I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to think out loud on Twitter. Controversy can be really fruitful and you just never know when it will be.

When you say you can’t see that indispensable thing with Wave. Do you mean the Wave tech or the Google Wave service or both?

How about this. With the wave protocol you can participate in the communication and creation of content in any system speaking the protocol directly from your inbox. And vice versa, collaborating and communicating in a system supporting wave you can do so in tons of peoples inboxes, and other wave-supporting systems, in real time. Add to that the fact that those waves can be completely public and discoverable by the world. To me it’s completely mind boggling.

Isn’t Wave more like “That’s sooooo useful! And some of it was impossible before.”?

And, even if Wave is “only” incrementally better than a lot of other things. I think it already has brought a lot of value to the world by simply giving the competing technologies something to describe itself against. A context that could mean the difference between success or failure for some of those actors?

For me, Gmail was an incremental improvement over Thunderbird, Zoho was an incremental improvement over Google Docs, Eclipse (when considered as an IDE) an incremental improvement over Visual Age for Java.
The Eclipse example is probably best. I adopted it as an IDE, but found an ecosystem.
I’m wondering about the synergy of Wave, Android, Google Books, Chrome, GWT, GAE, the JVM as a platform. Novell’s Pulse [http://www.novell.com/products/pulse/] may be an example. Expecting Wave to have the same significance as Email & portable computers is a tall order. I’ll probably be happy developing for it if it acts like email if email had been designed in 2006.

Kent,

I was one person who respectfully challenged your Twitter assertion. I share your opinion, but I’m giving it time to emerge. True, one can’t do anything with Wave that can’t be done another way….except maybe watching someone’s keystrokes as you collaborate on a document (cool but not so useful).

Wave is built on mature technologies like XMPP. It is conceived on the shoulders of many collaboration pioneers like Ray Ozzie and Ward Cunningham.

I came away from a Wave Hackathon last summer underwhelmed. Using Wave for two days, I remember thinking it was an amalgamation of child toys (e.g., many of widgets had cutesy names ending in “ly”, like Polly the Polling widget and Spelly the Spellchecking widget). A glaring challenge for early adopters is that there are no suitable metaphors for the UI. It’s confusing for people to use (overwhelming for large waves).

Unabashed proponents might argue that a mash-up of wiki, email, and instant messaging under one hood is something that wasn’t available to the masses before and, as such, is the “that’s useless, but it was impossible before” revelation you’re seeking.

The “that’s useless, but it was impossible before” revelation to me is:

A smart, bottomless pockets organization has opened up the development of a collaboration platform. Google is exercising the limits of Minimum Viable Product releasing an immature federation spec, under-developed tools and API, and opening up a fuzzy concept of “what could be” to programmers like me.

I’m skeptical and bullish. The potential is palpable. There will be more useful robots built. The robots will operate on content is useful ways. Someone will apply UCD to come up with a better UI. Wave is emergent design. I’m giving it time to emerge.

Cheers.

http://bobtuse.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-wave-and-collaborative-projects.html
http://bobtuse.blogspot.com/2009/08/emergence-of-wave-etiquette.html
http://bobtuse.blogspot.com/2009/07/will-google-wave-overtake-microsoft.html

I’m talking about a heuristic that let’s me focus on technologies that are more likely to have big impact. “Solves previously impossible problem, however trivial,” helps me decide where to invest my limited time and attention.

Hi Kent,

I don’t find your tweets controversial, at least not yet.

Wave has incredible potential but it hasn’t been realized yet with an application on it that shows the indispensable nature of the technology. I’m wondering if there is or will be a push from Google to create something great on the platform to showcase it, in a similar way to how game engine developers did to promote use of their engines. There are similarities here, would you agree?

Rgs, James

My guess is that if there is a compelling application of Wave, Google won’t be the ones to find it. I would trust them to notice it when it comes and push it hard, but the application itself will likely be built out of necessity by someone with a problem.

I’m inclined to agree with your skepticism: Wave is very, very cool, it’s superior to anything which tries to do the same (granted, this is mostly because nobody tries to do all the stuff Wave does at the same time), but it does not enable you to do anything really new. In fact, it bundles together many old, known things. So I fear it bears the marks of failed products: Its better than the others, its more complex than the others, it does not integrate with the others, and, after you use it for a week, it is still not perfect, but lacks the goodies you’re used from the more mature solutions.

That said, there is still hope it will be successful: There is quite some potential in the robots. I think Stockie is a bright spark, since it enables you to patch in systems to augment a conversation. Think of knowledge bases, phone books, music rating, games, whatever. Of course I have no idea how to harness this.

On the other hand: “hosted conversations” is a privacy and data security nightmare, maybe I should not hope for Wave to replace email….

Replaying a wave conversation is unique afaik. It’s like playing-back all changes for a wiki page (since gw conversations are also editable).

I think it could be a useful tool for distributed teams. Combined email, chat, document repo, replaying of conversations. Nothing new though, right?

Kent,

I was a Wave skeptic until the recent Google Test Automation Conference (www.gtac.biz) in Zurich.

My two tweets about it:
http://twitter.com/jhuggins/status/5068389905
http://twitter.com/jhuggins/status/5068962101

In the past, people would have an IRC back-channel for commenting in real-time during a conference talk. But that’s very geeky (even among geeks!) and does not seem common in practice. In the recent past (and present) people send out quick tweets during a presentation. Also the phrase “live blogging” has the same roots when combining plain old blogging with reporting a live event…

But before GTAC, I’d hadn’t thought of Wave as useful tool for that same situation. With the tree structure and editable nature of a Wave… it *fixes* the problem of IRC, where you can go back and fix a line that was inaccurate or vague. Or even add pictures or video to previous points in the transcript. With IRC, if you don’t respond to a question posted immediately, you quickly get of context.

In the ‘live note taking’ use case… Wave is better than IRC because it’s a tad less geeky, it’s editable, it’s stored and easily accessible later. And Wave is better than Twitter… because you use more than 140 characters.

HOWEVER, outside of live note taking… I haven’t seen a “killer app” reason to use Wave. Even though I remain a general Wave skeptic… I specifically think it is better than all other alternatives (irc, blog, twitter) for live/public note taking during an event.

But since we’re now everyone is talking about the “realtime” web… Using wave during “realtime” events might just be its “specifically indispensable” niche. And it might end up being a pretty big niche.

I think it’s important to remember that context determines how much better a new product must be. In consumer electronics people often speak of the 10 times rule. The new technology must be 10 times better than the old one if it is not compatible. You can sell a DVD player that is marginally better than the competition but you cant sell a new format that is twice as good.

Wave is in many ways a new format. So, is it 10 times better?

Are you saying then that Wave is a sustaining technology (email improvement), not a disruptive one?

I have not yet used google wave. Though I have seen the demos and everything I’ve heard from people who have used it seems to conform to the same featureset. Nevertheless, take these opinions with a grian of salt.

The main complaint I have against google wave is that though it has many cool aspects which make for a neat demo it does not seem to solve any of the hard problems of communication. Let me discuss email for a moment. In its infancy a lot of people saw email as a silly idea in the same way a lot of people regard twitter today, but email solved a lot of the really hard problems of communication and has justifiably become the de facto standard of communication in the modern age. Before email there were in person meeting, phone calls, conference calls, and physical letters (or interoffice memos). Written communication has a significant advantage in editability (mentally or physically) which allows the finished form to result from numerous iterations of a reflectlion/(re)composition cycle which results in far more understandable, concise, and accurate communications. However, it suffers from a horrible latency problem, and terribly expensive cost of transmission. In verbal communication these cycles of reflection/composition are replaced by cycles of misunderstanding, questioning(or argument), and re-expression which eventually (one hopes) narrow in on the same information, but with less efficiency (because others don’t know what you are thinking and so may ask the wrong clarifying questions) and at a greater cost because more people are involved. Conference calls and physical meetings have lower latency than written communication but they come at a much higher opportunity cost in attendee time, suffer from all the problems of verbal communication, and are difficult to keep on track. Email provides many of the benefits of other forms of communication in one form, dramatically increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of communication. Email gives the composability advantages of written communication without the high cost of shuffling paper around, provides the low latency of physical meetings and conference calls without the interruption in workflow and extreme cost of veering off topic. More so, email is stored and (nominally) searchable, providing new capabilities that other forms of communication did not have before. These reasons are why email is so dominant and exists as the primary form of communication for nearly all modern companies in the industrialized world. Today we are starting to run into many of the limitations of email, but it’s important to remember why it is so popular in the first place, because it solved many of the hard problems of previous forms of communication.

Google search is another excellent example of a successful disruptive technology. In a time when most search was primitive, low-quality (based on keywords and meta data), and slow google revolutionized search. With page rank, revolutionary data center design, and sharding/mapreduce google was able to produce better searches faster at a lower cost. Google searches solved, simultaneously, most of the hard problems of search at the time, which is why all modern search has been following in its footsteps.

Google wave however does not seem to solve any hard problems. It solves a few easy problems (instant communication, for example), and it adds a degree of novelty which look cool in a demo, but in the end it still misses the mark. Indeed, if anything it looks like wave regresses in several areas, favoring instant, verbal communication (see above for the problems of verbal communication, and the costs of meetings/con-calls). Merging email, wiki, and bug-tracking into one unified tool is a natural idea who’s time has come, I think, but I don’t think google has executed well on that idea. It remains to be seen whether this is merely an abortive attempt on google’s part or whether they can evolve wave into something worthwhile, something that solves the legitimately hard problems of modern communication.

Marty, you ask if Google Wave is sustaining or disruptive. Right now they seem to be aiming towards the disruptive side since there is no obvious way to use wave as a “better” e-mail client. You have to migrate to Wave and that is painful since there is a network effect. If Wave fails at being disruptive I predict they will morph it into a email client with lots of added possibilities.

One thing that disappoints me with Wave (besides the cryptic interface) is that they have not addressed spam. Wave should have a build in model that made spam irrelevant.

As an aside, I have read other posts by you discussing an app that would allow 2 devs to pair. Is there a possibility of accomplishing such a task via google wave?

Wave implements the most critical algorithm, 2-way merging, for the rare cases when two people edit the same code at the same time. This is important because it allows both people to have immediate, local response to editing but still coordinate their efforts second-by-second.

I agree with Jason Huggins, Wave is better than IRC.
And Wave looks like better than Twitter, because the flow of discussions is easier to follow.

In fact, both (Wave and Twitter) have their value.
I could imagine Twitter information to be posted into another form, into the Wave form, for matching different use cases, different reading experience.
Indeed, it sounds like Twitter is like SAX (event-oriented), while Wave is more like DOM (tree-based) !

If Wave is going to be enough polished, then Wave may be able to cross, to get over the last meters that make an application attractive.
Well, to do so, Wave has a good base because it just looks like Wave is little better than other solutions.

Wave provides the following plus according to concurrent solutions:
* DOM representation /versus/ Twitter
I still think Wave is a bit better, because readers are more familiar with DOM presentation. And, I imagine a Wave-based Twitter as a list of waves, a vertical flow of waves.

* WYSIWYG edition + multiple concurrent writers + wave replay /versus/ wiki

* gadget + robots /versus/ portlet container

* synchronous + collaborative edition /versus/ (asynchronous) email

* extensibility /versus/ forge

For Wave for forge use case: see http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito/entry/google_wave_or_wikis_could
For Wave versus other competitors (wiki, email, portal): see
see http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito/entry/google_wave_more_a_collaboration

But it looks like not enough for Wave to become indispensable:
- these are not enough disruptive features
- other competiting tools may evolve too to include those features during the Wave beta period (some wikis already provide a WYSIWYG editor)
- currently, a friend using Wave told me Wave is not fast enough, not enough polised, still in beta…

Then, so far, and up to now, there is nothing proven indispensable in Wave.

But let’s see things differently.

IMHO, Wave is more a collaboration tool than a communication tool: http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito/entry/google_wave_more_a_collaboration
It’s may be a reason Wave does not appear at first sight as indispensable, because people communicate much more than they collaborate.
Communication looks like cars, while collaboration is similar to trucks used to put your previous house items into well-defined *named* boxes in order to find them easily while settling into your next house: well, people use more cars than they use trucks… and while cars are indispensable, trucks too, but into another high-end niche market.

But, today, the main advantage carried by Wave is that it’s a cross-frontier technology (that may be competiting with wiki, email, collaboration tools, and even portals, CMS, forge…).
So, Wave shakes up the landscape, it pushes to think again about old frontiers people thought permanent. And from that point of view, up to now, it’s may be indispensable

I agree with Jason Huggins,
before being involved in GTAC 2009 I didn’t realized how and when a stuff like Google Wave could be useful.

And only working hard with peers, without knowledge of who-where-how-when, on common tasks&events I realized it.
When ppl say that Wave don’t share commons with emails, chat and blogs… ppl are right. Thinking or comparing Wave with existant tools can only make confusion about what it is and which are the best purpose in using it.

For developers and architects could be interesting reading how the R&S team in SAP are trying to outperform their tools with Wave technologies: http://remagio.posterous.com/blogs-says-users-have-no-idea-about-howwhy-to