Posts Tagged google wave

So I’ve been using Google Wave for about 2 weeks now off and on with the few people I know that use wave. My first impression after logging in was that the interface wasn’t exactly that intuitive and friendly. Wave did import all my gmail contacts into wave that had a wave account which was nifty.

Chatting in waves themselves is relatively simple if you know the keyboard shortcuts, but everything is transferred in real time as the draft mode has not been implemented yet. This means you cannot formulate your thoughts before sending it off unless you type it up externally and paste it in. While not normally something I’d care about, there are times I’d like to spent a little time composing and editing my response to such things.

Also, once someone is added to a wave they are there pretty much forever as the remove function is also not implemented yet. So take care in who gets added to a wave if there’s anything in the wave you would prefer to remain private.

The buddy status indication of online/offline is also pretty poor. From what I’ve observed it isn’t entirely accurate yet as I’ve had numerous conversations with people that all showed offline. Not knowing whether someone is online or not is a pretty big deal, I mean whats the point if it doesn’t work. Might as well just check a regular IM or email the person instead.

All these problems aren’t really the biggest problem I have with Wave though. My biggest problem is almost no one I know actually continues to use Wave, and I’m about to throw in the towel for Wave as well. I just don’t see any real point to using Wave right now besides extremely niche uses. It also adds yet another layer of stuff I need to keep track of to keep in contact with various people who don’t desire to use all the same protocol/communication tool which is somewhat annoying. I have enough of those to track already and more keep popping up all the time. Perhaps after a bit of polishing by Google I’ll give Wave another chance.