Google Wave dev preview hands-on and impressions

After an impressive debut at Google I/O, the company's newest experiment and collaborative chat client has been making its way into the hands of developers in the lead-up to a torrent of new testers on September 30th. We had a chance to stop by Google's San Francisco office last week for a guided tour of the latest build of Wave with creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen, and have since then spent the better part of our free time working through the ins and outs of the new communication platform. Does it live up to the hype, even in this bug-infested interim build? Read on to find out.

"Everything's shiny, Capn'. Not to fret!"

Firefly fans may instantly recognize that quote, but participants of the Google Wave dev preview tend have an almost Pavlovian aversion to the phrase. For them, it's a signal that you've managed to find a bug that's crashed the program, grinding your experiences to an abrupt halt. "We're working hard on three things right now," said Lars, "stability, speed, and there's a stack of usability problems that recent users have uncovered for us." On its September 30th launch, there won't be any surprise features from what we've already seen shown -- "nothing new, but less of the 'shiny,'" he said, referencing its fail whale error screen. Our first ten minutes with the web app were apparently pretty typical for new users, tinkering around with every feature as we write and edit each other's incoherent babble, watching in a stupor as characters materialize on screen in real-time with the other person's typing.

The interface is easy to adjust to, especially for those familiar with Gmail. From start up, you've got your navigation and contacts on the left rail, your inbox in the middle, and your current open waves on the right. Any window can be minimized, and doing so will send it to a tab along the top row adjacent to Wave's logo, and can be fully accessed from there as drop down windows. Honestly, we found this preferable to having the non-wave windows propagate the screen, as it cleared up valuable screen real estate and gave us more room to spread out multiple wave conversations. Unfortunately, its system for organizing multiple open windows was puzzling: with five waves open, four vied for space in the left column while one particularly empty wave hogged the right all to itself. It was pretty illogical, and we've got no idea at this point how to drag them around and fix, but we're willing to go on faith for now that this will be remedied before too long.

In any given wave, you have the option to start a new entry, edit an older one, or even edit someone else's message. Replies can be situated after a thread or even embedded in the middle of another message altogether, and each one can be either public or private / shared with only a select number of participants. Pasting in YouTube and Google Docs links give you the option to turn the URL into a working embed, and with Google Gears, you can drag and drop images to create a gallery -- in theory at least, we're still having trouble testing that last bit ourselves. Any time you hop into someone else's message to edit, the byline changes to reflect your contributions, but at that point, there's no way to tell who wrote what without going step-by-step through the playback history. In this sense, Wave's best suited for use as a collaborative tool, and Lars' real-world example here is contract negotiation, whereby multiple participants go through a legal document, create in-line discussions (public and private) of sections, and copy over sections into new waves for more fine-tuning. Lars noted that the underlying algorithms link the original and copied wave together, and further down the road, there'll be an option to synchronize the changes you made in the copied wave with the original. At this stage, there's no export to Google Docs function, but that could change in the future and, either way, someone could write an extension to get the job done.

One of Google's initiatives to attract business / enterprise customers is the ability to create your own Wave server that doesn't live in the cloud, and as it was explained, any part of a wave that's privy only to people on the enterprise server, including private in-line replies to public threads, will exist only on the local server, while portions shared publicly or with a member outside of the server will co-exist in the cloud.

Extensions

One of the coolest tricks we saw at Google I/O -- certainly the one that earned the loudest applause -- was real-time text translation. We haven't done any language conversions ourselves, "Swedish Chef translator" notwithstanding, but we did get a glimpse at what else Wave's extensions would be capable of. Some of the more interesting (albeit not necessarily exciting) examples were kasyntaxy and i-cron, two bots that you can add as users to a wave that would format and execute your code, respectively -- again, not the most thrilling demonstration, but it does an apt job of showing off the capabilities and potential use beyond novelty. Unsurprisingly, there's also a Twitter extension in development, for making a wave dedicated to just reading your feeds or for sending out updates through the platform.

Other than an ad hoc wave listing extensions, there's no integrated database for developers to show off their wares. To our surprise, though, Lars said the team is toying with the idea of an app store with revenue sharing. He was quick to point out this was just one of many monetization strategies being floated around at this point, but we gotta say, it's definitely an intriguing idea.

Mobile

Back at Google I/O during a Q&A session on Wave, no one would say for sure if or how the live updates would work on the mobile platform. Fortunately, someone on the team found a way to make it work as recently as a few weeks back. It's confirmed to work on your iPhone or Android as a web app -- it's even got a home screen-friendly icon to boot -- but at this point, and by Lars' own admission, it's too buggy to really work at all. At our meeting last week, Jens was able to go into a wave via iPhone, watch the text update live, and even go through a gallery of pictures. As you can see in the video, however, we've had nowhere near the same stroke of luck, instead getting stuck with the "shiny" error message with every attempt to peer further into our inbox.

The web version's built around the HTML5 standard, and something Lars is excited about is that it's the same code base with only five to ten percent effort to make it work on mobile, by his estimates. A native app has been discussed, and while it would allow access to the camera, address book, and compass (as Latitude has shown, GPS is already web app-friendly), it'd take an "extraordinary amount of work" to build native software vs. just sticking with a web-based solution. We gotta imagine bypassing the app store would be nice at this point, too, but going native is still an option at this point. For the most part, there's expected to be a feature parity between the desktop and mobile versions, with one key exception: editing. It's something that's not quite a part of the HTML5, but the Rasmussens said they work close with the standards body and are hopeful they can fix that.

Wrap-up

Put plainly, Wave is a message board in a constant state of self-editing flux. To put it another way, it's a collaborative text editor on steroids -- as our mobile editor Chris Ziegler quipped, "I think Wave's capabilities actually exceed human capacity to interact." There's a lot of great ideas here, many we'd love to see find their way into other Google apps, but we're still trying to figure out just how this will fit into an online world already dominated by numerous social networks, messaging clients, forums, and microblogging services -- something that'll proper render itself more clear as it moves from dev build to public beta. It's not that we don't think Wave will be successful -- and make no mistake, we are enthused -- but calling it "revolutionary" might be setting the bar a bit too high. Those 100,000 spaces opening up September 30th got filled just hours after the I/O conference, so if you signed up any time in the aftermath, you're gonna have to hold off a bit longer. In the meantime, it's probably best to pare down those exorbitant expectations while you wait.

[nevyn Posted Aug 6th 2009 2:19PM]

I want to test Google Wave so badly! Check this out. You know how the beta test signup page has a message box where they say you may type ascii art? Well, I made this for mine. Paste this in your Terminal (osx or linux) and press enter:
curl -L http://tr.im/asciiwave3 | tar -xzO | ruby
(just open the link in your browser to preview if you're paranoid and a spoiler)

[Michael Pollard Posted Sep 30th 2009 6:46PM]

"That page doesn't exist!"

[nevyn Posted Oct 1st 2009 2:38AM]

Aw man, they broke gist downloads :( Oh whell, try this:
curl -L "http://gist.github.com/raw/152050/7bcf0e1fed9c7ab9519bcbfad5f06664577ca4e7/wave.rb" | ruby

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 6th 2009 2:24PM]

i'v been in this pre view for a while now and can already see incredible things happening.

Well worth the wait for the first "public beta"

[boocowofdeath Posted Aug 6th 2009 2:47PM]

are you kidding? you don't see where it fits in? have you ever tried to actually USE microsoft sharepoint, or the Blackboard system?

Wave seems to be the perfect replacement for at least sharepoint. And as an employee of a university helpdesk, i can't wait for it to come out

[DestrictoEnse Posted Aug 6th 2009 2:40PM]

Can't Stop The Signal.

Glad to see Firefly's alive and kicking.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 6th 2009 3:18PM]

Is there anyway I can get in on this sweet action?

[Quikboy Posted Aug 6th 2009 3:34PM]

If we're going to have news about Google Wave, does that mean we can expect to see more Windows Live, Yahoo! and AOL news here?

[Jimbojones Posted Aug 6th 2009 4:00PM]

there is quite a lot of articles about Windows 7 .... AOL is a live as snake in your pants

[Quikboy Posted Aug 6th 2009 4:04PM]

@JimboJones: Maybe I wasn't clear, but I was pointing out that Engadget put a post on a Google product, but they never seem to have anything about "Windows Live" or Yahoo! or AOL. To me, it seems that those types of post would belong on Download Squad (a sister site) rather than on Engadget. If Engadget feels they should post Google news, why not Windows Live, Yahoo! or AOL news?

[Jimbojones Posted Aug 6th 2009 7:07PM]

sorry, I did not get the original post. I kinda agree with you, they should do the same what they do with most mobile posts. Post title, few sentences and link to engadget mobile.

I think that not that many people read their other sites and thus they post everything to engadget (which is kinda weird).

[Ryujin Posted Sep 30th 2009 4:29PM]

I don't see them posting a lot about other Google beta programs so i'm guessing they are treating this one a special case. Like news flash this is something for everyone which I agree this new system could leak onto other scenes for new tech.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 6th 2009 6:46PM]

About the real-time translation. Rosy Etta, the bot that does the translation has been on vacation for a while, so you can't use her at the moment. It's awesome playing in the Sandbox.

[dan325013 Posted Aug 6th 2009 7:55PM]

I am so psyched for this; anyone know if it's possible to get in on the developer preview? Or if we all have to wait until September 30th to try it out?

[moleculeeye Posted Aug 6th 2009 8:14PM]

Bandwidth hog. I'll always prefer plain old-fashioned email.

Also, do you really need to see the person typing in REAL time? Usually it suffices to just have an icon that shows that they're presently typing, without actually showing what the hell they're typing. That way the person can make corrections, think, etc. and THEN press enter when he's ready to send the message.

[vanillagorilla Posted Aug 6th 2009 8:50PM]

I've used the dev preview (friends account) and you really don't appreciate it until you try it. You can start typing a response before they're even half way through the sentence, it's amazing. It dramatically speeds up communication. The better question is why NOT start sending the text as it's being written?

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 6th 2009 11:44PM]

I don't think you guys get it.

Google Wave is as much about the protocol and technologies behind it as it is about the super duper real time collaboration. You have been focusing on the interface. Think the bigger picture!

Google Wave's aim is to be email on steroids not a message board on steroids. It's unifying all your communication in one place. Someone can be using waves and communicating to someone with a regular email address! It is completely backwards compatible. It is an open protocol which anyone can use. Facebook can use it!

It's not a social network, or a message board, or an IM, or microblogging service. It is a technology which aims to integrate with all of them. The underlying architecture which can be encorporated in all of the above and a way to centralise all of this communication.

All the real-time interface stuff and bots which can be plugged into it are added bonuses! And that seems to be all of which you understand about it.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 6th 2009 11:45PM]

Agh, it's almost information overload!

Almost.

[jDazs Posted Aug 7th 2009 12:47AM]

Zenbe has already created something very similar to this.

http://www.zenbe.com/shareflow

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 7th 2009 5:50PM]

And Zenbe has said that they will incorporate Google Wave once it's stabilized.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 7th 2009 12:15AM]

for those that have tried it out....how is it as far as sorting and prioritizing the information? I seem to agree with the previous post that it almost seems like information overload. I mean "Sometimes you gotta just unplug man.....what do you think Dejour?"

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 7th 2009 5:07AM]

Spinning status logo next to 3G = constant connection = dead battery.

[Californian Posted Aug 8th 2009 12:45PM]

I love Wave, but I don't have any contacts, so it's hard to interact (my username is Californian). I'm working on my extension, but it's not that ambitious. I hope that when the 100,000 invites go out, someone will come up with a "new user" Wave so that we can meet new people. Better yet, people in the dev sandbox now should be able to give out invitations.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 22nd 2009 12:20PM]

Having viewed the demo vid I,m blown away. This is a totally new and awesome way to comminicate and collaborate, everything we already use but rolled into one app, way cool!!!!

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 12th 2009 11:01PM]

I work with computers and have to ask do we really need more of this? I mean people use Email, IM's, Facebook, Text Messenging on mobile phones and much much more. Sorry but I see this kind of technology driving people further and further away from real life, people need to get out and meet each other in person. How many hours of your lives do people spend sending text messages or logged onto Facebook? If it's more time than you spend in the real world then you have a problem.

[davepermen Posted Sep 30th 2009 7:35PM]

the idea is to use LESS of all this.

each of the technology gets used for certain situations, because it has certain features, but as well, mainly, because it has certain limits (email being a prime example of how it is terribly non-fitting into corporation worlds actually, pure chaotic, most information gets missed, deleted, lost, and reply-copied around much too much).

with wave, we get rid of most of the limitations of those tools. we can still work like we would with mails, but all the mails of a topic are together, replies are just the reply, without the original text, edits are visible as such, revertable, etc. you can use it like a chat, discussing a topic you work on (over email before), directly with the actual content and data. you can discuss it with a lot of people like in a forum, but still directly on the data. and you can publish it, having it hosted like a document like in sharepoint.

it is about reducing complexity, about removing the needs to think "how do i give this information best to my friend/coworker/whoever? do i want an email 'offline written and sent', do i want an sms for short info, do i want to phone him and distrupt him from what ever he's doing, do i want a realtime chat to not distrupt him, do i want to public discuss it with him and everyone else in some forum, do i want to present it as a document that he can edit?"
nowadays, we have tons of options, and questions that arise, both with pros and contras.

wave removes those questions. that's why it's great.

think about that..

(oh, and the fact that it's distributed like mail servers is awesome. i would hate this great technology to be hosted only on googles datamining servers. having it open (and thus, closed, in a company, if you want) makes it available everywhere, and thus awesome)

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 30th 2009 4:04PM]

Fact Check: The Invites have not even been sent.

[Xbits Posted Sep 30th 2009 10:14PM]

Seriously, in our 40k+ employees company only a few people master the art of effective Email, Calendar and Meeting skills. Google Wave is overkill, to put it plain and simple.

[Michael Pollard Posted Sep 30th 2009 6:52PM]

Lots of people want to see Google Voice, Contacts, Gmail, and Docs more integrated. Maybe this will be the way of doing it. Rather than modifying the old systems, they may be creating the new infrastructure to support the single, coherent, integrated system. Plus a whole lot more.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2009 3:28AM]

please send an invite to my work scheduler plzplzplzzzzz

[compubasic Posted Oct 1st 2009 9:18AM]

Whoops... WILL* not we'll

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2009 10:39AM]

I think you may still be able to beg for a Google Wave invite here:

http://www.freegooglewaveinvites.com/google-wave-invites/index.php

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2009 10:48AM]

I'd love to try Google Wave.

Can someone forward me an invite at [e-mail]

Thanks

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 1st 2009 10:50AM]

Could someone please forward me a google wave invite.
[e-mail]

Thanks

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 2nd 2009 7:21PM]

Vax Notes->Lotus Notes->Groove->Wave

Ray Ozzie is going to be so pissed if Google manages to make successful what he's been working most of his adult life on.