It’s not surprising that expectations for Google Wave got way ahead of reality. The all-purpose Web-based communication and collaboration tool is one of the most ambitious things the company has come up with this year.

So it’s also not surprising that some early users of the service, which opened for tests in September, have been critical. Robert Scoble, never one to bite his tongue, was outspoken in his own views.

When I met the Wave’s lead developers at Google in Mountain View recently they were open about the service’s shortcomings, and outlined the changes they are working on.

That is likely to start with an end to the anarchic free-for-all that lets any participant in a Wave change or delete anything another user has written.

Lead developers Lars Rasmussen (pictured), brother Jens, and Stephanie Hannon were on a visit to HQ from Australia (if Google was treating your project as an experimental “internal start-up” and gave you carte blanche to run the operation how you wanted, why wouldn’t you base it in Sydney?) The quotes below are from Lars, who did most of the talking:

On Scoble’s criticisms: “I think I agree with most of his points - but not his conclusion that it will crash on the beach. He captures accurately the work that lies ahead of us… He correctly concluded that Wave is a ‘loud’ place. The truth is we should be able to handle that, and we will be able to handle that, but it will take a good deal of work.”

On controlling the anarchy: At the moment, any member of a Wave can edit or delete any part of it. Rasmussen says this “almost anarchistic” approach “works really well in a small work group,” but more controls are needed for larger conversations: “The big missing feature is having permissions on participants.” In the next iteration of Wave it will be possible to limit the powers of some participants just to reading, or commenting. “That we’ll get done reasonably fast, in the next couple of months.”

On moderation: Rather than post all comments in a single view that is open to all participants, Rasmussen says Wave will be much more useful, particularly in work settings, when a moderator with the appropriate authority can view the “draft” conversations among various participants and control which pieces get posted into the official conversation. “The real meaty bit of work is adding moderation. This is some way out in the future.”

On “live” typing (the feature which lets other users see words as they are being written into a Wave): This is the feature that most unnerves new users: “People feel a little exposed, they’re used to doing their spelling errors in private.” The Wave developers also say this is something that users adapt to quickly, so it’s here to stay. However, the feature becomes a real distraction in a large group when several people all start writing at once. “Its very useful when you’ve got a small group of people, but when you’re a lot of people on a Wave it gets too loud to follow.”

On attention management: It is hard to manage a users’ list of active Waves, for instance by cleaning out the “inbox” and putting the least important ones into the archive: “Right now, in a somewhat naive implementation, they come back every time someone puts a new character into the Wave.  That makes it very loud.” The developers plan to add tools so that users can choose the circumstances under which a Wave jumps back to the top of the pile.

On complexity: Wave has been criticised as too complex for new users, but its developers are unapologetic: “We weren’t trying to hit something that you could learn in an afternoon. We were trying to build a tool that will be with you for many hours each day. You can even imagine in time people will be teaching courses in Wave.”

Tags: Google Wave

November 3, 2009 1:28am in Internet, Tech | Comment