Google Wave

by JS

I’m a little late to the party on Google Wave, but I just got an invitation today. Contrary to early Google Mail, Wave is clearly a beta (or even really an alpha release) during this preview-by-invitation-only period.

[Aside: Did Google invent the preview-by-invitation-only concept? Or bring it to the Web 2.0 world? I have a feeling that this release strategy will still be around long after Google bites the dust.]

The user interface is clunky. Copying hyper-links between Waves results in a hot mess of misaddressed links. When you use the link edit item to repair these links, the tool invariably inserts a new link in front/back/between the existing link. Google Wave highlights how clunky Web 2.0 image manipulation is, since it lacks the drag-and-drop desktop paradigm, opting instead for file browsing dialogue boxes. I’ve heard that Google Gears can make this problem go away, but as yet I’ve had no success.

Settings and profile information are stored as Waves along with everything else. This does not make sense to me, as these are privileged ways of interacting with the program, unless of course, Waves can somehow alter my administrative state, a stupidly dangerous state of affairs if true.

At least on Firefox everything is extremely slow. I run Ubuntu so Chrome is not yet an option. I find myself constantly clicking on a too small button in the upper right to select edit on various components of a Wave. The menu appears after an aggravating amount of time, and the semantics for switching between editing and reading are totally button and menu driven, slow, and entirely non-intuitive. Everything should be editable all the time without having to perform some kind of mouse pointer target practice followed by a second or two of impatient waiting.

Not ready for prime time.