A very nice person sent me an invite to GoogleWave, which I’ve been wanting to play with, ohhh, only since they announced it, pretty much. Not many people I know have it – and it is in many ways a kind of specific tool, so it’s not something you necessarily just sit and play with, especially not on your own, because that removes the point.
However, @Sunsetmog and I spent some time on Thursday playing with GoogleWave, trying to explore it’s possibilities and potential. The verdict so far is, as above, ‘Hrroomm, Hmmm’ – lots of potential, not quite there yet.
The first (and main) problem is that it is very slow. Typing into GoogleWave feels a lot like typing on a computer without enough RAM – your fingers go faster than the letters can come up on screen. I think this is mostly because of the live-type function that allows all the people on the wave to see exactly what you’re typing. I have to ask – why is this feature necessary or good? Is it just so that people can start responding to you as you go, without waiting you to finish your train of thought and absorb it before replying? Because I’m not convinced that that’s a good idea; much better to see your fellow-waver’s full thought before you reply to it. Additionally, the nature of GoogleWave means that a lot of people will probably end up using it for project work, quite often with people who are colleagues rather than friends. I don’t need or want the people I might end up working with to see that I am constitutionally unable to type ‘constitution’ fluidly and correctly with any regularity (all those ‘t’s confuse my fingers). They probably don’t want to see it either – it’s quite painful. Delete isn’t a bad in this situation. Making the text input the same as that of IM would make GoogleWave faster, I think, and also less embarrassing!
It’s also not that intuitive. I don’t think it helps that it has gone live without the ‘settings’ wave being completed. At the moment I can’t get it to ‘ping’ me when a message comes through – meaning if I’ve gone to check something out in another tab, or in a book, I don’t know when my fellow waver has responded. I’m also annoyed by the scroll function, and I found the system of commenting, replying and editing fairly unintuitive for a lot of the time – I couldn’t always tell where the new bit of text was going to pop up.
Those are the main annoyances – once I found the paperclip, sharing files was easy (although we didn’t really play with text files, actually, which we should have since I suspect that’s what we’ll both be using it most of the time). There’s an extension called ‘trippy’ which involves Lonely Planet, and which allows you to plan joint trips, which I really like. And I still really like the potential of the whole thing – I think it’s going to make joint projects easier to handle and keep track of, especially when more than more than two people are involved. It’s just not there yet. I really hope it gets there.
