Google Wave Preview, A First Look

One phenomenon I didn’t expect from the buzz of an internet giant’s new product was the sheer friendliness of strangers.  I had resigned myself to getting a first-hand look at Google Wave a year from now at the earliest.  But it seems that there are plenty of legitimate people willing to send you an invite; you just have to know where to look and have a bit of luck with your timing (Also, I suggest using scr.im or something similar to mask your email from the inevitable bots).  Fellow 8th writer anti and I got invites from the awesome people over at Reddit (for which we thank profusely), and since he’s studying for various tests while I’m procrastinating, I’ll be giving you an overview of our first impressions.  Keep in mind that this program is very much a preview (aka beta), and it is probable that Google will enact a number of changes before Wave even reaches an open preview stage.

First off, Google Wave is currently only supported in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.  Anti and I both used Firefox to test Wave out; I don’t know if the experience would be different in the other browsers.  Secondly, I’ll admit that I haven’t been keeping a close eye on Wave reviews and tips so I jumped into my first wave simply trying things out randomly  (I haven’t researched more for this article either; please forgive me.  And while you’re at it, forgive the typos in the screencaps).  And finally, before I start, here is a quick rundown of Wave terminology that I’ll be using.  A wave is a specific conversation; I think of it as the all the communication with someone between the time you log in and out of an IM service in a day, even counting the long pauses and stops of no messaging.  A wavelet is a smaller part of that—say, the conversation you had with someone in the morning about making plans for lunch.  A blip is a single message: whatever is in the box when you hit enter in IM (it could be “I want tacos” in the previous example).

Our first instinct was to create a conversation of wavelets like instant messaging, with no embedded (i.e. indented) replies.  This will probably par for course for most users to set up a basic conversation and then start using the indented replies to spin off into tangents, but I couldn’t help but feel a little lost.  I wanted more certainty of when to reply at the same level of indentation and when to reply at a further level of indentation.  Maybe this is a bit of pickiness stemming from my personality, but there very well could be some kind of unofficial rule or etiquette for replies in the future.

Personally, I can’t help but think that this will occur; I get the feeling Google sees the indented replies as a way to go back and spin off something mentioned in passing.  For example, if someone was describing their day and briefly mentions lunch before describing an amusing story about a friend, another waver can go back and make an indented reply asking what the person ate for lunch.  This would make sense considering the way the replies-GUI currently acts—we could not make an indented reply to a wave that was the last wave at that level of indentation in the “thread.”  In order to make this more clear, I’ll use an example: let’s say in thread/wavelet A (which has indentation of zero), there were three replies/blips with an indentation of one, called 1a, 1b, and 1c in order from top to bottom.  We would be able to make blip replies of indentation level two to 1a and 1b but not 1c.  This took us a while to figure out, so we ended up making a lot of empty waves, which was a bit annoying.

While my compatriot and I were figuring out the basics of waving, we also tested out the sharing features that make Google Wave so ideal for group projects (in theory at least).  We toyed with uploading pictures, pdf files and mp3s, but all were rather disappointing.  The pictures work the best, with small thumbnails that enlarge (fit to screen instead of 1:1 actual size) when clicked.  There’s a “1/1” at the bottom of the picture screen, but I’m not completely sure what can turn it into an actual slideshow.  Multiple pictures in one blip don’t allow a slideshow, and I couldn’t figure how to upload a whole folder.  The one definite way to get a slideshow is the “images” menu at the bottom that allows you to view all the wave’s images in a slideshow.  There is also an option to “download all,” but for some reason I wasn’t able to select it.  Furthermore, if you uploaded a gif image file, its animation isn’t supported.  In addition, anti was disappointed by the lack of the promised drag and drop feature.  When I later looked into why this was missing, I discovered that it was necessary to install something called Gears in your browser for the feature to work.  Interestingly enough, it seems Gears only really works with Internet Explorer and Firefox (it works with Safari if you have certain versions of OS X), meaning that currently drag and drop is available to a few of the already relatively small number of Wave users.

As for the pdf files (which Wave gave a preview thumbnail for) and mp3s (which Wave didn’t identify as a media file), we were expecting to be able to open the files in browser, like we can do in Gmail.  However, clicking on the files—which were unnamed in the blip and not even identified by file type, only captioned by the ever descriptive “file—led to a prompt to open the file with one of your own programs or to save it.  I expect this inconvenience will be remedied to mimic Gmail, with descriptions of the file type and the option to open the file in browser or save it.  As with the “images” menu, there is a “files” menu at the bottom that allows you to browse and download all the files in the wave.  I think a “select multiple files for download” feature would be useful, especially for group projects where there might be multiple versions of a file being shared, but only one selected for use.

Some other features we tested includes the functionality of polls and maps, which are actually extensions/gadgets (think Firefox extensions).  The poll is pretty useful because not only can a person vote yes/no/maybe, but they can also add a status to that vote.  This could give more detailed answers, such as a person who says “no” to dinner at 6, with the explanation “I have a meeting till 7.”  The only problem I could foresee with the poll is taking up too much room vertically if, say, twelve people vote “yes,” but that’s hardly a pressing issue.  The map extension (Google maps) was a little more difficult to figure out.  Although we got it to show up and figured out how to get it into edit mode, it wasn’t showing the area anti was trying to show me, and also seemed to disappear for anti for while.  Those were the only two extensions we tested (this time).

Before I move onto my next big topic, I’ll roundup miscellaneous features.  You can edit a blip as if it was a blog post, which is a nice way to fix typos or to add/delete files—the timestamp will update too.  And there isn’t the problem of someone editing and claiming something was never said; this is where the “replay” feature comes in handy.  The replay feature is not so much a “playback” feature as it is a slideshow showing all the changes made in the wave so far.

As for the updates themselves, it took us a while to figure it out how Wave notifies users of new replies, but we think we figured it out; next to each wave in your inbox is a displayed number signifying the number of unread messages contained—just like how an email.  It’s a little more difficult to see where exactly these blips are though; unread blips are marked with a green line on the left border but we found no indicators to say whether these new blips were above or below the place you were currently viewing in the wave.  Also, the green “unread” line only disappeared if you clicked on the unread blip or if you clicked the “read” button at the top to mark all blips as read.  I wouldn’t count on the extra clicking to be done away with in updates, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the update notifications became a little more like Gmail’s, with at least arrows directing you up or down to each unread blip (apparently you can go through the unread blips by hitting the space bar, but I only learned this recently and haven’t tested it yet).  Another type of reply you can create in a wave is a private reply, which is essentially a blip with viewing privacy filters, and can be used in a manner analogous to a forum PM.

And now for some quick-fire comments.  Emoticons aren’t a great matter of importance, but I found it interesting to note that unlike Gtalk emoticons, Wave’s emoticons aren’t changed in any way.  You can also create hyperlinked texts in your blips, which can help give them a more blog-like feeling.  We tested outside links with Youtube videos, trying to get the videos to have embedded players within the Wave (as I believed was promoted), but failed to activate this feature.

On a more overall usage note, we weren’t completely sure what the mute feature was for at first, seeing as it only took the wave out of your inbox (it was still made accessible from the “all” link in the navigation panel). Personally, I think it’s for “leaving a conversation,” a la closing an IM chat room.  The only difference is that you will still see the changes and additions to the wave after you “leave”—you just aren’t notified about them.  As for the panels I mentioned, the default layout has the wave box taking up about half the screen’s width on the right, and then on the left most there are the navigation and contact panels stack on top of each other.  Whichever folder in the navigation panel that is selected shows up in the space in between the two columns.  Users will most likely resize the middle and wave panels to give the wave more screen space, but all the panels can be minimized to menu bars at the top, which is very convenient.
 
Now on to my main complaint, that hopefully will only apply to the limited preview version of Wave: lag.  It isn’t so bad at first, considering you don’t have many wavelets going and probably haven’t uploaded many files yet.  But half way through waving, anti and I started running into a number of problems involving lag.  Firefox actually crashed twice for me during our wave, even after I closed all the rest of my tabs and programs.  Wave made the browser significantly slow down or freeze up if I opened and closed files, tried to scroll up or down too fast, and even when I was just typing.  At this point, I’ll consider the first two things to be server issues (i.e. data retrieval speed issues or whatever you would call it) on Google’s part, even though I think an internet-oriented company of their magnitude should have enough (properly allocated) servers that lag wouldn’t be a problem.

The typing issue seems to in part be a constraint programmed into Wave.  Part of the features Wave touts is real time typing, allowing you have a faster response as you can start replying before someone is even done with their blip.  This can be especially useful for all the instances when your instant messaging program merely displays “anti is typing” for two minutes.  Of course, some people might find it a bit creepy that others can see their unedited “word vomit,” but it probably won’t be a problem if you’re waving with friends you trust (although this might not make Wave the best place to gossip).

However, the “real time display” of typing isn’t actually real time. In reality, the letters appear at a set speed, which was painstakingly slow.  If I typed, say, five sentences of twelve words each, I could be in the middle of typing sentence number three while the display still shows me finishing the first sentence.  As you might imagine, this was really annoying.  If I suspected I made an error a couple words back, I would have to wait for Wave to catch up to check my spelling.  If not fixed, this waiting would probably become the deal breaker for many; the rest of the deficiencies I mentioned above are pretty much tolerable.  I was actually very tempted to get up and do something else while I was waiting for the typing display to finish, and I suspect I will not be alone in this sentiment, which bodes ill for the future of Wave; if users want to leave during something that is supposed to speed up response times, then something is clearly wrong.  Hopefully Wave will be changed so that the real time typing reflects the speed at which a user actually types—otherwise it will end up being a very difficult and frustrating way to communicate.

Overall, Google Wave is a pretty shiny product that I want to use with more friends (I don’t have any invites yet, sorry), although its preview is not quite as shiny as anti and I would like.  If I think about all my complaints, I might even say that Wave hasn’t completely gotten its Google-sheen of functionality integrated into simplicity. However, it’s in a limited preview for a reason, and I expect that many of the problems we found will be addressed in some manner. If Wave follows the design mentality behind previous Google successes such as Gmail, I’m sure the lag I found so frustrating will also be fixed.  Ultimately, I look forward to waving some more and testing out whatever new features or fixes are released.