DISQUS

John Smythe · 2 months ago

Great points, and in principle google wave (and the underlying protocol) should provide everything you outline, HOWEVER, as is, the web client solves little or nothing. The interface is sluggish, buggy, overly complex and the MAIN problem it was going to resolve for me, the endless indentations etc. are NOT resolved, because of the incredible amount of "chrome" (icons, borders, etc etc) used in the interface. Their implementation of playback is failing and even with a very limited set of co-workers, you'll end up with a sea of bordered bubbles impossible to read for an ordinary human being.

I've used wave for 2 weeks now, I'm fully aware of all the browser short-cuts and features and my appreciation for it has waned. Contrast that with I *LOVE* etherpad. It has its own issues (e.g. no indication of age of edits) but contrary to google's wave, it actually works and everyone I've introduced to that keeps using it.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

I haven't gotten that impression about the interface, but then I haven't used it for as long as you. However, it's worth remembering that Wave is still in Preview, and I'm sure they'll iron out those niggles as things progress... For now, it seems good enough for me to use with my team, who are all tolerant enough to use an app that's not quite *finished*.

John Smythe · 2 months ago

I think it works well with small groups or people who can stick to a set of ground-rules, but when you type "with:public" in the search box and visit one of the larger interactive waves is quickly becomes a mess. I anticipate it would be the same in any organization with 100+ employees.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Even in an organisation with 100 employees, they won't all be involved in every discussion. I have rarely done any sort of collaborative work by email with more than, at the most, a dozen people (and even that was very rare). Most email-based collaborations tend, in my experience, to be around 4-6 people at most. In a way, I think the with:public feature is a distraction.. it's not what Wave is good for.

coldbrew · 2 months ago

I also disagree with the 'webheads' negative take on Wave. However, I also disagree with your pigeon-holing of what Google is doing with Wave. As has pointed out in most of those negative posts' comments, Wave is a protocol based on open standards, and Google is open-sourcing the majority of the code behind its implementation (you can build and run your own server right now from code.google). Not to mention the APIs for adding features and the ability to change the presentation using standards.

Collaboration among large sets of people is difficult (IRC proved this long ago), and as the product matures I'm certain there will be ways to minimize the effects of allowing large numbers of people to go hog wild.

My favorite idea for a use-case is a real-time auctioning system built on top of the wave protocol.

At least you've realized XMPP is better than SMTP/IMAP or POP for communicating in a more synchronous manner. Down with unnecessary meetings!

Gabriella · 1 month ago

Thank you thank you thank you! I've been explaining the exact same things to my contacts here in Italy. My job involves collaborating on a number of different documents almost constantly over several private and corporate email addresses and computers, so I'm really looking forward to everyone understanding Google Wave's potential in order to cut down on lost emails, lost faxes and old attachments still being passed around after I've warned people to use the new version. Actually, that's my pet peeve, spending hours correcting/amending a document to perfection only to find that the old doc is still being circulated because someone got mixed up with all the files. It happens all the time with the busy people I work with. I'm thankful for the current public waves though because I can use them as sandboxes, not because I think that's the future of Google Wave.

Enkerli · 2 months ago

Several things to like about this insightful analysis, including the side-comments about the punditocracy and the emphasis on using the tools to do things, instead of evaluating them through knee-jerk reactions.

There are already enough comments here to make it too long to read, so all points have probably been addressed. The main thing, for me, is that Wave isn't just about corporate environments. Yes, it fits there. And it was allegedly created to solve the problems you describe. But the cautionary tale, here, is that of the blind men and the elephant: we can all see Wave in terms of what it can do for us, but that's not the whole of it.
My own tunnel-vision pushes me to see Wave in educational contexts. There, Wave can solve issues with email, of course, but also with course forums and, more interestingly to me, classroom backchannel. The way some people use Twitter or wikis in class can easily be supplemented by Wave. My guess is that the same could be said about conferences (and Barcamp-style unconferences) or even corporate meetings. The "realtime+document" dimension of GWave makes it ideal for going between backchannel and reference material.
But this, again, is just one scenario.

BTW, something Wave might be able to supplement quite effectively: mailing-lists. I've been a big mailing-list fan since 1993 and, before Wave, nothing seemed like a good candidate to really supplement mailing-lists. Gmail and Google Groups made mailing-lists a bit more efficient, but mailing-lists are rather stable, as a medium for topical (and more informal) discussions. Geeks probably hate them and many needs are more appropriately served by forums. But it's remarkable how useful mailing-lists remain, at this point.
Wave supplement mailing-lists in part by making for ad hoc subscription. Managing mailing-lists can be relatively painful, depending on members' behaviour. Wave already makes it easier to add people to a wave. We know it'll soon be easy to remove people from waves. And the platform seems to be built in such a way that it should be trivial to add tools to make it easy to monitor waves in a way similar to mailing-lists. I may be wrong on this one, since I don't have that much insight into GWave's internals. But it's fairly easy to imagine bots and gadgets which enhance the "mailing-list" type of Wave use.
But that, again, is only one among many possibilities for Wave.

Wave has what it takes to become a much broader tool than what was expected/intended. Like Twitter. Or Facebook. And even, to an extent, Gtalk, Wikipedia, and GMaps.
Tools which are dismissed by geek pundits often end up becoming quite important. The iPod is my personal favourite, as an example. But you could say the same thing about Twitter: it took a while before it really became what it could become, and pundits were off on this one for some time. They saw some potential, but they dismissed the way people were using it.
Scoble isn't a bad guy and he's allowed to his opinions. From his early write-ups on GWave, though, it seems that he went to it with the wrong perspective. He was prepared to review a tool, not to try it out or think about the possibilities.
Not to becoming too academic about it but, in Science and Technology Studies (STS), people talk about "affordances" in a way which is useful for such situations. It's not just about what the tool was meant to do. It's what it can become, how embedded it is in use patterns.
To an engineer, Wave is a solution in search of a problem. And this list of issues fixed in part by Wave is quite valuable. But Wave is also a "channel," a medium, a "pipe." What it might be used for goes beyond a series of problems.

Google's partly to blame for the misunderstanding. Their launch strategy was, IMHO, somewhat off-base. Apparently, they did invite members of some corporations, but they still overemphasized developers. These are important to get on your side, of course, but it doesn't make for a very wide range of use patterns. And it really doesn't help the social media geeks (who are even more important to get on your side) understand what Wave is supposed to become. Also, because Wave has a very strong network effect, it would have been more effective to start with existing clusters and communities, instead of the Google I/O crowd and select people.

Ken · 2 months ago

I think it's adorable how half of these "problems" with email are things our corporate Usenet server has been doing just fine for decades.

Thus I am enlightened: Wave = Usenet + Bling.

jv2222 · 2 months ago

Ok, if this article is correct then it's a big problem for Google. Because their entire revenue model is based on earning money from from advertising... I can't imagine enterprise level organisations allowing Google to Earn money via advertising.

I know that Google have made some efforts to make money by directly charging Enterprises but that represents a tiny part of their revenue to date.

In other words, is Wave a much smaller opportunity than they had hoped? And if so, it might just end up being a "side project"...

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

I'm not sure that's a big problem for Google. They have plenty of cash so they can afford to spend a long time pushing a technology like Wave without seeing much revenue from it.

Also, as far as I know, Google do make some reasonable revenue (though nothing compared to adverts) from selling "Google boxes" to enterprises. They really don't _need_ Wave to generate any revenue for a very long time.

Markus Hegi · 2 months ago

The main business model of Google is to link user content to relevant advertisements. Google is not a vendor of Enterprise Software (Like IBM, MS or Oracle) - But until Wave like tools will be successful in large Enterprises, it will take time, and before that, smaller groups of people will adapt it - and thats the area where Wave will probably be successful first -

DavidG · 2 months ago

I think the weakness in the current client is that it conditions certain behaviors that are NOT going to be happy in a corporate environment. I do not think any supervisor wants their staff to watch them typing. They will therefore begin to make all changes via cut and paste. This will result in them taking a document from the wave, copying it to their local editor, making the change and then pasting it over the original. Now you have lost your change tracking. Worse yet, its perfectly possible that someone else made changes while you were off in your other browser.

So yes the underlying protocol yields benefits, but implementation is key. Its great to work towards collaboration being centralized, but it isn't really a realistic aspect of structured document writing. People aren't going to be typing tables of data into this. They are going to be exporting. They aren't going to be having the legal department working on the document while the engineers and marketing staff are. They are going to be sending it for review.

Where I think the protocol might thrive is as a place for mashups. It is a combination of a wiki and a messaging system. But change management doesn't exist. I haven't really studied the protocol and API, so I don't know whether these are client issues or protocol issues, but its not unreasonable to see why people might look at this and say it doesn't solve their problems.

Certainly in small intimate teams that are used to whiteboarding and 'ideating' this has some obvious value.

Ian · 2 months ago

I'm pretty sure that when I watched the Google Wave demo they explicitly pointed out that the real-time typing could be turned off, which would at least remove the need to copy and paste from/into a local editor.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Indeed they do. There's a "Draft" checkbox. If you click it, people don't see what you're typing. That's already implemented.

bratling · 2 months ago

Backing up your point about watching real-time typing:
http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009/10/the-lost-less...
"The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the reasons Manjoo describes: it makes you self-conscious. We took it out in the next release."

found via: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/10/14/alf...

MichaelonTech · 2 months ago

Finnally someone who has clearly explained what Google Wave is and is not....I now have a good basic understanding of what Google Wave is....this is a very good post....

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Thanks! I'm glad you found it helpful!

Se7en · 2 months ago

Great analysis. The problem with the blogosphere is the whole sense of entitlement some bloggers tend to have-"if it doesn't suit my needs, it's useless for everyone!" I don't think a lot of bloggers realize that most of us out here don't "blog" or "social network" or "twitter" as our profession, they are just tools to get our jobs done.

We recently switched to Google Apps for our company-and one thing I realize that Google Wave "fixes", is how Google Mail handles threaded conversations. Right now, its just kind of confusing how you have to dig down in the threaded Gmails to find conversations, and check who is being cc-ed and who shouldn't be. From what little I can tell from Wave, it seems to really clarify what Google was attempting with Gmail. Looking forward to trying it.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

I just hope Google realises that and starts marketing Wave to its real users: people who are trying to get things done...

the_madman · 2 weeks ago

Personally, I detest the web interface as well - I am looking forward to when people start making desktop applications, or integrating existing applications into Google Wave (Thunderbird for Wave, anyone?).

Abhishek · 2 months ago

This is good analysis. I am also of the same opinion and can see why Robert Scoble stopped using it as soon as he started it. Simply because it is not meant for him. I got my invite yesterday only and by seeing few example wave it was pretty much clear to me why this thing can become hit in corporate world. Good one, you saved me efforts to write my own post about this ;)

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Exactly... I got a bit exasperated with the fact that few people seemed to "get" it. After writing about 5 comments explaining this on HackerNews, I thought I might as well blog it instead.

Abhishek · 2 months ago

I must say you have done a good job explaining it :) This will be my first reference if I have to explain google wave to someone.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Thanks :-)

PulSamsara · 1 month ago

Agreed - a good snapshot synopsis.

Daniel J. Pritchett · 2 months ago

I really loved your post, Daniel. I feel conflicted when I see early adopters panning Wave. These people aren't necessarily interested in enterprise collaboration at all. It seems *obvious* how great it can be to merge email and IM with a rich text interface that could replace every text box you ever type into. The possibilities are still exciting me.

n · 1 month ago

This is a very thoughtful and clear analysis, thank you. You may also want to check out this succinct 2min YouTube clip explaining how Wave fixes email problems in practical terms. Cheers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo

AA · 2 months ago

It might take ten years before one can even think about this getting into corporate world. Plus, with corporate world, you are either using it throughout in and out of your companies boundaries (like e-mail) or you're not. They have not been able to transcend unified IM for corporate world, let alone any other technology. The email and the Microsoft's Offices files are the only things that works in corporate world (and PDF as well).

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

I have personally worked in two mega-companies that made extensive use of IM. One used an internal IRC-like system which allowed explicitly authorised external parties to connect. The other simply plugged into MSN. I know people at Barclays, and they use Yahoo! IM there. Seems to me IM is pretty well adopted in those companies, and I think if anyone can convince these behemoths to adopt something fresh and new, it's shiny old Google.

AA · 2 months ago

Yahoo IM in the financial industry? That seems impossible, they have plethora of audit and legal data retaining issues to deal with, how in the world could they rely on outsider Yahoo to deal with their work? Unless you're talking about few IT guys using IM for their work, the general work force can't be relying on Yahoo or MSN, the corporate policies won't even consider approving such communication channels.

But either case, Google Wave has a while go to before it gets real traction (besides the hype). As of right now, I personally don't see a need to use it as IM and email combined can do what Google Wave does right now, plus there are tons of other products which can be used to get the same work done (Etherpad, Shareflow etc). Also, Google hasn't made a case of even them using Wave internally corporate wide. From what it seems, there are handful of people in Australia and US who have developed and are managing the release (there's another debate on how they're managing the release of this product).

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Nope, those are front-office salespeople using it (Yahoo) to talk to clients, to each other, to their back-office, etc. I guess Yahoo gave them a way to log every conversation for SOX purposes.

Agree there are plenty of questions around Google Wave... plenty of ways it can, er, break and roll back :-) But I think those that say "it's just not that useful" are wrong - hence the above article!

blah · 2 months ago

Barcap use mindalign, a very bad IM that happens to fulfull all the retention requirements. Not Yahoo Messenger.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Heh, weird, UBS used that too. I always thought, what a terrible name for any piece of software.

However, I can confirm, for sure, no doubt about it, that my ex-girlfriend, who works at BarCap, is on Yahoo IM all day long and uses it for work (she occasionally chatted me trading information by mistake). Perhaps she's not supposed to (though I doubt that), but she clearly does - and clearly so do the people she works with.

King · 2 months ago

Trading and Sales functions at most Wall St firms use Yahoo or AOL IM. Its been the industry standard for traders and brokers to communicate for years.

Markus Hegi · 2 months ago

Yes, I think the marketing / sales may be the first to adapt Wave & similar technologies - It will take time, until this happens in a broader way, but there are a couple of large enterprises in healthcare too, which already use a Wave-like tool: http://colayer.com/PAGE_net

Abhishek · 2 months ago

Dude few corporations may still be using Lotus 123 notes. We are not talking about such corporations. We are talking about agile companies who wants to keep pace with upcoming technologies. Just look at the way big corporations have adopted twitter in their operations. This product is targeting such companies. For laggards no innovation or product is going to make any difference soon.

AA · 2 months ago

You're correct but change occurs very slowly at huge corporations which are not IT shops. Above we were discussing Yahoo/MSN IM. I have seen many people use these external IMs for internal business but they are not necessarily allowed through corporate IT policies. A firewall rule allowing them to go through is another matter.

vishnusankar · 2 months ago

Hi Abhishek,

I need google wave invitation, can you please send invitation to my gtalk Id: vishnusankar@gmail.com.

Thanks in Advance

Faiz · 2 months ago

"Wave is a corporate tool that solves work problems" - Totally agree. I have started using it in office today. We used to collaborate using SharePoint, TFS, etc. This is much more effective.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

My thoughts exactly. Sharepoint, Basecamp, etc, beware. Thanks for your comment :-)

Name · 2 months ago

Isn't this just a real-time message board?

Paul M · 2 months ago

Not quite. Where does a message board allow you to collaborate on a single document, make changes to it, discuss it in real time, invite selected users into it, insert private conversations about it, replay a timeline of events, easily add custom programs and interactive tools and form easily searchable information stores (wiki style)? A message board is a series of static text responses. Wave is something entirely different.

I really appreciate this write-up, Daniel, well said. There's a lot of love but negativity gets the publicity and almost every negative write-up I've read concentrates on aspects of it which are obviously related to the fact that it isn't even a beta yet, judging it as a finished product. I look at the potential, and it's not fair to judge a tool which is basically still being developed. I love using Wave already, even in it's preview state, and already begin to detest having to use e-mail. The sooner everyone has access to it the better.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

No. Message boards don't implement half the features of Wave - and don't solve many of the problems outlined in the article.

Steve K. · 2 months ago

One big, huge, gigantic problem of email in a corporate environment is that people get too much of it. If you are managing more than a couple of people, and interact with more than a couple of outside contacts, and need to keep abreast of what's happing in other parts of your organization, it can quickly become overwhelming to sift through a daily barrage of 100+ emails trying to prioritize what to reply to immediately, and remembering to follow up with the less immediate but still important items.

How does Wave address this? Or does it just make it worse?

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

I guess that will depend on how an organisation uses it. As the with:public option shows, having hundreds of people on a single Wave is unproductive to say the least. If companies send their newsletter to everyone that way, well, that's not very useful.

I guess it has the potential to help, though, because important, collaborative communications that require your input will be on Wave rather than on email.

That's an interesting point though - how does Wave deal with "email broadcasts" like corporate newsletters? I don't have the answer to that.

Paul M · 2 months ago

Read only IB, and Wave discussion below it

Steve K. · 2 months ago

"Read only IB, and Wave discussion below it"

? not sure what you mean (or what IB is, even).

'That's an interesting point though - how does Wave deal with "email broadcasts" like corporate newsletters? I don't have the answer to that."

Stuff like mass-mailings from HR, or newsletters aren't so much of a problem, although they do contribute to distraction. The main issue is that people use email as a primary source of communication, sending off dozens of emails a day with the expectation that they will get read. But much of the time they don't get read, or get glanced at and then forgotten, since the recipient is getting the same barrage from multiple people and it can be very time-consuming and overwhelming to manage a heavy email load and actually do work, too.

Unfortunately, though, I suspect the only way to really solve this problem is through a change in cultural attitudes towards communication technology, rather than new and better tools. But I don't have much faith that people collectively will decide to start behaving more rationally. So we're stuck, I guess.

Markus Hegi · 2 months ago

The problem is not the amount of information, but THE CONTEXT - see your daily newspaper: Its a large amount of information, right? - but is it a problem? - No, because it is well CONTEXTUALIZED - Now imagine, one morning, you would get an unsorted pile of papers instead of your newspaper, each holding one single article. Thats exactly, what you have with email today. And that is, how Wave and similar tools will help you: The information stays in context, and you get it in context. - more: http://colayer.com/PAGE_about

Arron · 1 month ago

Now that's an interesting idea. A start page.. kind of like the front page of a newspaper where you define the areas that will show certain types of messages. So for example, all newsletter type messages go to... the top left column. Everything that is important goes to the center content area. You could have headline area, status update area.. Basically it's a drag and drop UI of message containers that each have different filters and typography. Now that could be cool.

Louis Gray · 2 months ago

It is interesting that my coverage of Google Wave continues to be lumped in with others who found it a disappointment. I said it was very good and a likely invaluable tool for collaboration, but most people are focused on the observations I had saying it was going to be noisy. The noise is undebatable. It can get busy. But it has a lot of promise.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Interesting... Re-reading your coverage, it isn't as negative as I remembered it.

I think it's possible that Scoble's reply ("Louis: I came to the same realization very quickly that you did"), pointing to his article ("Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype"), which was clearly disappointed, and the fact that your two articles came out roughly at the same time, helped taint my (and others') perceptions...

Thanks for coming here and fixing this perception. I stand corrected.

Stefan Richter · 2 months ago

So it's like Basecamp then?

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

It certainly can resolve most of the problems that Basecamp aims to resolve. Most people that I speak to who like Basecamp like it because of its communication features.

That's not going to be an overnight replacement, don't get me wrong. But if Wave takes hold, I'd be surprised if Basecamp lasted much beyond that point without significant enhancements.

Anna · 2 months ago

I use Basecamp and love it. I can't see letting it go for Wave, though because I use it with clients; I can keep it closed whereas Wave appears to be too fluid on the security side of things. ON the other hand, the first thing I thought when I finally understood (partially) how a Wave functions was, "I can't wait to get my team on!" We are not quite a business yet, still learning how we could be effective together, and the swirl of email addresses, calendars, cross-platform attachments, lost Basecamp logins is absolutely driving us nuts.
I am very excited to try this new app out. Hopefully I can get my team on soon.
(e parabens no artigo! gostei muito. eu acho que somos 'amigos' no Twitter)

louisbclark · 2 months ago

So... how is Wave going to succeed where MS Groove (soon to be "Sharepoint Workspace") failed? one answer: it has a much better chance of becoming ubiquitous and doesn't have the ramp-up. But the notion that people are DYING to collaborate and fail to do so because of technology has not panned out to date

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Another possible answer is that Wave is free and open source whereas Groove costs a pretty penny, especially when you're buying it at Enterprise scale. And Groove is not even an option for small businesses, as far as I know.

louisbclark · 2 months ago

ironic. I saw Groove when it first released (c. 2001). back then it didn't appeal to the Enterprise (those on the inside reflected they thought "moms exchanging recipes" would be their paradigmatic user). it cost c. $29.95 and could be used by individuals (effectively) the Groove Server came later and now that MS has it and added it to the top-line version of Office, your perception is accurate: it's a costly Enterprise (captial "E") solution only. perhaps to live out its useful life as a Sharepoint client.

but still, ironic.

Dave E. · 2 months ago

I see it as potentially valuable in business process execution. Most current workflow implementations are painfully rigid and limited. Wave could be the basis for engineering change management workflows or, even better, the big general processes such as consolidating the forecast (messy!) and getting it into the ERP. A 'real' workflow engine would be too painfully rigid and unable to handle the loose and rapid give and take of an actual business process in action. Wave could help pull something like that together.

AA · 2 months ago

My one big problem with Wave is that I have to get into it to not only do something but also to get a notification of what others have done. Until they merge it with email, I don't see how it could be very useful.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Oh, you're definitely right there. I hope they'll allow us to merge our gmail accounts with our Wave accounts soon... or vice versa...

I suspect it will take a while though.

Aaron · 2 months ago

Nit: Wave uses Gears to upload, so it doesn't have the same usability and reliability problems that typical HTTP upload forms do.

Other than that, great article!

maxniederhofer · 2 months ago

Thanks, man. This was a good read. Would love to catch up for a coffee soon.

Max

Colin Curtin · 2 months ago

I really enjoyed this writeup, and I learned something - I honestly didn't know what Wave would be good for. That's not entirely accurate - I had a tickle of an inkling of a feeling that it could be used for work collaboration, but it didn't submit until I read this. Great job, sir.

Now, how does Wave affect Woobius? It seems like it would be a great add-on to put them together and have Wave + Woobius doc versioning + Eye, no?

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Absolutely... We have some thoughts about how that might work, actually, but it's still a bit early to hammer out how they might work together in detail. There's definitely plenty of overlap between our aims, and no reason why we wouldn't, for example, have a Wave widget that allows you to issue the documents from a Wave formally... many other possibilities...

Kutuma · 2 months ago

Totally agree! This is my feeling on Wave too. Sadly I don't have an account yet, but each time an email thread at work goes beyond 3 emails, I really wish I had!

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

It's only a matter of time ;-)

Anonnymous Coward · 2 months ago

I thought any decent e-mail client with a "threaded view" capability actually solves Problem 6.

Daniel J. Pritchett · 2 months ago

Not that I've seen. GMail for example infers threading but it's not the same as an explicit split like you'll see in Wave when people choose exactly where and to what they're replying.

Sathish Paul · 2 months ago

Perhaps yes, but the problems start coming in, when you begin to add a new member to the email thread and if someone in the thread forgets to include the newly included person.

Jubal · 2 months ago

Thanks for this illuminating overview of Google Wave.

One nit: "The SMTP protocol doesn’t seem to be all that good at sending large files."

This isn't a problem inherent in the SMTP protocol, but rather restrictions placed within the settings for the given SMTP server that's receiving the mail. For example, if a company wishes not to overload their SMTP server because an employee is sending out a 50 MB Powerpoint attachment to 10 Internet addresses -- that isn't really different from placing the same file on a fileserver and having 10 people download it. And if a company wants to restrict the size of inbound messages, well, that's still not SMTP's fault, either. The company's mail store (e.g. where mail is stored and retrieved via IMAP or POP) can take a single message to multiple internal recipients and store it once, but make it available to all of the internal recipients. That is an implementation-specific feature and not related to SMTP, POP3 or IMAP protocols.

If you wanted to complain about SMTP's real ineffiency with sending large files, that boils down to converting all attachments to plaintext, an act that usually inflates the filesize by 20 to 30 percent. Such an act is done in the name of compatibility between SMTP implementations -- wouldn't want to have a binary (8-bit) message garbled when sending to a 7-bit-only server. And so forth.

But if you're then grumbling about a 20 to 30 percent increase in filesize, that's not much of a grumble, in my opinion.

Email has other problems that a wiki solves, and that Google Wave solves better, but the SMTP protocol and its extensions are not the culprit. Careful with the overbroad knocks.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Noted. I thought that might be the case, but I wasn't sure. Thanks for the correction. I should have checked more closely. To be fair, though, in that case, HTTP doesn't have those limitations either, does it?

Sathish Paul · 2 months ago

Nice post Danny! Looking to read more from you.

Cheers
--paul

Ray · 2 months ago

Agreed. Wave is the next evolutionary step in office applications a la Exchange. The truth is, just like many corporate geeks forced to use Exchange accounts a their work, they'll be forced to use Wave-like variants in the future, mainly for the value it gives those around them--the big picture us geeks tend to ignore.

grovberg · 2 months ago

I'm willing to give Wave a fair shake, but you're forgetting one incredibly crucial issue here. My co-workers and I all had the same question when we saw the demo; does it integrate with regular email? No? Never mind.

No matter how great Wave is, it only works if everyone is using, right? So you're going to have to use email for some sets of people, and Wave for other sets of people (even if your company standardizes on it). And you know that everyone who has Wave also has email. So unless you specifically need Wave's features, you'll likely just email them since you're already there. And pretty soon, you're not really checking Wave anymore it starts collecting dust.

Jubal · 2 months ago

Unless an email client is integrated. Which isn't all that far fetched, after all. Why wouldn't IMAP be orthogonal, if done right? Say you email someone outside the Wave collaborative group, and you've attached something that the internal group would see within Wave, but the external group might see as a download hyperlink of some sort.

At this point I'm just waving my hands, no pun intended. Haven't seen Google Wave yet. My point is that existing wikis have zero integration (AFAIK) to email, and I see an opening for Wave to do something about this. IM (XMPP) is already done, right? Why not IMAP?

grovberg · 2 months ago

And if that happens, I'll be running through the streets shouting "GOOGLE WAVE IS THE GREATEST!" But you can't judge a product on what it might be one day, especially from Google (who have a proven track record of leaving out glaringly obvious features for years on nearly every otherwise excellent product they have). One little feature can turn any product from mediocre to genius, but it doesn't count until it's actually there or at least mentioned as part of the plan. And I haven't seen anyone (Google or otherwise) make even the smallest mention of it.

rob_nordic · 2 months ago

Wave as it stands now, is totally useless. Only once it matures, and more people get on it, will it start making sense—for corporate and team users. Regular users aren't going to use it for shit.

Here's another interesting post about how Google Wave fails to capture the audience it seeks http://bit.ly/yrNjo

Jay Cuthrell · 2 months ago

This is a solid Google Wave perspective -- very link worthy.

Wayne Attwell · 2 months ago

Thanks for that fresh and optimistic view on Wave. We haven't jumped into it yet for the obvious social media type objections, but I can now see the benefit from and email supplement or IM replacement perspective.

rymich · 2 months ago

This page just got bookmarked for me. I'm showing this to anyone I know who ends up asking. One thing I was thinking was that Google probably made this for Google. Your entire piece discusses a generic office, but given the type of environment Google is and the pace at which they must work, Wave must be a huge productivity booster, and it's going to help a lot of others as well.

nikanth · 2 months ago

Most of these things are available in bugzilla... check it out ;-)

Ruben van den Born · 2 months ago

Wave is not the new 'X'. It's a totally new concept of an integration of existing services. Therefore it is more a disruptive innovation than a continuous innovation. That requires a totally different way of entering the market. To have it adopted by the great majority of the market they should shift the users perception of it. The majority does not want disruptive innovation.

Marco · 2 months ago

One issue though: if it's for corporate/team use, why did Google add the "make wave public" option? Those Waves are already a mess at this very moment.
I agree on most of your views, but I am seriously wondering what Google itself is trying to achieve here. Doesn't seem to be just a team collaboration tool, there's more, I think.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Thanks for your comment. It could well be that Google itself hasn't quite figured out what Wave is for. After all, they're only human ;-)

In either case, if any organisation has the time and resources to pursue multiple possible applications of a technology/platform like Wave, it has to be Google. I certainly hope they realise the potential for Wave as a collaboration tool. If they didn't, hopefully this article might have helped...

Jay [ER] · 2 months ago

Nice writeup, it was a pleasant read. Thank you!

Levi Buzolic · 2 months ago

Exactly what needed to be said. Google Wave is not going to be the new way I talk to my friends, it'll be how I organise photoshoots & documents with my photography business partners.

fourstar · 2 months ago

Really enjoyed this analysis; as someone who loves Twitter but realises its limitations in the workplace, your use cases are spot on for collaborative working, certainly in my line of work (Banking IT).

Mark Howells-Mead · 2 months ago

An excellent article, of which I've just created a PDF to pass on to the powers that be at The Day Job. :-) There are a few savvy people about in our corporate world who may be able and happy to adopt it; the only concern I have right now (as a complete newcomer to Wave) is the issue of privacy. It's easy for someone who's not totally familiar with the setup to open a wave to some of his contacts and thereby allow them access to a discussion in which private or sensitive information may be shared.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Well, to be fair, that problem exists with email too. It's easy to forward sensitive information to someone outside the organisation.

Also, Wave allows each organisation to set up its own server, using federation to sync with the rest of the world - so they could implement custom controls at that level.

Bear in mind it's still early days for this. I don't see any but the most progressive, nimble organisations replacing email with Wave in the next year. We're using it already at Woobius, but we're not exactly a standard use-case. I think once it's out of preview/beta we'll see more serious interest from corporate environments, though.

Mark Howells-Mead · 2 months ago

Yes, quite: it seems to be a great tool in principle, which will really take off when one has more than half a dozen geeky friends as contacts :-) Re. privacy: it's more than someone being invited to join the discussion appears to have immediate access to the entire conversation, instead of that part which relates to his involvement.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

True, that will require some slightly different behaviours then. If you want to invite someone to discuss only a small part of a Wave, then you can select that part and start a new wave with that content (including any attachments you might have selected). So that use case is somewhat covered, it'll just take a little getting used to.

Mark Workel · 2 months ago

I like the angle you took on in this article! "What problem does it solve"? Funny that the extensions (robots and gadgets) are not the solution to any of the problems. Maybe it is because you focussed on the problems we have with email. Wave can solve other problems as well. For example picking a date when to have dinner with your friends. By e-mail it's a nightmare. With an online tool it becomes easier, but you have to register for the web service, send links to all your friends etc. In Wave you could just create a Wave add a gadget and add your friends as particpants.

Many web tools could port their services to Wave and make them accessible as extension. For me it would be great, because I would have it all in one place.

Indra · 2 months ago

Indeed, extensions are a *huge* part of what's new in wave that has been totally forgotten in this otherwise excellent article.

CJ · 2 months ago

Excellent article - it provides compelling reasons for using Google Wave in everyday corporate scenarios. From the article, it also becomes clear how Wave is different from other social media tools and not intended to compete or replace them. As someone else mentioned in the response, it will also be my first reference if I were to explain Wave to someone. Thanks.

Ryan · 2 months ago

How many corporations would allow these collaborations to take place outside of the firewall? Not many I have to believe. With that in mind, there would still need to be some steps taken in order to make it a viable corporate solution.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

That certainly will depend on the organisation. Banks probably wouldn't find that much need for most of their employees to have outside-facing waves. Construction-related firms, though, which do most of their work in collaboration with other companies, would.

That said, even that would just be paranoid. Email already goes outside the firewall, along with any files attached to it. Corporations have learned to live with that, and they have a hell of a lot less control over it than they would have over a Wave hosted on their own federated server.

Ryan · 2 months ago

Email lives outside the firewall, but email doesn't live on the Google cloud. :) Hosting on their own server is one of the 'steps taken' I was thinking of. I was also thinking of all the Corporations still using IE6. Thus far, many are resilient to upgrade due to legacy applications and I'm not sure Wave would be enough to prompt that move.

All that being said, this is by far the best explanation for the technology.

Ryan · 2 months ago

edit: non-gmail email doesn't live on the Google cloud. heh.

anoopjacob · 2 months ago

Good review.
Seems like I was takin de wrong ideas

N · 2 months ago

Daniel, I don't have an invite yet so can you clarify -- internal teams only or also with third parties outside the organization? Also, what is the equivalent of your "email address" in Wave? Thank you.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

My email looks like "danieltenner@googlewave.com" in Wave. As I understand it, the federation system means that everyone can have their own server(s) (much like Exchange servers), but still interact with servers outside of the company network. I guess it will depend how an organisation sets up its Wave server.

RadiantSteve · 2 months ago

I work in a narrow niche online - selling in-floor radiant heating systems to do-it-yourselfers. I see Google Wave as a crucial tool to add to my sales process.

Often, I need to collaborate with not only the homeowner, but also the architect, general and sub contractors - sometimes even building code officials. It can be a complicated and technical sales process and I'm constantly having to search through reams of e-mail threads and files.

Google Wave seems like an elegant solution to that - doesn't it do video conferencing too? That would bring some humanity back into a sales process that has largely become very disconnected for me...

I can't wait for my Google Wave invite - it's going to make the user experience much better for my customers.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

There's an add-on by 6rounds, easily installed, that does video conferencing. I just tried it out with Bob - it works about as well as Skype, which is to say, well enough for most video conf calls.

RadiantSteve · 2 months ago

That sounds perfect - I'm looking forward to being able to keep all of that communication in one place...
(Please hurry up and send me my invite, Google.)

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Btw, to solve some of the file headaches for now, you might want to check out my start-up, Woobius: http://www.woobius.com - you might find it useful, or not.. in either case I'd love to hear your thoughts on it (and perhaps on what _would_ make it useful to you, if it's not).

Walker · 2 months ago

socialism - yuk yuk yuk - in a larry sense of the word yuk

Slybacon · 2 months ago

Very good article - particularly the descriptionof the problems with email discussion. I wrote something similar on the Ramblings of a Remote Worker site: http://remoteworker.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/bu...

nomadismocelular · 2 months ago

Daniel, your article is precise. Very good analysis. I would like to translate it to Portuguese, probably only the two first paragraphs (actually, I would enjoy to put it into Portuguese, though is the first article really serious about Wave), and paste it at Nomadismo Celular.
Congrats,
Mary Jo Zilveti
http://www.nomadismocelular.com.br

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Absolutely, feel free to do so (with a link to here, please!). Let me know and I will add a link at the top of the article, like I did for someone who did a Russian translation of http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-...

nomadismocelular · 2 months ago

Daniel, I have just posted the translation to Portuguese of some paragraphs of your text. I have also twitted it and facebooked it. Here is the link. Btw, if you will use the link, and, of course, don't mind, I would like to ask you to keep the same URL ( http://ow.ly/uSDZ ). Thanks again.

Below is the text I'have twitted/facebookesd.
"Eaê, o Google Wave resolve o seu problema? Por Daniel Tenner | Análise brilhante http://ow.ly/uSDZ #GoogleWave #DanielTenner"

Mary Jo Zilveti
http://twitter.com/zilveti
http://www.facebook.com/maryjozilveti

P.S. I'm Brazilian and have been writing about IT for 20 years. Nowadays, in Brazil, Twitter and Facebook are major social networks (let me tell you and I can not forget about Orkut, adquired later by Google, the first social network that has been adopted by Brazilian people since 2004. Actually, Orkut is the top one in the ranking and the most used). Best regards,

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

I'm adding a link to your translation as we speak, but could I ask you a favour? If you're going to reproduce the whole text of my article, why not just link to here?

nomadismocelular · 2 months ago

Hi, Daniel, unfortunately, I haven't finished the whole translation of your text. On the other hand, I have put the link of your article in the headlines with the title in English. I have also pasted your text, just to give a comparison to the readersr in order to check eventual faults of my translation. But the link to your text is there. In the headlines. Btw, let me know if you'd rather want me to take off your text from my post and let only the link.

Intrawebs · 2 months ago

It's their product to compete with SharePoint 2007/2010 (the collaboration tools, not www publishing of course)

It is a different approach, and to me looks very well done. However, the bottom line is adoption (with SharePoint and Wave). If the users aren't "pushed" to it for lack of a better term (forced, mandated etc) then users will see it as yet another piece of software that only adds to the number of tools they are currently using on their workstations.

N · 2 months ago

I wonder how Wave will solve the "GoTo" problem. People go to their email client. If it's not there, they'll forget it exists. That's why Basecamp sends email alerts for example.

Daniel Tenner · 2 months ago

Once they integrate email into it, my guess is it will replace the email client.

pcunix · 2 months ago

Of course Google caused some of the stupidity by giving Wave to journalists without clues... had they looked at their own signup form and first given it to people whose comments indicated that we actually HAD a clue, they wouldn't have had all this dumb yammering.

kcecelia · 2 months ago

Interesting. Worked as a Director of Communications for a startup in Silicon Valley. We rotated the Project Manager responsibilities amongst the Directors, (most of whom were former programmers overseeing programmers). Our biggest problems revolved around the enormous amounts of information we were trying to control through email communications or lack of same, and the inability to keep a thread going consistently. We also were juggling hallway conversations of great import, undocumented meeting decisions with varying players in attendance, hardcopy changes, and online changes. Such things as changes communicated at different levels or in different forums would be lost. It was extremely difficult to get changes made appropriately and in a timely manner. But in the end it was my documents, used by a developer customer or one of our own tech support people talking to a developer customer, that would be wrong if I did not continue to push for accuracy and completeness. Hearing Robert Scoble complain about (rail against?) the software did not affect me one way or the other---though it was most entertaining and made me curious. I remain skeptical but interested. I have not used any software aids that solved the complexity of the problems in communication and action. Thanks for the well written, visually accessible, and aesthetically pleasing article. I think you have cleared up the basic mystery of The Wave for a lot of us.

noname · 2 months ago

has no head and sleep walk as zombie fodder in alaskan soup. empty glass jar. 'SPICE ANYYONE?

stevesimitzis · 2 months ago

I'm going to join the "hmmm sounds more like a Basecamp replacement than an email replacement" chorus. When email gets unwieldy in collaborative settings, people seek out tools like Basecamp. Don't get me wrong, as someone who spend the first half of my career trying to tame SMTP, I would love to see a replacement for that geriatric protocol. I'm just skeptical that there's an appeal beyond users who already seeking out (and finding) existing collaboration tools.

Time will tell, of course!

bgruber · 2 months ago

So i haven't been so, um, privileged, to have used wave, but based on the demos, i think you're kind of off the mark.

It's not that Wave isn't for corporate types; it's that that is just one of it's possible uses.

You say that Wave isn't twitter or facebook or whatever, but the fact is that it is twitter and facebook and blogs and wikis and email and newsgroups and IM and maybe a few more things.

In fact, 'a few more things" is clearly what Google is hoping for; they're hoping that someone figures out some killer application that wave can do that nobody else has ever even heard of; that's why it was released to "geeks and hackers" first. They hope this will happen because it will immediately make Wave a much more sellable product, just like every other killer application that came before it.

"Better than email" is a nice idea, but it's a very, very tough sell. Email is entrenched, and selling a product based on "better than email" is suggesting that you should use it instead of email; that's clearly google's long-term intent, but they know they can't go there quite yet. In order to get customers to consciously abandon email, you can't just be better, you have to be an order of magnitude better. The jump from paper mail to email? That's the kind of leap you'd need to make.

To me, the big deal about Wave is the combination of the potential to supplant a lot of those aforementioned other services with federation. As I see it, the big problem that google waves solves is that of walled gardens springing up all over the internet. If you don't believe me, ask yourself which of the two is a bigger problem for google: office collaboration, or walled gardens?

arthur_alston · 2 months ago

Thank you for this very thoughtful article. I've been testing Wave for about two weeks and prior to that read all the articles you refer to in your opening paragraph. In addition I also read an article by Steve Ruble (http://www.steverubel.com/google-wave-rss-the-s...) in which he asked exactly the question you posed in this article, What problem does Wave solve?

I think you've answered it perfectly.

I work for a multinational pharma company, and can see us using Wave in the way you describe above. My only concern is that it is yet another tool to be learnt and integrated in the work flow of people who already are change resistant. We run off an Exchange server, so until Wave is integrated in to our e-mail system, it will always be an issue. However, I don't think of this as insurmountable, hopefully we will see many solutions to this very problem.

Gaetan Dhont · 2 months ago

Daniel, I published a small article as a reply to your article (http://gaetandhont.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/goo...)

Extracts of the article:
<<This article isn’t about how good or how bad Google Wave is. I’m rather interested to understand what Wave is about and how it could transform the way we approach email and IM with collaborative content creation.>>>
...
<<<
I agree largely with the points brought by Daniel. There are pieces that make me smile in his article and especially in some of the comments. Many of us (IT/Technology enthusiasts that talk about it) seems to forgot that majority of companies is not ready to go outside for their email system.>>>
...
<<<
However, I learned from the comments sent by Daniel that federated server is a possibility.
>>>
...
More googling and reading for a later day, definitely. The starting point is a whitepaper from Google: Google Wave Federation Architecture>>>

JeffreyJDavis · 2 months ago

Thanks for a pretty telling overview. Many of the other "preview" docs and videos which are out there are pretty functionally oriented without really putting it in an application content. If the real benefit will be in a corporate environment, I wonder how seamless Google Wave will be with companies' internal email systems or whether corporate teams will need to use Gmail for their wave interractions, or whether I'm totally missing the point and Wave is not really integrated with email at all?

Mohan Arun L · 2 months ago

Do you have a way in Google Wave to view unconnected wavelets? Conversations that are not part of your closed-circuit social network? (Public chat views/memes etc. like a forum thread's view)

CulturalEngineer · 2 months ago

This is a good analysis... I also now have Wave account and can very quickly see that it's as a "much-improved" system of email that it's real strength lies.

My only problem right now is I don't have enough fellow friends and associates with a Wave account to use it more and do better evaluation.

I'm looking forward to its spread!

Sanford Dickert · 2 months ago

Just a simple compliment - excellent post.

Ansiolitiko · 2 months ago

If some one have an invitation : Anarkotiko21@gmail.com

Thanxs !

adamkmiec · 2 months ago

The reason most of these people compare it to something else (eg twitter) is because they aren't as smart of forward thinking as the community believes they are. In fact, most are simply linear thinkers. When you're a linear thinker you can't see the possibilities that an abstract thinker can. The easiest thing to do when reviewing a product is to compare it to something else. That takes no effort, no insight, and no thinking. Yet, these are the people Google decided to give the first set of Wave invites to. How does that make any sense?

Mike Chelen · 2 months ago

one way wave can improve on google docs is by offering a realtime api for developers

Dilmon · 2 months ago

WOW!! Thanks. Wave, a simple answer to a complex communication problem.

Comment: And the Telephone Company refused to upgrade the dumb phone. Another example that proves that power corrupts and absolute (monopoly) power absolutely corrupts.

Ian Page-Echols · 2 months ago

I think you did a good job of describing what the current implementation of Wave is. I think the huge thing is that you can make your own implementation and pick and choose features, or write your own.

The comparison is that if you want to, you can actually use instant messaging to transfer data between programs instead of just using it for communication between people. The OLPC XO and the XS server does this with Jabber.

In my mind, if you take something more complex than chat, IE, can send multiple types of data back and forth, while keeping track of history, changes, and who is allowed to view what, you've got a whole new basis for dealing with data for MOST websites and software. This could potentially be so huge, and all I'm seeing is people taking it as a "product". That's cool and all, but that's not where I see the potential.

I just want everyone to implement it so that I don't have to log in on all of the various sites with different passwords. And I want Google to let me in to try this current implementation out, as I somehow wasn't in the first 100,000 people.

Thanks for the post, Ian

Ryan · 2 months ago

Outstanding analysis. I'm going to encourage the large international non-profit that I work for to take Wave very seriously. It's free.

lobo12 · 2 months ago

And it generates?, Everything that solves problems, creates others.

openface · 2 months ago

To me, it's Google Docs meets GTalk. I don't mean to play devil's advocate to this article, but I'm already finding it useful for collaborating new ideas. Google Docs already achieved this to some extent, but Wave provides the ability to organize several Docs in one interface, in real-time with your peers. It's not suppose to replace Facebook or Twitter.

ricardoekm · 2 months ago

The problem IMO is that companies uses e-mail too much and some times badly. Shifting to wave won't solve this problem.
Collaborate on a document via e-mail or wave? Get a wiki, so you can seamless publish it, rather than export from wave and you will get many nice features for text collaboration. Keep casual information separate from your regular e-mail, by using a IM. It's boring when I will search something in gmail, and it displays a recent chat. And some times I don't want to talk with people when I check e-mail.
Wave is better than e-mail, afterall e-mail was created decades ago. The problem is if you try to put all information in there, it will be a mess, no matter how good wave is. And if wave doesn't integrate with e-mail it will be a problem for wave adoption.
I hope it succeed as a e-mail replacement, but not as a trying to integrate and replace everything else.

Alexander Ainslie (@AAinslie) · 2 months ago

Daniel,

Excellent analysis and post. Keep it coming!

One benefit of Wave that you missed is message authentication. Each Wave message is sent over HTTPS (not HTTP) just like the banks and financial institutions do today, therefore, the senders ID is verified every time. No message spoofing en-route. There are other security risks that need to be looked at, and provided for, depending the use you want to put the Wave to.

A significant additional benefit is the the Wave bots can push info & events to a wave but also receive the same from the wave user. This paradigm opens up huge possibilities to reform and optimize existing work flows and business processes.

BTW, I recommended Woobius to a friend's London based architectural practice "KUSHH" a few weeks back. Great work.

www.twitter.com/aainslie

josh · 2 months ago

can someone send me an invite please? my email is here: http://scr.im/1w87 thank you in advance!!

Outsourcing · 2 months ago

"Wave is built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool for getting work done. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this very early stage." - It seems that there a need to intensify the marketing of this "alternative". All it takes is to let the real users know how essential this tool can be to corporate environment and to the must needed "getting work done". This post is really information. I didn't know Google Wave not until I have read this post. Thank you;

Michael Givens · 2 months ago

.

robhallums · 2 months ago

There are so many collaboration tools (http://www.glasscubes.com included) which are going to compete with Google Wave... however surely it has several major flaws:

1) Replacing email is going to be a very difficult task as critical mass is so high
2) Getting businesses to buy into Google products is going to be a lengthy. Organisations rebuffed IM in the main, why would Google Wave be so much different

That said, it's thoroughly exciting what could be achieved, and if it does fulfil its promise then it will be great.

edparry · 2 months ago

Excellent analysis.

As has already been said a couple of times above email isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's understandable why many geeks don't get that: because they have seen the future already. But for the average Joe email is here to stay.

On this basis we have been developing dooster.net, an online collaborative tool aimed at individuals / SMEs with the USP that it strongly features email. It has taken over 18 months to develop so far (sincere thanks to the geeks involved in the 3 major rewrites – all scrapped) and when we heard about wave we thought uhoh... wasted our time... |

But maybe not. I don’t think wave is big on organising right? And in any case Google has not been great w other non-search products like Gmail, video and the payments system thing - that I can't even remember the name of…

Having not had the privilege of a wave invite yet (hint hint ;-), But having seen the original announcement videos a few months back and having read this impressive article, wave should be welcomed by guys like us because it is at least going to expand the conversation about the significance and the shortcomings of email - particularly at corporate level.

GerardM · 2 months ago

Wave is not one thing to everyone. For me Wave provides a front end to MediaWiki. A front end that allows for rich text edititng, a front end that removes a lot of the bagage of MediaWiki. At the same time MediaWiki offers Wave a publishing backend.. My project, MediaWikiWave ..
Thanks,
GerardM

bartoloilliano · 2 months ago

you can invite me? i wish try the google wave my address is dedrisproject@gmail.com

clear · 2 months ago

It's not a corporate tool. What is this article on about? It makes no sense why this article would claim to describe it as a corporate tool (vs the other tools that it supposedly isn't) especially since it also include what Google itself calls it: "online tool for real-time communication and collaboration”. I don't see the word corporate in there anywhere. I don't see a necessary exclusion of geek tool in there anywhere. Do geeks not collaborate and communicate or something? This premise of this article makes no sense.

It is what it is. The open sourceness, extensions, and decoupling of interface and protocol features all actually argues in favor of being a geek tool, but that doesn't even matter. With the right extensions and interface, it certainly could be a social media tool or even entire platform. What's with trying to limit it? So what if a couple tech writers do or don't like it. Who cares, no need to make up things about what Wave is supposed to be, or who it's designed for.

willylim · 1 month ago

Excellent analysis!
My company works a lot with emails and IM and we have ALL OF THE ABOVE problems. Google Wave has the huge potential to get things done more efficiently in corporate setting.

Nameis · 1 month ago

Take sometime and watch the fing video... There is a great idea and engineering behind it.

N Campbell · 1 month ago

I really like this analysis. It never occurred to me, when I heard about Wave, that it would be any sort of replacement for social media. I took it at its word--a way for people to collaborate on projects. I can think of a dozen projects I'm working on right now that would be so much more manageable in Waves...and some family conversations, too, as we try to figure out what's happening for the holidays. :)

Gabriella · 1 month ago

I've opened a Christmas Holidays wave with my family too!

Jim L-L · 1 month ago

Great analysis. I got Gwave from my tech son yesterday. I loved it instantly. You are absolutely right about its value in the corporate sphere. I also come from a very large family, 8 sibs, and I can tell you if we can manage to adopt this it will change our online family conversations, so in that respect it is also a social tool.

mouse53 · 1 month ago

I guess that is why they only gave out a few Wave accounts and them gave them to Twitter and Facebook people. I have not seen any Corporate people doing the reviews on the Wave and you can't get an account unless the " Chosen Few " invite you.

Enkerli · 1 month ago

It has indeed been a strange launch strategy.

Not in terms of numbers (especially now that so many people are on Wave already) or even in terms of the choice of an invite-only system (it does solve some social and technical problems). But in terms of target.

Several of the first people who received accounts had trouble understanding Wave. Those who already grokked Wave weren't given accounts, at first. So the image people have of Wave is quite skewed since early adopters tend to be vocal and to have quick reactions based on taking tools "at face value" (instead of investigating tools from a more comprehensive perspective).

Not sure "Twitter and Facebook" people were given accounts more quickly than others. It seems like most of those who received Sandbox accounts were developers while some prominent "social media" people and other "geek trendsetters" were among the first to receive Preview accounts.

Google's expressed desire, for the Sandbox accounts, was that developers would find new ways to use Wave. The problem with that strategy is that new use patterns come more frequently from users than from developers.

Developers do need a "sandbox" (to practice coding for the platform without breaking anything). But, in social media, the groundbreaking usage patterns come from connections among users, not necessarily from brilliant ideas developers have on their own.

So far, Wave still doesn't have the equivalent of the "@replies breakthrough" on Twitter and it suffers from some of the same issues faced by Twitter in 2007. Maybe @replies came from a developer's idea. But the Odeo people who invented Twitter didn't predict what @replies would mean and their implementation of them is still confusing, years later.

This is why this post is so insightful. It's not about what Google throught Wave should be (a way for developers in Australia to wade through complex email exchanges despite timezone differences). It's about the real email problems that Wave can solve (whether or not these problems are more pointed in corporate contexts).

It's a reflective, thoughtful, well-structured, and useful explanation. In fact, I've been sending it to a number of new wavers, along with CompleteWaveGuide.com (Tripani and Pash).

AA · 1 month ago

I think probably the only reason I got the Wave so early - got it the first day of them releasing invites (I'm not a developer nor anyone famous) is because I watched that launch video the first day and immediately signed up. Since getting my Wave, I have received invites to give out (10 each) twice. And I'm not using Wave because I have no use of it (I gave away Wave invites in random on Twitter).

I think their strategy is not strange, it is random. They're just not following a typical and known invite methods we are used to. I also think Wave is in its infancy and it will take more than few years for it to pickup any steam for general adoption. For me, until I see a way to consolidate my email into Wave, it is worthless.

Enkerli · 1 month ago

Fair enough.
Wave really is in its infancy. What's missing (including email integration) may easily be a dealbreaker for any given user. For many, what was missing was the network effect. It's now becoming closer to reaching critical mass and it probably reached it in some domains.
One thing about the launch pattern is that, even if it is indeed random (which sounds somewhat strange given the time they take to "lick those envelopes") is that the haphazard way they give out invitations has had effects on the way Wave is perceived outside of its userbase. Not necessarily a bad thing. But it sounds like it would have been a good idea to start out with some preexisting contacts.
One reason Facebook has worked so well, IMHO, is that it started with a few campuses, then spread out to a larger number of campuses, then to preexisting organizations, and then to the general public. At every step, they had issues. But they coped and continued to expand. Same thing with changes to the platform. The result is something that a lot of people have complained about, sometimes very loudly, but which did end up "changing the game."
It's not the whole story, but it's still interesting to think about these things.

Yannick Desjardins · 1 month ago

Excellent article, I really enjoyed reading it.

Paul O'Mahony (Cork) · 1 month ago

Terrific. Clear. Right. As someone used to corporate life, I agree with your description of what it's like working with email. In time, email will be remembered as the most clumsy tool that was ever popular.

I'll pass on your piece to others in my networks.

jasonearle · 1 month ago

I would love to "share the joy" on Facebook and Twitter, yet see no function making that possible. Is this by design or is it a symptom of an update in the offing?

randalllee · 1 month ago

Reference to Wave, Sharepoint, Citrix "Go To", Lotus 1-2-3, etc, etc as "Collaborative Engineered Information" tools is akin to saying that the early air-cooled VW Beetles are just another type of Porsche!

vezign · 3 weeks ago

check out what is google wave: whatisgooglewave.com

dparnas · 3 weeks ago

Thanks for the excellent analysis.

I am referring to and building on your work in my recently released presentation on
"Why and how the Enterprise should harness the power of Google Wave" available at slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/dparnas/why-and-how-t...

Jared · 3 weeks ago

No I wonder I dont get it it....its a tool for big wigs to blah blah more without getting off their fat asses.

Lovely...go wave!

samy · 2 weeks ago

You wrote "To most geeks, the main problem with email is spam." I disagree geeks don't have spam problem. They have solved that problem years ago. People with spam problem are called end users.

Enkerli · 2 weeks ago

While it's clear that true geeks care much less about filtering spam than do end users, there's still something to be said about a geek perspective on email being much more oriented toward filtering out unwanted messages than toward facilitating complex interactions through email. The point about geeks not caring for new solutions to email's actual problems probably stands but that statement might be rephrased to represent more accurately the geek view of email. For one thing, geeks tend to dislike long emails, which goes with the notion that they don't perceive emails as a core part in a deeper form of interaction. In fact, to many geeks, email is mainly a way to ping someone or to add a "to do" item to a list. It's not a medium in which thorough discussions are likely to happen or "real work" likely to get done.
Geeks aiming at mailbox zero perceive diverse forms of non-spam communication as actual spam. Some of this is included in the concept of "bacn," which was tossed around in some geek circles for a little while, a few years ago. But the idea is still the same: geeks fight email in terms of load, not in terms of depth.

cyberdoyle · 2 weeks ago

Excellent.
I didn't know what Wave was until I got an invite. I started to use it and it was all intuitive, which is another recommendation for it. Corporates don't like complicated. I think it is a brilliant tool from a brilliant team.
Kudos to Google.
again.

Alicia · 2 weeks ago

This is absolutely correct. I am an independent graphic designer/web developer and I work with multiple clients. I got really excited about wave for project management reasons only, and I still am...and I hope it does get quick penetration more quickly for that reason. I also look forward to it spilling outside of internal company project management. We all have too much going on: clubs, social events, trip planning with groups of people...wave really is the sane approach to email for the modern and engaged person in all aspects of life. I personally run a small business, have a rental property and organize countless other things with friends and family, wave would enhance organization of my whole life if others were using it.

Luke · 2 weeks ago

Hey Daniel, good description of how Wave can be used. Does anyone know how long invites are taking to go through now though? I was in the first batch invited by Google but when I invited people at the time it took over a week for invites to arrive. Hard to sell something to colleagues if they can't immediately access it and play

iquanyin · 2 weeks ago

great article! all i was able to say, to the many people who don't get wave, was "it's great for companies." now i can send your excellent breakdown.

Edd · 1 week ago

From your analysis, it seems logical that Google *should* be adding Google Wave as a feature of Google Apps (aimed at the business community)