one. And whether or not it’s revolutionary or evolutionary, people are clamoring to try it out.