Have you gotten your Google Wave invite yet? Just kidding — they’re not out yet. The team (which is based in Australia) decided to push them out later today so they could be up to deal with issues surrounding the massive influx of new users. And judging from the response on the web, “massive” is also the perfect word to describe the anticipation for the service.
Ever since it was unveiled at Google I/O this past May, it seems that everyone wants to know everything about Wave. And yesterday, when it was revealed that a big roll-out to more than just developers was around the corner, interest spiked again. Since then, the term has not left Twitter’s Trending Topics area. But there is always a downside to so much hype, and I’m pretty certain we’re going to see it in the coming days and weeks with Google Wave too: Backlash.
Actually, some amount of backlash started immediately after it was first revealed in May. While we were wowed after a hands-on demonstration we got, writing that Wave “drips with ambition,” there were plenty in the press and general public who quickly jumped on the other side of the coin. Upon seeing the public demonstation, reactions ranged from “Wow” to “I don’t get it.” But the real test will come later today when many of those people actually get to use it for the first time.
We have been using Wave since Google I/O, and while it has been very buggy, the team has worked hard to iron out a lot of the kinks since then. Still, there will be plenty who begin using it today who will be disappointed. It’s a tricky situation for the Wave team. From the get go, they’ve said that the ultimate vision is for Wave to be a new communication platform for the web — meaning they hope hundreds, if not thousands, of other services are built with Wave as the backbone. But that’s a long ways out. Today, all we have to play with is Google Wave, the service, which is still very early in its lifespan.
It’s really Google Wave’s ambition that is a dual-edged sword. Because the team is trying to do so much with the product, there will be plenty of people who find it confusing and cluttered. And to some extent, they’re right. But anyone who labels it a failure at this point is either a curmudgeon or an extremely shortsighted person claiming to have foresight. It’s a nice thought that every product should be a taut bundle of execution with an easy path to monetization. But the web, and really the world, would be a much more boring place if that were the case.
Part of Google’s strategy with Wave, and part of the reason they’re putting it out there early, is to see what developers and the users make of it. In that regard, it’s not all that different from Twitter, which started as a simple status-update side project, and transformed into something much different thanks to its users and the third-party developer community around it.
Wave is much more complicated than Twitter, and that could well be a downside (remember, keep it simple, stupid). But there’s a difference between clutter and ambition, especially when you have the resources of Google behind you. Shooting for the Moon is a good thing, and Wave has a unique opportunity to do that.
I’m not saying Wave will be a success. Many of the most ambitious projects often crash and burn — it’s the nature of high risk/high reward. But we’re still way too early in its lifespan to make that call for Wave. I can see the backlash already, and I think we should give it a chance. The end result could well be something that greatly benefits us all, but getting to that point, if it ever does, will take time.
[images: Paramount Vantage]
sure hope i get an invite!
And it’s begun. The invites are rolling out over the next few hours.
Please email me if there is an invite
try this site http://forumsgo...om/google-wave/
Having been testing Wave for months, I’m on the skeptical side. My initial reaction was the same one you mentioned: the interface is cluttered and confusing.
I see they’ve pushed out some (all? Who knows. They haven’t ported my account to the main servers yet) of the new features to the Sandbox Preview accounts. It’s faster and has some improvements to replies, but it’s still a lot to take in.
Still, some of the technology is, I must admit, game-changing.
I think the point behind wave.google.com is an example of the protocol, not the interface, the same behind the recent invites which are primarily going to developers. Comparing it to twitter, as the article does, is moronic. Wave.google.com may or may not look like it does when it’s released, the protocol isn’t even finished yet though (do people judge HTML5 on the current Canvas implementations that are floating around on Mozilla and Google?).
calling wave.google.com as a protocol is actually moronic. Google is selling koolaid, and you are drinking it.
This just show a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wave is.
No, you are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding. Google Wave is “an online communication and collaboration tool”, which is how Google itself describes the technology. The idea that this is an extension, adaptation or otherwise of Internet protocol is thoroughly misguided, particularly given how new Google Wave is.
Not really, take a read about what Waves actually are. As I mentioned, wave.google.com is an example, it’s a bunch of HTML/PHP/JS/whatever to display it to the end user, it can be changed, it can be built by anyone who feels like it, because the actual communications work in Waves.
http://waveprotocol.org/
http://en.wikip...ration_Protocol
That is the protocol, open for use by anyone. You can go build a wave server based on the in-progress protocol and start communicating with other servers, Google don’t get to do anything. They have about as much control over how Waves are used as CERN has over how HTML is used (they created that protocol).
It’s really vital to understand the difference here, and I think that’ll be the hard thing that may never be grasped by the public at large. Outlook and Gmail are communicating the same things, SMTP, POP3, IMAP packets. Web browsers are just tools to render HTML (and associated website languages, PHP, whatever). Waves fall in that category.
wave.google.com means very little, really, it’s a preview of the protocol, a visual understanding. Whether Google will release it as a product as is remains entirely to be seen, but it’s not how the public should be viewing Waves (or anyone for that matter)
I think this is the issue with many Google apps… since the company is full of engineers and not designers, the UI suffers and, in my opinion makes the product suffer.
Alyssa, you have hit it on the head. When iGoogle first came out, I was (for me) quite excited .. but once I started digging into it, it became a messy interface & didn’t actually deliver any value for me at all.
Just use Google Reader
Dude. Minimize the contacts and inbox lists to the top of the navigation. Less clutter. FIO.
I personally am loving the There Will Be Blood reference
DRAINAAAAAGE!
What a politically correct confused article.. Keep it up Seigler. Get some balls to have an opinion.
yeah. i never have an opinion. and i think mine is pretty clear here, i’m a big fan of wave’s ambition, and what it could become.
Word Count: ‘but’ = 8
cop, such a negative nancy
i see, now we’re not allowed to talk about the flip side of the coin. yesterday everyone was saying the opposite, so it’s hard to keep track, you’ll understand.
I hope COP’s comment was sarcastic because Mr. Siegler seems to typically be quite opinionated. I liked the fact that while he stated he hopes for the best of Wave, right now no one will no if its ambitious or truly all there. Somewhat like Wolfram Alpha and Cuil. Both were very much hyped…but in many ways (especially cuil) was all hype. Let’s hope Wave isn’t
Wave is the logical extension of everything that has been going on on the Internet in the last several years…. the lines from Friendster and LiveJournal, to MySpace, to Facebook and Twitter, all connects to Wave. There is no reason to have email, IM, social streams, and tweets (cross between email and IM) since they are all simply ways to communicate with people you want to communicate with. Email has been the antiquated hold out of the bunch because it has this weird and totally prehistoric lag. Wave will end that. Mark my words.
Looking forward to “waves” in everyone’s milkshake. I will drink it up.
it will take a very long straw.
that concept has been drilled already!!!
well not really, but we really must keep these references up!
also, Microsoft is a false prophet and windows is a superstition!
also, I am a web company, always have always will be.
MG, that was a great write-up.
My hunch is that Wave will be like running hot water in a home. It took a while for people to get used to the idea of that, but once they were doing it there was no turning back. The adoption of Wave will be slow, but that’s a good thing.
More here:
http://bit.ly/16vPGl
It will be success MG but will it be actually used instead of emails? I don’t think so.
Its strong technology and us smart kids are going to figure out how to build apps that are useful enough to become main stream.
i’ve got mom and grandma on twitter/FB, i’m betting i can get them to ride the #wave too.
Ok, no one ask for invites here. Just normal comments, PLEASE.
agreed!!!
Man, it sure would be nice to have a website where people could request invites or something like that…
Actually….TC has one. InviteShare.com However, I don’t think it’s used too much anymore.
forgot about that! i used it a lot in 2007 or 2008.
btw… there are NO Wave invites on there, so nobody get too excited.
Do you have an invite. I want an invite, PLEASE.
Can I have an invite?
I’ll send out 5 invites to anyone who visits my website and leaves a comment – http://www.ebizelindia.org
PS: I’m just kidding but lets see if anyone jumps right after reading the first sentence
Reminds me of the early days Java. Overbranded plumbing marketed to consumers.
As a sharepoint point user for work, I would be very interested in seeing how far Google Wave will blow sharepoint away… from a usability standpoint at least.
Really? I work on Sharepoint as well and don’t see much overlap between the two products.
Wave seems to be more of a replacement for email/IM communication whereas Sharepoint is….well, what the hell is Sharepoint?
Demn I would love to try this new service, i’ve been waiting for this a long time…
Shouldn’t we be throwing a party together with the Windows 7 guys? :S
quite right.
In fact these this testing stage is pretty critical because it will be the first chance most early adopters get a chance to play with it. If they like it and find a good use for it then people will start developing for it. Also they will recommend it to their friends and a service like this depends on lots of people using it.
Personally I hope it takes off as it really is an innovative product but I’m slightly sceptical as to whether the general public will get the need for it.
Nothing has wowed me recently more than the 80 minute intro to Wave at Google I/O. The product is simply amazing.
The problem, though, is that unless a bunch of your friends and/or co-workers are also on board, there’s nothing to do. Until it’s available to everyone, I don’t see many people doing much with it on the user side (not the dev side – that’s another story). And I’m afraid that’s going to leave a lot of people wondering what all the hype is about.
Thats the point of having 8 friend invites. Hopefully you chose them wisely and only invite people that are excited about the product and will use it just as much as you will.
Ah, didn’t know about that. Well that will certainly help things out. Thanks for clarification.
Sure thing. Check in yesterday’s post.
I don’t think you can compare Wave to Twitter. They’re two different beasts.
of course, but their inception isn’t all that different.
Twitter’s inception was status updates, Wave was the several year development of a brand new protocol due to the limitations of existing protocols. Twitter could easily be built on Wave, the reverse isn’t true.
The only similarity is that you can send a message with them, but the plan with Wave, since announcement, has been general communications of any data that could be benefited from real time communications
ditto davebroham! A twitter search reveals most don’t even know what it is or how the invites will work. They just want it b/c it is trending
If I don’t get my invite today, I will definitely lose interest. Even if I get one later, the excitement will be gone at that moment.
is that a threat to google?
No, it’s how most people I talked to feel. 100K invites given the months of waiting and the millions lined up for invites is a ridiculously low number. Won’t you agree?
Nikolay, I totally agree. The whole thing has become a nuisance and a distraction. Why not pick 100 developers and get them to hand out 1,000 invites a piece, or a more manageable 50 per and get a little more testing? This whole thing smacks of P.T. Barnum (big fan, by the way) and is really annoying.
Of course, I say that maybe because I have a terrific use case and have plead my case to Google but can’t even get an invite from anyone I know, so maybe I’m the nuisance
Yeah you’re 100% right about this. I’ve been using (and developing) for wave since they released the first batch of invites right after I/0. I agree that the software is great and has loads of potential. I’m just concerned that there is SO MUCH HYPE right now that people are only setting themselves up for disappointment. Wave is great… if you have people to talk to.
Oh, “one more thing”, here’s the blog post I wrote at the end of July outlining some of my first experiences with Wave. It should be an interesting read while you’re waiting for your invite!
“Got a Google Wave Invite” – http://plzkthxb...le-wave-invite/
Goodbye Basecamp
What really makes wave stand out is it’s possibility for creating your own gadgets.
It took me 30 minutes to create a gadget that let’s you inline a survey from my site http://obsurvey.com into your wave.
The gadget is very simple
1) Go to http://obsurvey.com and create a survey and collect answers for it. When you are given the URL copy the part of the URL after ?id=
2) Go to wave and add the gadget located at http://wavesurv.../wavesurvey.xml
Paste the ID into the gadget and viola you have a survey in your wave.
I’ll be looking into beeing able to create surveys directly inside wave.
But I really thing the gadgets will make wave amasingly usefull, you can really get creative.
Me and another guy created a collaboratory drawing surface in a couple of hours.
Having said that, the interface is not very intuitive, and does require some getting used to. Especially the srolling is terrible.
You really need som tutorial videoes to get started, and I’m pretty tech savy. An average user does not stand a chance of figuring out how to use wave as it is right now.
Hey its me Tim from Google. For the invites we sent out, we haven’t received any good feedback…Wave goodbye…am sure it will be in the dog pile soon.
So is Google’s strategy with Wave more about trying to one-up facebook by rolling up all the SN’s and messaging apps into wave? It will be interesting to see what the developer community comes up with, how many ‘new’ types of apps are built for wave vs. how many simply port apps they have on fb or twitter.
Yeah I don’t think Google has really announced it’s long term strategy yet. At this point, it’s pretty much just speculation over how Google could use this to make it worthwhile.
The biggest thing that will hinder the success of Wave is the adoption rate. If you’re the only one using the platform then it doesn’t really make sense to to move all your communication there. I think that’s why Facebook messaging has become so popular. Everybody’s on FB.
I think if Google is able to take Wave (or some of the features of Wave) and integrate these into some of it’s existing products like Gmail or Gtalk, they will have a real winner.
I hope they are not forcing this one too much. With all the potential Wave has, they have been better waiting longer to start rolling it out.
Also, I wonder if 100,000 invites is far more than necessary for them at this point. With 8 invites for each of those 100,000, you are looking at 900,000 people using the service very soon. Couldn’t they have received enough feedback for bug fixing, etc from a much smaller group?
But, kudos to them for doing something new and bring it to the masses.
I can’t think of something to compare Google Wave with. It seems like it is a product of its own.
OneNote. People can collaborate quite similarly. It also has an interface that can be a bit difficult to jump into, as some commenters here have said about Wave.
Also, OneNote is not web-based like Wave, but you can have OneNote notebooks stored in Sharepoint (bad in my experience) or on a http (webdav?) or SMB file share (good in my experience).
And OneNote is part of the new Microsoft Office Online deal I believe.
I cannot think of any big company using the wave protocol either, if that’s what you mean
I’m as excited as anyone about Google Wave but I do approach it with a certain skepticism and I appreciate @MGSiegler’s post on the potential backlash. As much as I’m eager for any new product to revolutionize the way I live and work, there’s a part of me that thinks that it will also be a huge distraction. http://ow.ly/s1fC
I just hope that they can keep it up and running. Their history with Gmail isn’t very promising.
MG i start to like you:) less about twitter, more about real stuff
):) cheers
forever updating streams of conversation. Thats what wave is. So 3 years down the line a stream that started 3 years ago will be damn long..
I need an invite PLEASE, im watching this closely because i like the idea BUT i don’t know how it will actually work!!!
*I will be sad if I don’t get an invite. Signed up with both email addresses.
It doesn’t matter how many times you signed up for an invite, but when you signed up.
me?
like the same week as it was announced?
so it is not random drawing? :S
Btw… what does it do? Apart from replace sliced bread and e-mail. No really, what does it do that I can’t do right now?
I send out a document to a US GOVERNMENT AGENCY explaining a scientific formula with my corporate logo GENUSi Research and Development and the words MASS ~ WAVE and all of a sudden, google, the compulsive copycat, jumps all over it.
What a bunch of uncreative hacks.
Lil’ Biters
Invite/nominate me! proplayersrealty at gmail.com
even if it doesnt blow up, i will be personally using the service for collaboration purposes
cant go wrong, just give google some time to optimize the interface, make it simpler and itl catch on… if they wanna grab another audience they can always advertise it as a social product aswell
I would love an invite!
Too much hype?
“Have you gotten your Google Wave invite yet? Just kidding — they’re not out yet.”
I just had a heart attack.
I’ve logged into Google wave weekly for the past few months with my preview account. Every time, I have quickly left overwhelmed and underwhelmed. As pointed out by many, it is quite buggy and chaotic. It gives me agita. My browser crashes, scripts stop running, the screen flickers constantly and parts of the UI vanish or fail to respond to clicks.
Google’s own implementation of this protocol is meant to try and expose as much of the functionality as possible. I get that. But it suffers for trying to do so much. And i’m not sure if this design is intelligent from their perspective or if it’s all just an example of what could be done. Either way, I have not enjoyed testing it as a user and just don’t have the time to dredge through it as a developer either. It’s too early for me to get involved but i’m happy that others are eagerly adopting it and moving if forward. I do see the potential of Wave and will not come to conclusions just based on it’s current incarnation by Google. I once called it a brilliant mess.
The other aspect of Wave that is troublesome is it’s complexity and barrier to deployment/development ease.
When i look at how other aspects of the real-time web are progressing… I feel that the significance of Wave is less than it was when everyone first learned of it. I also feel that if gmail was simply setup as “push” for anyone on any device (not just mobile) then that would be a more important evolution in real-time collaboration than Wave is.
Yes, Wave has potential to eventually be a pervasive game-changing tech, but that potential may fizzle out as other tech progresses and as users take smaller steps towards evolving their collaborative workflows with new tools.
I just got my invite so they are sending them out now…
I have received mine tonight (Italy)
Folks who use Google Wave invites to increase their Twitter follower count and/or blog readership are soooo lame. Most of those ‘followers’ will dart as soon as they have that invite.
If 240 million people can use Facebook and well over 10 million have utilized Joomla, Google Wave should have no problem gaining a large user base.
I’m intrigued by the concept but feel it will take a while before anything substantial hits the mainstream. My money is on Microsoft releasing an application/mockup first just to be able to dismiss Google Wave as not game changing!
I’ve been playing with wave for about two months now. I’ve even done a robot.
The possibilities with wave are just mind blowing but the interface is still too buggy for the big public.
My feeling is that they still have a LOT to do before opening it to everyone.
Google needs the sales motivators from Apple to sell Google Wave:
Amazing, incredible, outstanding, great easy to use Google Wave.
http://bit.ly/5rILn
I interested to see/use wave. I’m not personally huge on twitter and facebook but the real-time and collaborative platform in the hands of big G should be quite interesting and may bring a web savvy user like myself off the sidelines, we shall see.
They put them out pretty late. I got mine at 12:54 AM east coast time.
I am looking forward to GOOG Wave, I think it is a game changer. Google has the resources and talent to build out a platform and place most of these other web services/apps into their rightful places as add-on features to a larger communications platform.
So invites go initially to anyone who signs up as a google api developer?
I love all the comments stating that this will be “the end of email”. Let’s see, email is simple to use, is not dependent on a single provider, application, or OS, can be easily filtered sorted, or organized in almost any way possible, can easily be saved outside of the email program (in my employer’s case, emails are occasionally saved into our CMS to satisfy compliance audits), and let’s admit it, it has become a standard.
My issue with Google Wave is that it is GOOGLE Wave. I can only get excited if Google release the “protocols” or “APIs” with a truly free license and other companies develop their own versions and all are interoperable. I can email or IM any person with an email or IM address from anywhere, anytime, with any PC. Is that really what Google intends with Wave?
Yup, its licensed using the Apache license. You can build two Wave servers right now and communicate between them without Google getting a say in it at all.
Do we really want to keep giving Google more and more power over our lives and businesses and access to what we do?
Yes.
Really? Ah, youth. Take a wider look further into the future.
All hail the Googlepire!