Google Wave: First Thoughts

2009-07-19

I received a developer preview invitation for Google Wave this weekend. I’m luigi@wavesandbox.com if you want to add me to your contacts list.

My initial thoughts can be summed up thusly:

How bad is it? After about an incredibly frustrating hour or two of trying to wrap my head around things, here are some thoughts…

The Wave Discuss Group

Apparently in my excitement of signing up, I joined the wave-discuss group, which displays a collective intelligence that can only rival the comment threads to Avril Lavigne videos on YouTube. Click through to see the gory details:

I have no idea how to opt myself out of this group. I’m subject to a mountain of crap in my inbox that I simply don’t want. I tried the Settings option, which appears to be a wave, albeit a broken one speaking Japanese:

The Waves Themselves

The Archive and Mute buttons don’t seem to work. Spammers have already struck:

The WYSIWYG interface promotes some truly heinous typography decisions:

Threading seems to be broken. These answers don’t make a lick of sense:

The Good

The live type feature is indeed awesome. But watching the slowness of typing reminds you how much more efficient talking can be. Also, there appear to be live Googlers trying to answer questions as fast as they can, so that’s nice.

Hopefully, when some people I know get accounts, we can participate is civilized, well-structured waves. But for now, it’s all just too much for me. Using Google Wave results in a sensory overload of low-quality content. Maybe when I figure out how to get off the wave-discuss group, things will be more clear and I can focus on the technology instead of all the chatter.

UPDATE

I figured out how to opt-out of the annoying wave-discuss group. It involved adding my name to a list (in a wave, naturally) of people who want to be opted-out. Apparently a Googler goes through the list every few days and manually processes the names. There’s no automated system yet. A lose-lose for everyone involved…