I think people who think Google Wave doesn't get it will be eating their words later, much like those who thought the same thing about the iPod (most of the geek communities turned their nose up at that too).<p>I can see instant usefulness to Wave. I have my invite, and one of my colleagues does too. I can't wait for my other cofounders to get access so that we can use it for real work. Email really just sucks in so many ways.<p>Edit: It's worth adding that a lot of articles and pundits seem to be comparing Wave and, say, Twitter. Wave is nothing like Twitter, nor does it aim to be anything like Twitter. No, we're not going to start using Wave instead of Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc... because that's <i>not</i> what it's for! Wave might end up being useful for social communications too, but the most important pain points that it resolves are business pains, problems that people encounter when they're trying to work together remotely.
I stopped playing with it when I realized that the option to turn off instant-typing-relay wasn't implemented yet. Sorry, instant deal breaker. I've ^H^H^H'ed far too many obscenities directed at friends and clients for that to fly.
What I find fascinatingly baffling about Google Wave is that it's partly one of the most impressive communications tools I've used, and partly a compilation of features I saw removed from other sites for being poor design.
I think we'll see high level abstractions of a wave. My bet is google will introduce it to the generally population with most of the features turned off, so they don't even notice.<p>For example:
- In Gmail, when you hit reply it will be in a wave. When you hit replay-all, it will create a wave, auto-invite the recipients and it just looks like Gmail version 2.0.<p>- In GoogleDocs, the document can be shared now, but you'll be able to rewind the stack and see peoples changes. There will be commenting on documents (dunno is there is now?).<p>So I think most of googles apps will be wave-ified gradually and most people wont really notice. I think at the moment, you have the full wave hose turned on and people are getting a little freaked out.
Google needs to do two things with the GWT client UI:<p>1) clear up the confusion between collaboration spaces and conversation spaces, by making each wave have one collaboration space at the top and conversation space below it;<p>2) confine live typing and editing of the contributions of others to the collaboration space.<p>I wouldn't apply these same strictures to gadgets necessarily.<p>Also, they need to stop trying to use the Wave brand to mean two things. It's stuck as the name of this one client experience; the protocol should get an acronym or something.
I think Google Wave will succeed...eventually. I'm not sure if they are aiming it as a replacement for GMail. Most non-technical people I talk to have no clue what Google Wave is and when I explain it to them, they usually could care less.<p>The concept is a big change from what we people are familiar with today and I think the only way for Google to try to make it a household name like GMail is to slowly merge the features into GMail. Once they get a large enough population raving about it, these people will usually make their friends/family/colleagues try it out, and from there adoption will gradually increase. But if Wave is not a replacement for GMail, I'm not sure people will go out of their way to use another service that most of the time their email program will do just fine.<p>Now, if you like the Google Wave concept, I ask you to give MooGroups (<a href="http://moogroups.com" rel="nofollow">http://moogroups.com</a>) a try. You get the power of centralized discussions directly in your inbox, without ever having to leave your inbox, without having to create an account, and while using any email program. Plus a polls gadget based on free-form text.
I think for Wave to be ultimately successful, they'll have to ditch the "live typing" feature. Typing is a low-bandwidth form of communication, because you lose all of the other conversational cues (tone of voice, facial expression, etc.) that make sure your proper meaning comes across. Thus, when you're typing to somebody, you often have to double-check what you've written to make sure that it's not taken the wrong way. With live typing, you don't have that option. The cat's already out of the bag before you can reach for the delete key.<p>I can't count the number of times I've retyped a sentence on IM because the original was too ambiguous and could be misconstrued.<p>They're going to have to either kill the feature, or turn it off by default.
Posted on this yesterday: <a href="http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-creepy-feature/" rel="nofollow">http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/10/google-waves-creepy-feature...</a><p>Definitely agree with the OP. Wave should allow this feature to be disabled easily for chat.. I can see it being used for doc collab but for chat it's a horrible idea for a number of reasons.<p>Is it that hard to get a conference call going via Google Voice and actually talk to other users in real time using your voice?