Reading Johanna Hanes’ paper “Google Wave: A Revolutionary CSCL-tool or Overestimated Hype” (PDF)—a nice combination of personal experience with Google Wave, light theoretical foundation, and a decent suite of links and resources—and ruminating on how I might position Google Wave for my students has reminded me yet again that I’m still not sure what to make of Wave.
As a client—a working app—Google Wave is a pretty sad affair. I can reasonably set aside some gives given that Wave is a very beta (alpha?) release, but I remain surprised Google would roll a service out even as widely as it has while in such a shabby state.
The real question is what Google Wave the client offers that might be useful in supporting my work and other activities. Now that I’ve taken part in a number of waves, some of my own creation and some not, I can give a current answer: not much. Perhaps my biggest functional problems will be resolved as the client evolves, such as:
- Performance! Wave is terribly slow and laggy—and it just gets worse as conversations reach any productive length.
- Simultaneous editing: good idea, poor implementation… engaging in simultaneous editing often leads to lost edits or completely lost entries.
- Inconsistent and painful UI—many functions are hidden in keyboard shortcuts and available no other way, others seem only available via mouse and in mysterious contexts. Mouse handling in the conversation space is often-nonsensical. Given how much information is being packed into one place, use of screen real-estate is poor.
- Conversations are awkward due to lack of good navigation and inability to “split” conversations. At least as far as I can tell.
- Practically speaking, conversations are subject to length limitations (due to performance, screen real-estate and lackluster navigation) almost as restrictive as those in email clients. Breaking into multiple waves helps, but adds to the clutter and disconnected feel of the semi-conversations that typify wave-based conversations.
- Keeping a history is a good thing, but the “playback” feature is the kind of thing that looks cool in a presentation but is rarely of practical use.
The most interesting aspect of Wave is the potential for real-time collaboration using multiple media in a single location… but at this point it’s only potential and other products can meet those needs. For asynchronous collaboration the options are numerous, including Google Docs (for basic documents) and wikis of various kinds (that can incorporate a wider variety of media). Etherpad actually gets simultaneous editing right; I hope the open-source release means Etherpad will be readily available until Google’s snarfed up the interesting technology and used it to make Google Wave work. Group Discussion tools provide 90% or more of what Google Wave provides while being readily available, stable, etc.
I thought Google Wave was a solution in search of a problem. It’s probably more accurate to say Google Wave is (thus far) a clumsy solution to a very small problem that can be productively solved with existing, better performing tools—including a few applications provided by Google itself. This may change in the future: I can understand, even if I don’t buy, Google’s positioning of Wave as an email killer, combining functions of email communication with rich media, chat and wiki facilities. But for now it’s simply a slow, buggy, painful experiment for which I’ve yet to see a practical use with benefits enough to outweigh the cost.
However, as Alan Levine’s helpfully reminded me (and the world), Google Wave’s real promise may lie in its place as a platform. I’m not so sure Wave is a client with the future of the text browser or the protocol quite as important as http (and being of more promise than Wave’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad client is a pretty low bar), but the potential power in the combination of features and functions the API can bring together is great.
[Side-note: the debut of highly hyped products like Google Wave tends to bring the worst out of many in educational technology, (sometimes inadvertently) confirming the unfortunate characterizations of my community by those outside. First are those who immediately start looking through the wrong end of the telescope and start conversations based on questions like “how can we use Google Wave in education?” It’s not that this is, at heart, the wrong question, but in posing it that way we appear to be the very “geeks obsessed with every shiny new toy” that many think we are. Second are those that latch onto features provided by a product and highlight/elevate them without any evidence of their value in the first place. For instance, Wave may very well be useful for collaborative note-taking, but what supports the contention that collaborative note-taking is of any value in the first place? Just because a cool product does it?]
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I could not agree more and the apt phrase is being “terrible underwhelmed” with Wave- I struggle to even find a whelm.
For their larger successes- search, maps, Earth, docs, iGoogle, gadgets– Google has taken something that we know to some sense and made it much better.
With Wave, they “re-invented” email as something as useless as a fifth square iron wheel on a Corvette. I’ve not found one thing that has even a trace of “google juice.”
It was most elegant in the demo with 2-3 people, out here in the world, it is a bad dog.
Oh well.
Your blog is nice
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