WTB Reader Feedback: Google Wave

By now, many of you have gained access to the Google Wave preview, including some of you via my slapdash little side project, WoW on Wave. I’ve had access since the tail-end of October, and I’ve put it to good use here and there, but it still feels like I mostly use it for the sake of using it, instead of something else.

It fills a strange niche for me, the weird overlapping area between e-mail, IM, IRC and traditional forums. I’ve had some lively conversations on Wave about topics like the Wheel of Time book series, book recommendations, website development and updates, and WoW addons. It lends itself fairly well to realtime conversations, but still keeps things in a tree hierarchy of replies. As an added bonus, you’re able to review the whole thing later if you so desire. It still bogs down when the wave is particularly active or has many current viewers, but it has some pretty serious potential. I think by far the biggest missing functionality is that of moderation, followed by contact groups. Oh, and if it would let me actually keep @_erica on my contact list, that’d be nice too.

Back to the other two complaints, there is no simple way (that I’ve found) to add a certain sub-set of your contacts to a wave in one go; you’ll have to add them one-by-one. More importantly to me, there is also no way at all right now to restrict things like:

This limits my usage of it here and there, but I’m sure these features are all coming later.

A colleague of mine mentioned that he’d love to see one well-integrated interface to Google Wave, GMail and Google Chat all in one (probably cluttered ^_^) window. That does sound like a decent idea.

How about you folks? Do you use Google Wave frequently? How does your usage compare with when you first gained access to the preview? Have you found any really cool or handy ways of using Wave? Is there anything you think is really missing, or preventing you from using it thus far?

Posted on January 7, 2010 at 12:07 PM by Ithato · Permalink
In: Meta · Tagged with: ,
  • I've tried using it quite a bit, but it all seems rather redundant really. It doesn't really offer anything that I don't already have in Twitter, Forums, or IM. Sure, it's got all of that functionality tied into a single app, but honestly there are times that I would rather have them separated as they are right now.

    I need to use it more than I do, but so far it's just kind of...there.
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