The Next Web

Wave Overload – Does Anyone Still Use This Thing?

By Alex Wilhelm
November 21, 2009
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Wave is not doing anything for me, and I wonder if it does much for anyone.

I logged into Wave today, for the first time in a week, to head to a wave that actually mattered. A friend is working on a secret project, and wanted to get my input. He dropped everything into a wave, and told me to take a look.

I still have yet to find that wave, but I did waste a lot of time looking.

Wave has a single innovation, that I can use, that I love: instant team typing. That alone is amazing. But, I came to the realization that if Google would take that and drop it into Google Docs, I would never open Wave again.

That said, who the hell is still using Wave? Looking at my “inbox” (or Tide, as a I call it, if you get it: incoming waves. Anyway.), let’s see.

Here are a few select sample waves that I am supposed to check out.

Eliminate Tournament – I have no idea what this is, who anyone in the Wave is, or what to do with this. I did read the whole wave. Didn’t help much.

hey everyone, this is just a wave to chat -What the hell? If you want to “chat” with me, either text, email, GChat, or Twitter me. God knows that the last thing that I need is to have another place to have to go to check. Just to chat.

Hmm wave – This explains itself.

I do have some useful Waves. Maybe three or so. They are of course buried under around 50 other waves that I did not create, ask to be invited to, or want to have a part in. But it gets even better: my friends, that I actually want to hear from, wave me as well. From what I can tell, they have nothing to do but say this:

“So this is Wave. Hey man, what are you using this for?”

You know it, and have 17 waves that just say that. Horrible and content-free as that is, it’s about as far as people seem to get with Wave. So much the revolution. Wasn’t this supposed to be a game changer? What happened to that?

If I recall correctly, people claimed that Wave was sub-useful at launch, but that developers were going to be building on top of Wave to make it “killer useful.” When will that be happening? I would love to know.

Until then, I will use Wave when someone else insists on it, but I refuse to check my Wave inbox. Doing so is an excercise in futility.

It’s Saturday, tell me why I’m wrong.

Tags: ,  

  • Hey. I would love to tell you that you're wrong, but acutally you're completly right. Fun thing: you at least seem to have contacts you know. I still wait for a chance to be able to invite MY contacts to give it really a try. I honestly would love to try it for live-colaboration, but with only one contact colaborating is....lonely? ;-)

    Have a great saturday!
  • Like you, Alex, I'm trying to find the relevance of Google Wave to me, my work, and even to my colleagues and friends who use it. All the pre-beta hype made Wave out to be the next step in social media and collaboration, some said Twitter meets Facebook meets Google Docs. I have yet to see that. Thus far, I've participated in pointless waves, and seen one friend overjoyed that he could tweet directly from within Wave. Other than that, I've heard of no one doing anything of great import or utility in Wave.
  • It has no value without users. As invites seem few and far between there doesn't seem to be a way to connect to people you know, hence people connecting tenuously to old contacts that have it - just to explore what it can do.

    I see its potential but they need to open it to already existing networks of people so they can explore the value together, engage with the functionality and build buzz.

    Keeping it so closed and not allowing users to share invites with friends was a big mistake.

    Lastly, if this is the evolution of email, surely when I login with my google account it should load ALL my gmail contacts and EMAILS whether or not those people or communications are in wave. Else I have two places to my communication but not twice as much time to do it in. Let me send plain emails from wave and create waves when a contact has it.

    The mismanagement of this product launch makes me :-(
  • Thought of Wave as a replacement for GMail, and a couple of messaging services: Mail, Document and Forums (anything else?)
    So the day might come when you replace "email" with "wave": either text, wave, GChat, ...

    What I like is the organization of Wavelets in a wave, and Participants management (maybe the Playback feature too)

    The real-time editing is another good feature that integrates collaboration (as in Docs) with the whole thing

    I'd just like to think about it as a new way of doing things: a mix of technologies each built on its own
  • Which is great, if people you know are on it. Especially in group conversations, if just one person is yet to use it, it falls apart.
  • Nick Sharratt
    It's not a service yet, it's very early testing and development.

    Imagine someone when email was invented saying 'what good is this, hardly anyone is using it and when they do it's just to say so this is email huh?'

    Wave isn't a product, it's an open extensible platform and protocols. It will probably take years to really develop into something practical. Anyone getting an invite thinking they could jump in using something new and useful was missing the point. The people it's for at the moment are developers and visionaries - people who can see it's potential without needing to use it much.

    I could wax lyrical about why the Eliza robot is important, about why the federation code will allow a whole industry to develop around it - but if you expect to have random 'users' doing anything except play with it a bit for now then there wouldn't be much point. Probably best you do just log out and leave it for 6 months or so.
  • Anonymous
    Quite agree Nick. As a developer, I'm investing in it. Yet there is a world of difference between "allow an industry to develop" and one actually developing. Google just doesn't seem to get marketing. It'll take at least one other large company such IBM to integrate Wave protocol into an existing Enterprise product.
    It would be a shame if Wave fails to gain because of Google's aloofness. In this case I think the product's perception benefits from clear water between Wave and Google. Perhaps they should set it free and fund it like Mozilla.
  • Nick, I couldn't have said it any better. It seems like so many people are hating on a product that isn't even close to being finished. Seriously, if you don't see the potential in Google Wave then you are blind.
  • It was such a huge mistake going the exclusive invite route. It worked for Gmail because then you could still use it to email anyone you wanted. With Wave all you can do is, as you said, message the other 1 contact you have saying 'So this is Wave...'

    I've logged into Wave twice and it's like just going into an empty room. I think the negative views on it now at this stage are really gonna hurt its ability to be adopted when they release it to everyone.
  • I just got my Google Wave invite yesterday & you're right, at the moment it seems pretty useless. As you mentioned in your post, the last thing we need is another place to check for information & keep updated.

    Wave will prove to be most useful as a collaberation tool for established teams of people who may be seperated geographically. This will only happen if enough people adopt it. You're also right in saying that a lot of these features could be incorporated directly into Google Docs.

    Does Google Wave have a future. That's in the hands of third party developers & what they can come up with.
  • We were lucky to distribute invites quickly throughout our office floor, so most of my direct colleagues have a Wave account. We're currently playing around with it from time to time to see how we could use it.

    While it hasn't replaced email or IM yet (one reason being that it is still in pre-beta and we are reluctant to use it for anything serious) there are always moments when somebody will say "You know, I'll just open a Wave for that".

    So while I agree that Wave hasn't lived up to its Hype yet, I would also guess that this is partly to the unfortunate fact that invites are still processed slowly and there is indeed little to do with Wave when you don't have any friends to "wave" with.
  • I use it every day. It's where I do all my personal work and thinking. Increasingly, within my own workgroup we are using Wave exclusively. I would much rather work in Wave than in GDocs. (Or anywhere else for that matter.)

    It has most definitely replaced GDocs, email and chat with the people who I most frequently collaborate.
  • Anonymous
    thank you for the tide explanation. i did not get it because i am stupid. but everyone who actually did get it shure enjoys this little gag much more with your clarification. (get it? me being sarcastic and all? anyway.)
    thanks again for letting me know how clever you are.
  • Indeed, any time.
  • At the University of Illinois at Springifield, we are busy creating collaborations among classes, researchers, professors. One of the most interesting experiments is to join classes from different universities. For example, we are doing a wave with students at a college in Ireland; working together on two week projects. This works seamlessly - no tuition, logon, software licensing, registration, or other hassles to get these students to share perspecitves and the geo-specific nuances of what they have learned with others. It's also great for the profs to expand their perspectives and knowledge! Think Biology students discussing bio-ethics with classical Philosophy-trained students at different universities.

    Also, as your posting suggested, we are fostering collaborations among researchers at distant institutions in synchronous and asynchronous ways with easy data, audio, video, editing, polling, etc. toolsets that were not easily accessible across institutional boundaries. The possibilities are enormous.
  • I laugh now remembering that I told my husband I would cancel a planned weekend in Paris if I got my Wave invite on the Friday before. That was 6 weeks ago and oh so anti-climatic(the wave, not the weekend).

    But based on Kevin's comment & endorsement above(the only positive one), I will give it a shot with a colleague on Wave for a fresh approach to a new project!

  • I’m finding the same on my end. Even in my tech company there was talk of setting up a Wave for our informal team lunches, but then someone brought up the point that maybe hosting proprietary info on Google’s servers was a bad idea. I suggested that we host our own Wave server … which instantly killed the whole idea. No one wanted to go through all that trouble. I’d predicted Wave as being overhyped from Day 1, so I’m not surprised in the least


    This comment was originally posted on FriendFeed

  • Eelke
    "but then someone brought up the point that maybe hosting proprietary info on Google’s servers was a bad idea"

    haha, that's funny. you also refuse to send e-mail to gmail accounts? who KNOWS what might happen to their contents!
  • john Reeves
    I disagree entirely with the article. If you can't at least see that wave is better than email even with its current features, you are blind. Not having people to use it with is just the nature of a closed beta. But come on, as soon as anyone can use it and someone has written an apparently that reads waves and sends traditional emails, this completely replaces email for anyone that wants to use it. And on top of that, its IM, docs, collaboration and more. It works as a sort of glue service, and its open nature means anyone can host it or write Apps for it.

    I'm just amazed so few people in here see the potential in this.
  • Olly
    We all see the POTENTIAL but we're struggling to find value today.
  • john Reeves
    Sorry bout this second post, I forgot to check the email me box :)
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