Google Wave Turned One

J

John_Keck

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 3, 2010
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379
Friday marked the one year anniversary of Google showing off Wave at the Moscone Center. So what progress has it made in a year? Well, not much.
"Can you imagine a world without Wave today?" Google's official post asked.

Probably, since there's a pretty high likelihood that you've never used it. Just about everybody I know that's tried Wave has had the same experience -- which is to say that they stopped using it about half an hour after they started. Honestly, I don't really blame them.
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When I tried Google Wave, all anyone did was use it to post stupid pictures and youtube videos. Not exactly hard to imagine a world without it.
 
Yeah, I tried using Wave for serious collaborative purposes and the lag makes it hardly usable. And I don't expect it to get much better, considering that they're trying to do everything in HTML. I appreciate what Google is trying to do by adhering to W3C standards so strictly, but the browser support for something like this just isn't there. Quite honestly, it would work much better if they used (gasp! :eek: ) Flash.
 
I used it once after it came out. That counts for something right google?
 
it's like forum posting email, that happens in a chat. Or something? Felt forced and unnecessary. I find email to be just as good of a communication tool, or IM chats for more "real time" stuff.
 
I used it long enough to make sure I was completely removed from it and had it disabled from my account. Never looked back. If I want people to know what I'm doing, I'll tell them myself.
 
HOCP4ME said:
Yeah, I tried using Wave for serious collaborative purposes and the lag makes it hardly usable. And I don't expect it to get much better, considering that they're trying to do everything in HTML. I appreciate what Google is trying to do by adhering to W3C standards so strictly, but the browser support for something like this just isn't there. Quite honestly, it would work much better if they used (gasp! :eek: ) Flash.
Click to expand...

Problem with Flash is it tends to bring a ton of browsers down, especially on lower-end machines. Although I hate Apple, they have a point when they say Flash is bloated. Have you ever left a flash-built website running all day? It's not uncommon to have memory-leaks that continue to grow.

Streamlight is actually pretty impressive, but not widely adopted. AJAX is the usual method.

A lot of the "slowness" or issues have a lot to do with the code used. Take NetFlix vs. Yahoo for example. Reordering your queue in NetFlix by using the drag/drop method can bring a decent system to its knees. In Yahoo Fantasy leagues, you can drag and drop with no issue. Both do about the same thing (offer reordering by drag/drop with visual elements).
 
srangara said:
Silverlight? I installed it, but have no idea whether any of the sites I go to use it.
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Silverlight is almost exclusively used in video streaming. NBC Olympics, MLB, Netflix are sites that come to mind that use it or have used it...
 
Give it 5 years and I expect it, or elements of it will replace traditional email.

The only thing wrong with wave is that most people don't have it.

It would be great for those long email conversations between a group of people which after a while have 10 pages worth of quoted text, but that only works if everyone in the conversation has a wave account, which is not possible right now.
 
Wave was not well thought out. I think it had too big of a scope and that's not very Google IMO. Their best stuff starts out as a simple solution and grows from there.

The first sign it was crap was that nobody knew how to use it. It clearly had no path for adoption.

I personally think it's technology would be great in other software. It would be great in some sort of texting solution, maybe email or even facebook type sites. It all seemed like so much novelty... "Here, look at what this can do!"

I just don't think they thought it out clearly enough. Maybe too much confidence. :)
 
I've used it since beta day 1, once the novelty wore off I actually started using it for tracking the work on my web projects, it's easy to log in and write a few lines to an original document and have everyone see them updates.

The main problem is that it was in beta and getting people in was a pain, you got limited invites you had to activate, it was delayed by a week or so to start with. Once it becomes open like something such as gmail then it will be very popular I think.

The core idea of a wave is much better than email, it does solve a lot of emails problems, it's come a fair way since the launch, theres some things such as user permissions in now which was a problem at beta launch since everyone could write to any part of the wave. Performance and crashes are way better, theres less errors now. My main complain if any, is that it's quite slow, the servers seem a bit slow which is understandable, but also the client lags in some browsers, on slower PCs which we have at work it's terrible, on a fast PC at home it's brilliant. IE is the biggest part of that problem it really slows IE to a grinding halt, but IE is very VERY slow at almost everything anyway.
 
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