The more I play with Google Wave, the less I like the user interface. In contrast, the more I learn about the Wave technology stack, the less I care about the user interface, because it's clear to me that the important innovations are underneath the skin. That became very clear to me when I got on the train on Friday morning and decided to see whether Wave worked on the iPhone. I've decided that wave is better on the iPhone than it is in a full screen browser.
On a full screen browser, Wave takes up 3 columns. When you get to try Wave, the first thing you should do is get rid of the leftmost column. This gives the rest of Wave a bit of room to breathe. On the iPhone, by contrast, you get only one column of content per screen. The result is much, much easier to digest. You don't have waves yipping at you while you read another wave.
The iPhone version on Wave is implemented as a web app running inside Safari. Inexplicably, when you log in, there's a message that says that the iPhone browser is not fully supported. This is inexplicable for 2 reasons.
The iPhone implementation is quite a bit more mature than the Firefox 3.5 implementation I run on my laptop.
The main bug in the iPhone implementation is that the screen telling you the iphone browser is not fully supported breaks links into Wave.
I would expect to see a iPhone native Wave app very soon.
I think most people running Wave will eventually choose to run Wave in native applications that talk the Wave protocol, just as most people (i.e. me) use native email clients to do their email. I just hope that Google's choice to launch Wave inside browsers is not just a plan to establish Chrome as a new web operating system. Twitter owes its success in no small part to the ecosystem of client applications that have sprung up around it. Although I use the Nambu client myself; I'm sure that many satisfied Tweetdeck users would be unhappy if the only way they could use Twitter was through Nambu.
I've read the assertion that Google Wave is the Segway of email, but I think that's wrong. The better analogy is the videophone. Although it's often thought that AT&T's videophone failed because there was no one to call, that's only half of the story. The reason that there was no one to call was that the videophone didn't fit into any social practice- no one really want to have people popping up on little screens in their living rooms.
I'm betting that Wave will turn out to be more popular than the Picturephone, but the real turning point will be third-party clients.
It took me 30 years to get over telephone dread. Before my cure, I could only make a telephone call in a quiet environment without anyone to disturb me. Having decided to call someone, I would screw up my courage, pre-decide what to say to every possible answerer, and then pick up the phone. The dial tone would taunt me until I started dialing. With every digit of the phone number, I would experience doubt and anxiety. The touch-tone made it better; in the days of pulse-tone dialing, I hated numbers with lots of zeroes. Maybe the number was wrong. Maybe the person I was calling would be out. Maybe I would have to talk with someone's mother. Maybe the person wouldn't know who I was, and I'd have give a humiliating explanation of who I was. Half the time I would click the hook part way through the number after thinking of some unconsidered terror. By the time I got through, I would be an emotional wreck.
It was the mobile phone that cured me. I could just key in the number, double check it, stare at it for a minute, and then I could press the send button and I was launched into the call. Ten buttons of anxiety was reduced to a single button, and that, combined with a small bit of emotional maturity, has enabled me to use the phone like a normal human being.
I've always been comfortable with email. There's a single send button, and once an email has been sent, I can forget about it completely until I get a reply. And there's no need to reply immediately- the ease with which email can get lost is perhaps its best attribute!
The tele-presence afforded by Instant Messaging is quite comfortable. You can see who's "around" and strike up casual conversation. The intermittent immediacy can be very stimulating.
Twitter was very un-threatening to start out with. No one was ever going to read that first status message, or so you thought. Gradually, Twitter will reel you in because once in a while, without rhyme or reason, people will react to what you say. Retweets are like the random rewards that kept pigeons pecking in the famous random reinforcement schedule experiment.
Google Wave is different, and I still can't tell if it will terrorize me as the telephone dial did or whether it will comfort me the way IM status messages do. Although it's conceived as email re-invented, it moves beyond familiar modes of communication. My first impressions post got a commenter who pointed to a blog post from June that included a note about the unexpectedness of one of Wave's features.
Wave is changing paradigms. People can no longer take back what is released. Even if someone deletes part of the document, the deleted part can be seen in playback. While this "permanent memory" was there almost since the beginning of the Internet, it was never before real-time. How could we take back an information from a Wave? Imagine you have misplaced your password to the wave instead of password input box. It will always be visible. OK, I could change my password, but what about unfortunate copy&paste event with a credit card number?
I had never really considered the importance of forgettability in communication.
Wave's waves are described as "living things" because they can be continually added to. They also live somewhere that's not on your computer. Google's conception is that there will eventually be many Wave Service Providers running the Wave open-source service platform, but for now, the waves all reside on Google's servers. I can't think of any form of human communication that "lives" in remotely the same way. Maybe people playing music or games together is the closest example.
Email was easy to start out with because it wasn't so different from the kind of mail that requires stamps and envelopes. You wrote a message and sent it off. Instant messaging was not so different from having a real-word or telephone chat. Wave, by contrast, maps most closely to other things you do on the internet, like IM and Wiki editing, each of which is a degree removed from things you do in real life. Wave is two degrees removed from normal human intercourse.
Since it's a living thing you can't just send a wave and then forget it. Your "inbox" is like a litter of puppies that are yelping for attention and growing in front of your eyes. Or maybe they just sit there dead, waiting to be "archived". It will take a while before I'll know whether the Wave window will be filling me with dread or delight. At least I've learned how to give my puppies a bit more breathing room.
After four days of Wave, I'm most excited to see how the Wave ecosystem is developing, even though many features are still hidden because important things aren't working yet. A sorely needed feature has been a way to do ranking of public waves. Today, that feature is being born. This is a great example of the benefits to having a platform open to developers from the very beginning. Needed functionality is being quickly added using the robot mechanism. I'm starting to think about how to use Wave robots to do useful things in libraries and scholarly communication.
Human communication is a magical thing, and over the last decade, we've acquired some super-powers. We've had the telephone for a hundred and thirty three years and it is still developing. Nowadays you can hardly set your twelve-year-old loose in the mall without packing a cell phone, and people are dying because they just have to send texts while driving. Just think about all the "conversation" tools we've added since the birth of the internet: e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, mailing lists, bulletin boards, blogs, various and sundry social networks, Facebook, Skype, Twitter. Our use of these tools will continue to evolve, but at some point there's going to be a consolidation. Do we really need both Twitter and Facebook?
Yesterday, I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the Google Wave Preview. I have no idea whether Wave will be the next big thing, but I can tell you it won't fail for lack of ambition. Unlike Twitter, which started with a concept so simple that it sounded really stupid, Wave starts by imagining what email would look like if its designers were to start from scratch, knowing what we know today. The result is a daunting attempt to roll all of our communication superpowers into a single user interface. At first, I couldn't really figure out how to get Wave to do what I wanted it to do. Part of the problem was that some of the features mentioned in the help videos had not been activated in the Preview version, though they are still working in the "Sandbox" version which has been available to developers for a few months now. Other things just don't work yet- the contacts module seems very buggy, which is a big problem because you need that to connect with other "Wavers". Luckily, my multitool communications mischmash is still working, and I was able to find some friends (via Twitter and Facebook) who were in the same situation as myself, still stumbling around a dark room of functionality, looking for someone to connect with.
With some help here and there, I gradually figured things out. Wave introduces several new (to me) user-interface widgets; it struck me that web applications rarely introduce new interface widgets, unlike applications like Excel or Photoshop that put powerful capabilities in inteface objects. I still haven't figured out the sliders. The threaded discussions have little colored boxes that indicate who is typing something. The overall effect is that gMail has been tricked out and turbocharged. After a day of playing with it, I'm not sure I like the user interface, but I can't really think af any way to make it better given the scope of what Wave is trying to do.
The focus of Wave is editable, threaded conversations, i.e. waves. (There's already a convention to use lower case w for the conversations and upper case W for the platform as a whole.) These are quite well done. They support hierarchical threading, styled text, auto-linking, distributed editing, history, history playback, insertion of images, videos, and software objects known as extensions (there is a poll widget pre-installed). The one thing that's missing is undo. I can think of all sorts of uses for these capabilities; I intend to try a few over the next week or so.
The intro videos plug a tool called Bloggy that allows you to publish a wave to your blog. Bloggy is a robot that you add as a participant in your conversation. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get Bloggy to work, until I discovered (via Twitter) that Bloggy had not been activated on the Preview version yet.
Having failed with Bloggy, I started thinking "Is that all there is?" and envying Google's white-hot overhype machine. But then @jillmwo pointed me to the way to search on public waves (put "with:public" before a search). Immediately the little ripply waves I was seeing turned into a tsunami, and I began to see the enormous possibilities of Wave. To make a wave public, you add a participant called "Public" (public@a.gwave.com) to the wave; "Bloggy" does the same thing.
The ability to search public waves (and to make your own public wave) is a feature qualitatively different from anything I've seen before. A public wave is sort of the bastard offspring of a Twitter hashtag mated with a Wikipedia topic page. When it matures, this creature will surely be a monstrous beast; what no one can tell yet is whether the beast will be a tame workhorse or whether it will be a velociraptor requiring a good strong cage. New technology is always easy to create and control compared to new social practice.
If it was me trying to invent email from scratch, I would spend 80% of my effort on spam prevention. It looks to me as though many of Wave's feaures have been hidden in the Preview because the functions needed for spam prevention are not ready yet. This is not to say that the Wave team is not spending 80% of its effort on spam prevention- these are incredibly hard things to get right. As an example, it's currently not possible to remove a participant from a wave, and any public wave participant can see the addresses of all the other participants. The problems with the contacts module are also probably related- waves from people you might not know just appear in your inbox, even though it looks like the intent is for them to first appear in the "Requests" folder in the "Navigation" module. Groups are also not yet implemented. It's difficult to know how this will play out until we see everything working.
Since the Preview roll-out, there have been quite a number of negative reviews by people pointing to all the problems in Google Wave. I think these are missing the point to some extent. Sure, Wave could end up being a complete failure, but even if that happens, Wave is giving us today a glimpse of what the future could look like. If not Wave, then surely there will be a SuperTwitter or a SpaceBook or maybe even a MagicForce that will contend for the consolidation of our one hundred flowers of conversation. Note: this post will also be published as a public wave.
In contrast, the more I learn about the Wave technology stack, the less I care about the user interface, because it's clear to me that the important innovations are underneath the skin. That became very clear to me when I got on the train on Friday morning and decided to see whether Wave worked on the iPhone. I've decided that wave is better on the iPhone than it is in a full screen browser.
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