Google Wave Review

[Sean Lew]

I have been playing with Google Wave for a few days now and its been a rather refreshing experience. Even though I only have seven friends I can use the platform with and it doesn’t work with traditional emails, i still found the experience pretty good.

Below are somethings I really like:
1) Playback feature. With a tool with Google Wave, version control is necessary and playback does the job very well.

2) Commenting, discussion and collaborative editing. This is quite powerful, taking the idea of collaborative editing (google docs) and discussions/commenting into one platform allows uses to all work at the same time. No more check in, check out problems.

3) Highlight changes. With any version control, sometimes it might be hard to know what really changed. Google Wave allows highlighting of changes inline.

4) Drag and drop. This might be a rich user interface feature and might not provide much value for the tech savvy, but for the average joe, drag and drop makes wave alot easier to use.

5) APIs are pretty cool and the tools that can be generated for Wave will be limitless.

However, besides all these cool stuff. I felt that many features of Wave are marginally better than emails and with emails used as the incumbent communication tool. I really wonder if Wave will take off. The biggest issue is that Wave and traditional emails are not compatible at this point of time and for Wave to be useful, it has to be compatible. Google might be big and powerful but I am not convinced that they are powerful enough to change the traditional email way. The last thing Google should do is to compete directly with traditional emails.

Also for Wave to be successful, Google needs to get people on board quick! While the iron is hot, get people to start using it and start collaborating. I can see that they are signing people up somewhat quickly and I generally have one friend added to Wave a day but this needs to be way faster. The longer the people wait, the more frustrated they become and if they do not find benefits for themselves, they could just leave the platform.

This is just a quick review of what I could see over the last few days and I am sure what I think will change soon enough when I start discovering more and understanding wave better. Please do not take this as a full final review of the product. I am sure there’s alot more to Wave than what I wrote and we shall discover and see how things pan out.



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