I agree, but I still think that most Google launches, while certainly not finished products, generally have fewer "Oops! We just lost what you were doing!" moments than Wave has.
In my experience, any time I sit down and use Wave for more than 10 minutes, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a lockup or typing loss of some kind. And this is just as often when it's me alone as when another participant is online.
That's really unfortunate, because according to the technology previews, the seamless transactional content collaboration scheme was the big technology spike that went into this.
Some folks at Google (specifically the guys who invented Google Maps) were sitting around pondering the fact that email is a very old concept based on even older snail-mail concepts. They sat around brainstorming how they could reinvent email, and came up with Wave.
None of the individual ideas are impressive, but they did put a lot of stuff in one place. It's hard to explain all the features quickly, but here's my best attempt: it's like an IM chat client that can be used when not everyone is online (like email), allows for replies to old comments to fork a conversation (like email threads), allows for revising old comments (like wikis), allows for historical review of how a conversation grew and was edited (like wikis), and allows really nice formatting and pictures (like a word processor).
There's other features not mentioned above, but those are most of the biggies.
The thing is, it's slow and crashes semi-often right now.
MY google wave is fun :) am I on your list? shadowstone at goooglewave or shadowstone at gmail
It still does have alot of functions that havent been implemented yet. I bet over the next few months it will be come much more functional.
The biggest drawback I see with wave is that because it is meant to replace IM, e-mail, other things, it may be hard to get people used to those things to switch over. I have a feeling it will end up as 'just another' way of communicating online.
Once it gets more stable, people will make more bots/plugins to allow bridging between Wave and traditional IM/email. You won't be able to use all the funky Wave features over the bridge, but it will allow people to move themselves entirely over without breaking old contacts. Eventually, once enough of your contacts have done similarly, you'll start using the Wave features, which will create peer pressure to get the stragglers to move over.
It will be "just another" way of communicating, but that argument is kinda irrelevant, like saying that Facebook is unimportant because it's just another way to do what people already do with MySpace. It's really all about diversity and evolution of techniques and ideas.
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In my experience, any time I sit down and use Wave for more than 10 minutes, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a lockup or typing loss of some kind. And this is just as often when it's me alone as when another participant is online.
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None of the individual ideas are impressive, but they did put a lot of stuff in one place. It's hard to explain all the features quickly, but here's my best attempt: it's like an IM chat client that can be used when not everyone is online (like email), allows for replies to old comments to fork a conversation (like email threads), allows for revising old comments (like wikis), allows for historical review of how a conversation grew and was edited (like wikis), and allows really nice formatting and pictures (like a word processor).
There's other features not mentioned above, but those are most of the biggies.
The thing is, it's slow and crashes semi-often right now.
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It still does have alot of functions that havent been implemented yet. I bet over the next few months it will be come much more functional.
The biggest drawback I see with wave is that because it is meant to replace IM, e-mail, other things, it may be hard to get people used to those things to switch over. I have a feeling it will end up as 'just another' way of communicating online.
Reply
It will be "just another" way of communicating, but that argument is kinda irrelevant, like saying that Facebook is unimportant because it's just another way to do what people already do with MySpace. It's really all about diversity and evolution of techniques and ideas.
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