The Think Room

Every Friday around 4:00 p.m., the Olson development team likes to gather in a conference room to discuss something fresh and inspiring in the world of application development. It could be sharing insight gained through a recent project, trading tips and tricks to speed up each other's working lives or discussing up-and-coming technologies. Sometimes, there are even delicious brews from one of the few home-brewing enthusiasts on our staff.

Recently, on one such occasion, we decided to pull up our sleeves, dust off our glasses and surf the Google Wave application. If you haven't yet heard about Google Wave and would like to know more about it, let me Google that for you. In short, Google Wave is a real-time communications platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. Google Wave is currently only available in limited preview. Luckily, we had enough invites between us to have a full-on wave with the whole development staff.

The following are some things we liked, and some things we disliked, about the Wave client.

Likes

• It’s a nice collaboration tool to modify parts of a document together.
• The ability to compile content from multiple sources and perform actions automated or manual—even something as simple as reading blogs from all over that you've commented on—against them.
• It’s a much better (and more trackable) way to communicate than email, especially with large amounts of people.
• The ability to have a shared document that contains state management and functionality without having to leave the document. For example, Google sends you a wave for invites to send to other people. It could have linked you to a page allowing you to send an email to a user and given you a total of invites left. But the wave message allows you to do all of that in-line without having to go to different software clients to manage the requests. Instead, you just read the wave, add a user and click send. The document does the send, updates your invites and leaves a record of whom you sent it to. All this in a document that you can go back to at any time and see what state it's in.
• The polling extension is cool, as was seeing what the state of the poll was when you go back to the document (wave).

Dislikes

• In order for a wave to be considered “read,” you have to read each wavelet and blip in the wave. To have the application know that each is “read,” you have to click on or tab through them.
• Contact Groups seem to be unusable.
• Unable to revert/merge back/undo to old content.
• Unable to lock down certain content from public editing.
• Unable to specify a content owner/moderator.
• Unable to specify read-only access for users.
• Malware could be an issue if one user adds someone who then modifies all content in an unwanted way.
• Unable to remove users from a wave if added accidentally.
• Organization of content is now dependent on users, much like a wiki, although apps could “create” the structure needed for entering through their interface. But if you can still use Google Wave, there’s no structure in place.
• No apparent Google doc integration. Attachments are just attachments (e.g., PDF).
• How will extensions work? Does every person need them in order to view content? What about mobile devices?
• Slow. Mobile devices and even our high-powered development laptops had issues once there were large amounts of content in the wave.
• A bit overwhelming with nearly 15 people interacting on one wave.

After about an hour of playing around with the beta Google Wave client, the general consensus from our team is that the Wave application itself leaves a lot to be desired, and was not yet all that exciting. What is really exciting to us, though, is the Google Wave API and the open Google Wave Federation Protocol. This is where the true powers of wave have yet to be unraveled. We are already waving about exciting usage ideas that we have. For some interesting Google Wave usage ideas out on the net, visit this link at Mashable.

-Dennis Evert, Associate Technical Creative Director