I think Google is trying to solve a problem we don’t have in the first place. Google Wave feels like an auto manufacturer that wants to mix a sports car, a family car and pickup truck in one. Each one of them has a specific need and a specific set of benefits. Email, Instant Messaging and Wikis work fine as they are, and mixing them might be something that most people don’t have the need for. I think Google Wave is a pet project that happens to tap into the buzz word of realtime collaboration, but it fails to deliver something that could be actually useful. - Jorge Escobar

I want to move the conversation started in various posts into one place. So far guruvan (Rob Nelson) posted a brilliant response to this post that I'm copying below (guruvan, let me know if it's okay with you): - Jorge Escobar

guruvan said "Jorge, I have to agree with Chieze. First off, the comments about it all residing with Google would be valid if it weren’t for the fact that Google wants to see this be federated not unlike the email that we have today. I think that you’ll see eventually most of the “big names” will run their own wave services (Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc, etc.) As for who controls the identities that access the waves, that will go as things are going now. We’re moving more towards OpenID, and your authentication to the various wave servers will be through those. You say that Google has failed at their attempts at social media. While this is correct, I think you mistake the Wave for being a social media platform. It is not. The social media platforms will adopt the Wave as the communications standard, leaving “chat” IM, email, forums, and comments like these behind. Why, I’ll bet that even you will replace this commenting system with a wave based one when it becomes available for you to do so. I’ve seen a lot of people saying that users won;t like the real time aspect of it. I just don’t see that. 1) In Google’s client implementation (as seen in the demo video) you can simply turn off the real time if you want the wave to act more like IM does today 2) we’ve had full duplex phones for as long as I can remember. Those don’t freak anyone out. I don’t see why having that happen in a text environment will 3) You mention the real time sharing of photos. How is this different from an email attachment you ask? Simple, it’s in the now. How long does it take for us to attach an image to an email (wait for upload), send email, receive email, download image and view. Would it not be more user friendly to have that happen nearly instantly? One of the big things that makes computing, and the communications that happen through it, slow, is all the milliseconds that we spend waiting for the computer to do something. These are all wasted milliseconds, and they add up in a great... more... - Jorge Escobar

love the picture - Alfredo

I need the features of Google Wave every day. The lack of a need to duplicate things alone is worth it. Then the fact that you can publish sections to a blog, wiki, or any other service you can code to is a bonus. Wave will be awesome, and once people get used to what you can do with it, they'll laugh and say how quaint old email, wiki, and IM were for office communication and knowledge worker tasks. - xero

how can you say email works fine as it is when easily 3/4 of the emails received are spam? and of the remaining that are not, the information is static and except for html views, lifeless? (or worse, virus'd to the hilt). - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

The real challenge to adoption is the speed at which other parties can get wave products out to market, and that depends on the speed at which google can a) push through the federation standard, and b) open the source code. For the moment we're going tohave to be satisfied to develop gadgets and robots and such that operate within Google's environment. But once they release their code, then we're going to see a great number of 3rd party wave servers, and then the "mad rush" will start to get them installed into corporations. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Here's my take on this, though. If Google wants this to be a service that can be used by the other big guns like Facebook/Yahoo/etc, why are they launching it first and not as a consortium? In the past we've seen how slowly these guys have moved just to implement half of the OpenID platform. Do you think they will just open their servers and install something that Google initiated? - Jorge Escobar

The interesting thing is, that while Google may have (and may always) fail at "social networking" their Wave product is likely what will bring social networking into every desktop in corporate america. (where social networks are today being banned and blocked) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

@Mike, my point is that email works as it is because people understand that it's sort of a letter they sit down and write. Spam is not a problem, in my mind, as you could argue that spammers will also try to attack Google Wave as well. Besides, Spam is being handled very well by providers (I hardly get Spam email on my Gmail account) - Jorge Escobar

I agree with xero - It's all just text and media manipulation... why should I use something that only handles specific types of manipulations when I can use ONE application that will handle any of them depending on my needs at the moment? For instance, at work a lot of conversations via email/IM turn into project requirements which then turn into task lists and bug reports which then turn into documentation... All of that stuff could just be different views of a single wave. There's no point in keeping them separated... It's all just data. I think xero's right in the prediction that in a few years we'll all look back on having it handled by "unitaskers" and laugh. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

I think that they're going to be forced by the marketplace. I think that the hype machine is going to push this as hard as it has Twitter, and that alone will force the big player to adopt it. The fact is that consortiums tend not to be fast when developing a product/platform etc. Consortiums seem to work better after the large development has been done, and the work can be handed off to the consortium for long term housekeeping - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

The wave is much more resilient against spam because of how it's stored. It puts the economic onus on the spammer rather than the spammee. This is the opposite of how it works in the email world. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

And I totally agree with Lindsay & xero. This is why I think the wave will in face replace several different forms of communications, and why I think that the big players will actually adopt it. They'll also adopt it because they won't have had to do all the development work, and can still reap equal or near equal rewards to those that Google will reap. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Fundamentaly, what does Google get out of this? The get the pick of the crop of little startups that have various revenue strategies associated with wave products. Google won't make any real money off the Wave itself. Its a huge investment in the future for them (IMO) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

My only problem with Google Wave: seeing every character/edit someone does in real time is on by default. It's just a show piece with little to no practical value. Turn it off by default and it will be easier to adopt for most people. - xero

I just don't see (specially) Facebook just rolling over and opening their servers to install a Google Wave. As much as I'd like that, Facebook is very keen on keeping their experience under control. I just don't see them opening to having Waves when they are also racing to be a real time platform. - Jorge Escobar

Xero: When I describe it to people as "real time ,full duplex multimedia communications tool" They ALL go "ooooo aaaaaa" and want it now. And I'm talking just regular non geeky people. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Guru: but I don't think you're thinking of the same non-techies Xero and I are thinking. We're thinking Grandmas and Dads and Sales people who don't even understand what Twitter is. Don't you think we're years away from that type of adoption? - Jorge Escobar

It won't BE a "Google" wave. It'll be a Facebook Wave. It will make their transition to a realtime platform that much easier and that much more complete. But mark my words, you'r ecorrect that Facebook isn't likely to install a "Google" anything to get there. They'll take the code, and modify it to suit their own needs. Facebook is moving away from their walled garden model, and they'll want to join the ranks of the public communications providers, but they're more likely to do that in the wave federation than to open up their email system. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

No. Gramma has talked on a realtime full duplex phone since forever. The non-realtime of email and IM is a far bigger stretch for adoption than the wave is. It's amazing that they use the communications tools on the net as they are because they AREN'T like the wave. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

@xero - actually I kind of like the real time typing stuff... It reminds me of "talk" back in my BBS days... you could express a lot more emotion through that real-time typing than you can otherwise. If you want to play with it, make a new EtherPad (http://etherpad.com) and get someone to join you on it... I think that's a taste of what Wave will be like. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

I think most people think like you are Lindsay. I think that the delay is one thing that keeps people from taking social networking and sIM and things seriously and adopting them as fully as we have - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I'm not a fan of watching someone slowly hack out all of their (and my) spelling mistakes, thought pauses, inline research, etc. - xero

Did you see spelly? That thing corrected spelling in realtime too - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

But then again, I'm a letter writer and not a talker. I like to have time to collect my thoughts, flip them around, and try again. - xero

Did you ever use a BBS back in the day, xero? It felt a lot more personal communicating with people like that than IM does to me. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

And also, I'm predicting text-to-speech robots for the waves to be developed (for the blind etc) but also I'm predicting that VoIP networks will be connected to the things too so that you can have voice communications become part of (and be stored with) the wave - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

It sure did Lindsay. That's what I grew up using - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I also think realtime is falling in line with other buzzwords like AJAX or web 2.0. People will all be running like ADHD headless chickens trying to make sense of all these Waves happening at the same time. With email *I* control the timing. - Jorge Escobar

The only BBS I used was essentially a forum. You typed it up, then posted it. I like the interaction of real-time chats (like IRC) and IM, but am satisfied seeing the "x is typing a message.." message as opposed to the actual characters - xero

I'm satisfied, in that it works ok enough to get the job done, but there are lots of times that I would like to have real time. (and occasions that I would not! - and the Google wave product -client certainly accounted for that desire) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I also don't like at all (from the demo) that you can go and edit *any* part of the message; it looked like total chaos to me... - Jorge Escobar

I guess I'm nostalgic because I had a lot of friends that I kept in touch with using "talk" on BBSes, including a couple of boyfriends and my husband. But it was more like a phone conversation (which was way more expensive back then) to do the RT typing. A lot more personal, and less annoying when you wait 20 minutes for someone to perfect that sentence and press the enter key. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

You can edit any part of a wiki, but that doesn't make it chaos. Besides, you can always set conventions for edits, just like people do with blog posts and news articles. - xero

@xero but you don't see edits on the wiki on real time. While one person edits, the document is locked. - Jorge Escobar

@Jorge - you don't HAVE to participate in every wave as it's happening... you can let them queue up just like email does. Wave just gives you the option of being able to communicate in RT. - Lindsay is in 20-ten

There will also become ways to prevent edits on any parts of the wave. Remember, a lot of the eventual model of the real platform is being left up to outside developers. I can already imagine access control robots that determine which parts of the wave (or wavelets) that a given person can edit, revert etc. It won't be any more chaotic than a wiki, and in fact is likely to be less so because of the potential for real time automated access control - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I'm thinking the button to toggle realtime will need to be a prominent feature in every wave app. - xero

It looks like a lot of power will be given to developers, which is good on one side. But look at what happened with Facebook platform apps -- a lot of junk out there - Jorge Escobar

Sure, and you'll be able to have a wave filled with crap like Facebook quizzes. Or, you could have a wave that isn't filled with that. And in a publicly accessible wave, you might want a robot gatekeeper that tosses stuff like those quizzes out (I hate facebook quizzes BTW! ) ;) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

regarding an earlier point, I personally liked real time typing. It was one of the few things about ICQ that I really loved. It felt much more natural, like I was actually having a conversation. You could watch them form their sentence and figure out what you were going to say before they finished, kind of like a real voice conversation. - Chieze Okoye

realtime, full duplex is the way we normally converse. to do so as we are right now is somewhat unnatural - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

to say that would be unbridled chaos is not unlike saying that a conversation between 5-7 people would be chaos. Sometimes it is, but more often than not, "rules of the road" meaning common turn-taking conventions spring up organically and naturally (or sometimes not so naturally). We're already wired to converse in full-duplex, real-time - Chieze Okoye

yeah, what Rob said. - Chieze Okoye

I think the notion of chaos comes in the revising what others have written. And I think everyone is aware from the experience of things like wikipedia that there will need to be additional controls able to be put into a wave. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

:-) - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

oic, yeah - Chieze Okoye

if wikipedia can solve it, so can wave. - Chieze Okoye

I do agree with guruvan in one thing: this could be a "before wave", "after wave" era, if things work out. It really is a revolutionary piece of software! - Jorge Escobar

Wikipedia has their difficulties, but there isn't an easy way to automate all of that in the wiki. The wave (IMO) lends itself to this with the ability to invite robot entities into the wave as participants. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

What about FF, guruvan? How is it affected? - Jorge Escobar

don't get me wrong Jorge, the full adoption will take a long while. PLENTY of gateway products will have to be written - several so that you can send an email from/to a wave, a few more so that you can tweet from/to a wave, IM from/to a wave, SMS from/to a wave - the point is that we want the wave to become the centerpoint of the conversation. All these legacy data types will have to be supported to make it successful - we build on the previous layers - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

I forsee a distinct possibility of them adopting the wave to FF, and this conversation we're having now is in a wave ;) (but adding to our waves here, all of our aggregated content) - In fact I think that friendFeed is the best positioned to take advantage of the wave. Then Facebook. I think twitter is going to be left out in the cold, as a "legacy data type" - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

What remains to be seen with a FriendFeed - is just how waves are begun, what their starting content is. Is it like this thread here, with each piece of aggregated content? or is it going to look some how different. I don't know that yet. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

i love the pic..... - 拓 | wavesand from email

Great discussion guys! What I was thinking this morning was how this is exactly why we need something like Google Wave. Right now this discussion is trapped in Friendfeed (although it's showing on my blog via Backtype) but people are also commenting on my blog and those comments are not showing here. I think bloggers would have a great way to power their commenting and aggregate that comment across many sites, like guruvan said some posts back... - Jorge Escobar

Jorge there's an advantage too towards distributing yourself across multiple sites, it makes you resilient to failure. A wave is centralized in the federated service provider. If it's gone, if it fails, if it doesn't scale, you are effectively dead. It also discourages innovation at the service layer and makes innovation only possible at the UI layer and making robots. FF innovates because it controls the stack. When your data is elsewhere their ability to innovate goes way down. - Todd Hoff

Jorge: You could not be more correct about the wave than in your last comment! Yes this discussion would be so much more in a Wave. - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

@Rob, so then, it *is* a social media application or can be used for such, right? ::wink, wink:: - Jorge Escobar

Todd: You seem to contradict yourself in that statement. Certainly FriendFeed discussion is more centralized than wave discussion. The wavelets exist on every server that has a participant. Want multiple copies of the wave(let) add "multiple yous" from multiple wave providers. FriendFeed doesn't encourage nearly as much innovation as the wave model. There's just the one set of API calls @ FF - there are several APIs for the wave. (and more to come when more companies release wave servers and clients based on Google's open source code) Google's plan is to encourage innovation on client, server, and service levels. (gadgets/robots for their product, servers and clients from os code, services based on 3rd party servers) - guruvan (Rob Nelson) from PeopleBrowsr

"You seem to contradict yourself in that statement" both sides of my brain battle for the keyboard so this happens sometimes :-) They key is: "The federation case works just like the single server case because, for a given wavelet, a single designated “authoritative” server (identified by the domain part of the wavelet id) hosts the wavelet and operates as server. All the other servers act as dumb proxies, they just forward the operations between their clients and the authoritative server." - Todd Hoff

The way you got most of the replies to your blog post via Friendfeed is already a bit "wave like," isn't it. Since Google Wave is a protocol and open source, you can be sure that its state-of-the-art implementation will be adapted to what people actually need. By the way: The first email was sent on the earl ARPANET in 1969 (according -- not to the Google guys -- but according to Wikipedia) What did the client look like back then? Something plain ASCII text based in a command line console. What do we have today? Multimedia embedded and attached, pretty fonts, easy to follow threads, ... How long did it take till email spread and became so popular? I guess I could count myself as being an early adopter. Got my first email address in 1993. Google Wave will spread to the masses. It will take some time, but less time than it took for email to take off. One crucial feature I will want is being able to work off-line. Like it is possible with Gmail already. I personally like having data in the cloud, but I also don't want to be 100% dependent on having to be online with a high speed connection all the time. I want a local repository/archive/backup so to speak as well. From what I have seen in the video presentation, I believe Google Wave will be a productivity booster, if used the right way. The metaphor itself is a great one. And that's where good usability usually starts out: With a good metaphor. - John W. Furst

Great observations John! I wish this thread was on Google Wave indeed, so that this comment appeared at the same time in my blog, FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter at the same time! :) - Jorge Escobar

I just learned something new. I was able to correct my embarrassing typing errors here on Friendfeed. Wow. A pre-wave experience. I wonder, if "spelli" would have caught those typos right away. We'll see. - John W. Furst

But think of all those emails you sent with embarrassing typos that you couldn't correct. - guruvan (Rob Nelson)

Adoption of the Wave in the workplace is something I've been struggling to comprehend since I've seen the announcement and product demo. In my experience, our "work" conversations are much more controlled than our "friend/social" conversations". Work conversations are much more structured and based on inherent organizational processes and hierarchies. Aside from using this in the corporate world to facilitate development work (as a Business Analyst in a prior life, I do see the value), I believe the rigid corporate structure - in other departments - would inhibit the uptake and acceptance. Prove me wrong. What are the use cases? How is this rolled out with Change Management practices in the workplace? - Todd Weidman

Those of you that DONT think Wave will be revolutionary are whacked. and I'm no google fan-boy. Obviously not for everyone - I don't think corporate will dive into this early on - but for friends and groups I see it blowing up in a big (good) way. the fact that it's open source is key - I think the product in one year will be much, much more than it is now. Even still, the ability to play back email or im messages, intersperse comments in the middle, add contacts to existing conversations, edit simultaneously, generate visual polls (just the start), and translate in real-time are pretty hot in my book. I'm crossing my fingers hoping to get an api key for it!,,,, - david pavlicko

Well I certainly joined this late (and as an outsider), but I just want to give my two cents to this incredibly insightful thread. Todd, your last comment gave me an idea (and I'm compiling all of my ideas into a Google Doc to have at the ready for later). What if there was a simple way to set up a Wave server of your own with setting presets, one of which could be for businesses and have no real-time and edits only by those who authored the blip? These presets could later be customized and, although this takes out some useful features of Wave, it could lead to rapid enterprise adoption. Perhaps there could also be a designated segment (blip) dedicated for anyone in the Wave to edit (for collaborative documents). Overall, I see immense potential and I think (and hope) that Wave will become a major force in the online world, if only in a personal and not a business context initially. I really wish this were in Wave, especially because I'm coming in late or for those who take a break while others are still commenting, so that I could comment on some of the other thoughts more clearly. It has a potential for chaos if not clearly understood and well-used, but there is a much greater probability that it will become logical and more organized than all of the diverse and separate communications interfaces we use today. Now I just have to hope for early access! - Californian