“Google makes its Google Wave Federation Protocol available to let would-be Wave providers build their own Wave servers and get them communicating with other Wave servers, similar to the way e-mail servers talk to one another. This federation would ideally pave the way to making Wave ubiquitous, making it more available for future users. But given the learning curve stumping early users of Wave, how many programmers will want to build their own Wave servers? That remains to be seen.”
I still don’t understand just what people find hard to understand about Wave. It was a smooth and straightforward experience for me from the day one. Can someone please give me some clues?
Although it’s a fat chance, I do hope that Wave will eventually completely replace email. It is a superior technology.
What Wave allows you to do is hardly confusing, but that’s not what new users see. They see Google’s Wave client’s crowded UI and balk.
What Wave should have delivered on day one was a minimal client targeting core e-mail and IM functionality. No widgets, no robots, no embedding on web sites, none of those inline comment bubbles, no “settie.” If it looked and behaved more like a friendly version of software people are used to, users wouldn’t have so much trouble figuring out what it’s for. They would have been pleasantly surprised by features like collaborative editing and live updates. It would have been less buggy and available sooner.
And federation? That’s key; it should have been enabled from the start of the developer preview. It’s a major selling point and its unavailability during the first developer surge was a huge buzz-kill.
Now that it’s here, let the innovation begin!
Wave is not launched to grand public yet. If someone gets shocked by the UI, it just means wrong kind of user got the early invite.
People being confused by Wave is the topic of this thread.
That’s just a wacky editorial angle inserted by eweek. Wawe is a disruptive technology that’s going to make a killing (when it’s ready), regardless of someone’s grandmother finding it confusing.
It maybe superiour, but sometimes you do just want a simple e-mail. (eg server status reports, website notifications, etc)
Wave, as a concept, is excellent. But in the real world I like to pick my mail up from several locations / devices, forwarm mail on and so forth.
I treat e-mail like a read-only technology and only respond to it when I have the time. So IM functionality is a little pointless for me.
What I’d preferred to have seen was a more integrated wiki-like content management system based around e-mail and google docs.
Something that allows you to have a messageboard forum like self management / user participation but with the layout of a wiki, e-mail integration and content editing tools of google docs.