It's Just Fancy TalkThe Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009, at 6:42 PM ET
Here's a little story to show just how thoroughly Google's long-awaited chatting tool, called Google Wave, can kill your mood to chat: The other day, I was "waving" with Zach Frechette, the editor of GOOD magazine. Naturally, we were talking about the new site's merits and flaws. As we went back and forth, I had a tiny epiphany. I wanted to tell Zach that I thought Wave would have a much tougher time catching on than Twitter, because it was asking so much more of its users. The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time—every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.
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StumbleUponLike Wave, Twitter was also "trying to teach people a new way to communicate," I wrote to Zach. "But its main"—and here I paused, searching my brain for the right word. I wanted to say that Twitter took off because it was drop-dead simple. So did I want to say, "but its main function was simplicity"? No, that was wrong. How about goal—"its main goal was simplicity"? Hmm, better, but still not quite right. The pause grew; the word that I wanted—in retrospect, feature—wasn't coming to me, and I began to reconsider the sentence entirely. Maybe I should just delete what I'd written and say, "Twitter works because it's simple." But I couldn't do that, because Zach was watching me. He could see me struggling right now—he could see that I'd gotten myself stuck in a textual cul-de-sac and that I was desperately searching for a way out without looking foolish. Now I saw Zach beginning to type: "Don't let the live-typing get you down!" The game was up; what was the point of making a point now? I ended my thought clumsily and then resolved never to attempt to say anything very deep on Wave.
Chatting on Wave is like talking to an overcurious mind reader. On a conventional IM, you only see what other people say once they hit Enter. (True, the IM program will tell your partner whether or not you're typing, but this is too little information to get embarrassed about.) On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it's a feature—indeed, it's one of the Wave team's proudest accomplishments. When Google first unveiled Wave this spring, the program's inventors hailed real-time typing as a way to mimic real-life conversations online. Because you can see what your chat partner is trying to say before she's finished saying it, you can start replying immediately, making conversations much faster, Wave's proponents argue. In practice, though, live typing either slows conversations to a crawl or renders them anodyne. Because you've got to second-guess every word you put down, you find yourself agonizing over the keyboard. It's hell—and, so far, Wave has offered no way to turn it off. (The program is still in an invitation-only preview mode, so it's possible they'll fix this soon.)
Live-typing illustrates Wave's bigger problem: In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don't need fixing. What is Wave? Its designers say that it's an effort to modernize e-mail by adding features from IM, wikis, and other tools for collaborating in the Web age. Improving e-mail is a worthy goal: There's too much of it, a lot of the mail we get is useless (even the stuff that's not spam), and threads involving more than two or three people can get wildly, incomprehensibly out of hand.
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I think you completely failed to consider what was said in the demo back at I/O. The core feature of Wave is that it is a real time communication PROTOCOL. Right now that manifests itself as live time chatting, but Wave is not meant to be just a fancy new IM client like you seem to have been using it. It is extendable by developers and the real time nature of the protocol allows it to be potentially used for lots of things. It's limited only by the creativity of developers. Google demonstrated a non-live-type checkbox, and if they don't implement it someone will -- this is an open source project!
The critical point is that by making the protocol real time the wave is not locked to the user currently editing it. There are no collisions or merge tasks required like you see in existing wiki products. And it doesn't mean that you will routinely need to simultaneously collaborate on something or chat in real time. But anyone that's used SVN or Sharepoint or Wikipedia for 10 minutes has seen that even with a very small group of editors making infrequent edits, collisions do occur and are a huge pain (think a small team updating a weekly dashboard before a syncup meeting or whatever).
-- maracle
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