A very small review of google wave
I received an invitation to Google Wave recently and went to have a play. Fortunately I know some people who are involved with Google so it meant I had a few people to fiddle around with things with but to be honest I am not hugely fussed by it.My main thoughts on it, having played around for a little while without really knowing anything about it:
1) It's very difficult to use. The UI is very cumbersome, and they seem to have given everything silly names that are not in the least bit descriptive. On its own that might be okay, with one or two like that (such as with twitter/tweets) but with waves and blips and gadgets and robots and god knows what else is going on you need a pocket reference book to take with you. Also, it's completely unintuitive as to how to add a gadget to a wave. I spent the better part of 5-10 mins trying to work out how to add a gadget to a wave before discovering I had to "reply" before I got the options up.
2) Not much information about what has been done recently. It's a pain in the butt to have to read through 100+ "blips" to see what's been updated along the way. This is connected to the "feature" where people can edit other peoples' posts. However "useful" that might be, I could see it being highly irritating to miss an edit because there was no highlighting of it or anything useful like that.
3) Gadgets. Only a couple of gadgets are available, yet there seem to be heaps on other app sites yet with no easy-seeming way to add them. How do we add them? Also the weather app is only in Fahrenheit. Grump.
4) Settings. I realise that the main settings are coming, but the extension settings didn't actually allow me to customise anything I wanted to actually customise. Like the weather app being in Fahrenheit. Also, why can't we easily add more extensions from here? Why do we have to "add from URL" (another COMPLETELY confusing option) when replying to a wave?
5) Freedom. I suppose that's what this is all about, but to be honest I find Wave too free. It has no real focus, anyone can edit anything, and so it makes it pretty useless to replace irc/forums or similar, yet there isn't the infrastructure to really handle much more than making it a glorified dumping ground for youtube videos and sudoku games. What is Wave supposed to be, Google? It doesn't fit anything I can think of that might be particularly useful, except maybe for D&D tabletop gaming. lol.
So that's my little review of Wave. I realise I'm probably just ignorant about some of these things but honestly this is what struck me :) Mostly #5 too. I look forward to seeing how it develops, but atm it doesn't do anything that my other forms of communication don't already do, and there are some weird, off-putting bits that need ironing out.
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