Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings... - Marshall Kirkpatrick

I acknowledge it's potential and effort and openness of the protocol. But I have had a developer sandbox account since July and I have logged in a few times a week to give a chance. It is very buggy/alpha so that has to be taken into consideration... even though it has been actively developed for over 2 years now (that alone might say something). But everytime, I leave overwhelmed and underwhelmed. I agree that it is non-obvious what problems this aims to solve. I don't think it solves any. It's a grand experiment that tries to push realtime communication to its absolute limits. That is the core of it... multi-user real-time communication. The other features are more of the norm. Embeddable wave/widget, embed/upload rich media, folders, search, profiles, extensions etc... nothing new there. You almost have to expect such features today in any app/service. So to reiterate, it's squarely about the real-time discussions. And it's that core feature that may be overkill and what ultimately steers many users away. Every letter someone types is seen in realtime. That is achievable in many ways and has no real value. It's more of an experiment in stress testing the system than it is an actual useful feature. I think they will allow that to be disabled and will probably improve overal performance and usability. But the multi-user real-time discussion threads are still going to be chaotic..more so with more than 2 users but even with just two participants, it quickly turns into some sort of anxiety producing read/write experience that makes me want to sing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I mean really, are our brains ready for this kind of experience? I've tried. Really, I have. It's not for me. The UI as a whole is not great. It's showing its age actually... This project started a few years ago and I bet this UI has not changed too drastically. And like most of Google, UI is fairly poor. Google Reader is horrid. But I do like Gmail. Now everyone has to remember that... more... - sull from FriendFeed MT Plugin