On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Mark Canlas <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm absolutely shocked no one has posted this yet. > http://wave.google.com/ > > Thoughts? > Be careful what you ask for! :) Briefly put, that's some impressive engineering! *wink wink nudge nudge* Given the hype, I went into watching the insanely long demo hoping for something great but being a tad skeptical. I came out of watching it being a lot let down and a little annoyed. And still skeptical. As an ex-developer, I respect the amount and kind of complexity in building wave, and I give props to the teams on wave for doing what they did. As a person/potential user/potential integrator of this tech, I just can't get myself excited about it, at least nowhere near as excited as seems the general milieu. What I see are some great twists on ideas like structured embedded threads, playback, contextual spell checking, and a nifty way to enable and show collaborative editing, which for me was the highlight. What bugs me is the claim that this should be *the* collaboration product, platform, or protocol and the consequent explosion of uses beyond reasonable context (twave? really!?! facebook? etc.). I'm also not keen (and this is related to the previous concern) on the front-end control pattern, i.e., everything is expected to occur within the wave for the dream to be happy. I get really skeptical, bordering on anxious, when folks try to say "everything should go in here." Put another way, "if you just standardize on this one way of doing it, it will all be smooth." We've heard it before. Real life (and business) is too organic to be thus contained. Inevitably, the Swiss army knife will be missing something, and you still have to (or just want to!) use some other tool. And then the whole everything-integrated-all-the-time meme dies in a cataclysmic fireball of twisted metal and skin. What most of these kinds of solutions do, instead of doing what they purport to do, is multiply the tools beyond what we already have, contradicting their primary purported value add. I'm also concerned that so many people still seem to giddily lap up what Google puts out as if it were here to heal the world. As someone else said recently somewhere, as soon as they started taking money from shareholders, they became just as big a threat to the common good as Microsoft, Apple, or any other (mega) for-profit corporation. We need to keep it real and be wary. Google is not doing this for the common good. They want to make themselves the one ring to rule them all. Learn from history (and classic fiction!). Finally, to end on a positive note, I really do hope we see some of the innovations shown in wave to sort of seep out into the ether, both in Google's other stuff and outside of Google. Whether or not we buy into the larger vision for wave, there are definitely some cool ideas and (since it is open source) assets folks will be able to leverage. And if absolutely nothing else, it will make life more interesting (read: challenging) for all of us. -ambrose ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
