Google buys yet another company: AppJet, the start-up that created EtherPad, an innovative online word processor. The EtherPad team, that includes three former Googlers, will join the Google Wave team. EtherPad will be available for the existing users until March 31, 2010.
"Other real-time editors like Google Docs work by broadcasting an updated copy of the document to everyone every 15 seconds. This creates a noticeable lag that gets in the way of collaboration. You start editing something, only to find 10 seconds later that someone else deleted it. Etherpad updates every copy of the document every half second. This 30x increase in speed changes the experience completely. Your edits hardly ever clash with other users'. So you work confidently instead of tentatively." (from EtherPad's site)
As excited as I was about Google Wave, right out of the gate, I’m still scratching my head wondering exactly what it’ll do for me in the long run. Yes, I can see how it might help collaborative projects, which is fine. But there are a few glaring issues that—even though the product is in Beta stage—have been keeping me from actually using it.
No Gmail integration. There’s no easy gmail integration to speak of. There’s not even an easy way to invite people who are already your contacts in Gmail. This makes adding new people rather tedious, especially for a Google product.
Slow speeds in many respects. Everything moves very slowly. Sure, I anticipated that things like video might take a little while, but even the chats move at molasses pace some days. What ends up happening? A lot of frustration. Not to mention the lag between invites and signing up new people. When something starts to catch on, you’ve got to be able to move with it. While I understand Google had a lot of applications to sift through for the project, waiting as much as a week for confirmation is just ridiculous. Did Google forget? We’re people of the Internet age. We want everything yesterday.
Separate windows. So, I’ve now got GChat in one window with Gmail, but now I’ve got to open up Wave, too. Sometimes people are on both, but rarely. 90% of the time while I’m on Wave, there is no one around at all. There are a great many people in my contacts list—many of whom I have no idea how they got there in the first place—but most of them are never on. Probably because they don’t want another window open, either!
How is it different from email again? I know when I first saw the Google Wave intro video I was blown away. I figured it would change email communication. But then again, I type fast, with relatively few errors. I think for many people, especially since we can’t turn off the type as you go feature right now, there’s a certain feeling of self consciousness going on. It’s hard to edit when people are watching you type (if they’re on at all). A way around it? Open up… another window?
I worry that Google Wave is one of those good in concept but not in practice kind of applications. It can certainly work for some people, but definitely not for everyone. In fact, in the last month the only messages I’ve received on Wave have been from Google… giving me more invites.
When it comes down to it, I think people are reluctant to leave the formats they’re comfortable with. As useful as I think Google Wave could be, the preview has enough holes in it that, unfortunately, it’s left a lot of users in the dark. Let’s just hope when the full-service version rolls out, they’ve attended to some of these issues.
Because right now? It’s feeling quite lonely over on Google Wave.
That said: I do have 10 shiny new invites for the first ten comments here, if anyone wants them. If you haven’t yet, you can take it for a spin and see for yourself.
I was a bit miffed when my husband got his Google Wave invite before me; I mean, seriously. I showed it to him in the first place. Still, I’ve been insanely curious since learning about the new product–developed by the makers of GoogleMaps, by the way–since I first watched the introductory video months ago. Right away I saw the value in the application. It seems really smart, from my perspective anyway, to integrate the components of GMail that I use most: email and chat–and do it in a much more content-rich manner.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication.
Ten hours after my husband invited me, I got my notification and giddily clicked the link. And, yes. Well. The biggest problem with Wave is that it’s dependent on lots and lots of users and friends. It’s collaboration-minded, and that’s awesome. But when you first start it up and just see two people on your “wave” it’s definitely makes you feel a bit lonely. Okay, really lonely.
Sure, time will bring more connections. But the lag is a bit frustrating. With a whopping three contacts right now it’s not exactly bristling with energy over there. I’m surprised that Google didn’t opt for a quicker contact system, or integrated it with current Gmail contacts (or at least retained email addresses to make inviting easier).
All in all, I can certainly see how Google Wave is going to rock my communication world. I mean, I’m a collaborator. I have writing groups, activism groups, friend groups, family groups, blogging groups, geeky groups… Organization is always an issue with me, and even through copious Gmail labels and filters, I still feel overwhelmed. Not to mention that with my excessively short attention span (and love of tools like Twitter) the opportunity to communicate in one place is really exciting.
But the jury’s not out yet. Until I have proper time to tinker, and more contacts to actually make the wave make sense, I’ll have to hold off on a more formal review.
However, in the spirit of altruism, I still have three (3) remaining Google Wave invites. If you’d like one, just leave a comment. We’ll select randomly from the best answers and post the winners this evening!
Edit: Our winners have been selected, and invites have been sent. You should get confirmation within the next day or so (as mentioned, my invite took 10 hours to make it to my inbox!).
Congratulations to infostud (who made me lol with his typo), to protocollie for the most creative response, and to Brian for the poetic turn (I can always appreciate some good haiku!)
Google Wave is about to open to new users. Starting today, Google will send 100,000 invites to some of those who were eager to use an early version of the service. Google's blog lists three categories of users that will receive invites: Google Wave Sandbox users, those who signed up and offered to give feedback on Google Wave and some Google Apps users. When you receive an invitation to Google Wave, you'll be able to invite other people so you can use Google Wave together.
"Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won't be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project," writes CNet.
Like Gmail's early version released in April 2004, Google Wave lacks many basic features: you can't remove someone from a wave, you can't configure permissions or write drafts. The interface is not very polished and some of the options are difficult to find, but it's important to keep in mind that Google Wave is just one of the ways to implement an open protocol. Gmail revolutionized email with an interface inspired by discussion boards: messages are grouped in conversations and it's easy to handle a large amount of messages. Google Wave wants to revolutionize real-time communication by extending a protocol mostly used for instant messaging, XMPP.
Combining email, instant messaging and wikis seems like a recipe for confusion, but Google Wave pioneers a new generation of web applications, where everything is instantaneous. As Google explains, each wave is a hosted conversation and users can edit the conversation in real-time.
"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin. Or, you can use one of these browsers: Google Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5. If you want to continue at your own peril, go ahead."
I'm not an Internet Explorer user and I understand that developers hate it because they have to spend a lot of time finding workarounds for IE, instead of adding new features, but this message is misleading.
"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin." That's simply not true: Google Wave works in Internet Explorer, even though there are some features that require Google Gears or work better in other browsers.
"Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use -- each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations -- further complicates building rich Web applications. In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind," explains Google.
Just because you can't offer the same experience in all browsers is not a reason to mislead users. You can inform users that your application runs faster in Google Chrome or certain features are only available if you install a plug-in or a more recent browser.
It's a slippery slope and I hope Google doesn't drop support for Internet Explorer just because it's a good opportunity to promote its own browser. Especially now, when even Microsoft builds applications that don't require Internet Explorer.
"Graceful degradation is an important principle in Web design. It means that, when you put in features designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of newer browsers, you should do it in a way that older browsers, and browsers letting users disable particular features, can "step down" to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, though perhaps not as snazzy in appearance," explains Dan Tobias.
I was a bit miffed when my husband got his 
