The Google Wave superchat is all well and good, but I want the team in a given wave to be able to refer and possibly edit a document outside of that chat — a spreadsheet or a word doc or something. Allowing me to throw up a Google Doc spreadsheet as one of the panels would immediately turn Wave from a curious toy into a powerful tool.

This thing is *VERY* beta. VEEEEEEEERY beta! Critical features are absent at the moment! Reserve final judgment for final product!
The preview you’re playing with is about 10 times more stable than the Dev sandbox we’ve been playing in, and I’m sure you’ve noticed even the “public” beta is not completely stable.

I also think that, once you get used to it, Wave beats email pretty handily. It really just takes a bit of a paradigm shift. It’s interesting to watch wave newbies attempt to use it as though it were email, or a chat, or something else. It takes a while to get into the mindset, but it’s extremely important to recognize that it’s not any other format you’ve ever used.

Feel free to ping me as joshua.proehl on wave if you need someone to talk to. :-)

On a side note: as I was scrolling through the replies, I thought I was seeing things until I tilted my screen back. I never realized you had added your mug as a kind of watermark to your comments. Kind if creepy-cool!

Thinking back, the percentage of misfires for ‘Whatever’ comments is probably even higher. I wonder why I am more reluctant to post comments here? I guess I prefer that Scalzi’s wit not be directed at me.

Once upon a time, I really hated that AIM didn’t work that way. Then I realized I liked AIM’s way better, especially after they started telling you when the other person started typing. I’m not sure I can go back now…

There’s still a few really critical Wave features missing:

1) Undo. This is actually very well supported at the protocol level; they just haven’t gotten around to adding a UI for it yet.

2) Hiding real-time typing. Again, this is a (relatively) simple feature to add, but Google will have to reorganize some of the underlying Wave libraries a fair bit.

3) Better permissions and access control. Some waves should clearly be read-only; others should allow comments but no editing. And some waves should forbid certain participants from adding new participants.

4) Federation with non-Google Wave servers. Some major progress is expected in this area by the end of the month.

It’s worth noting that Wave is currently a very early preview—it’s not even one of those infamous Google betas yet. :-) The Wave team has been working flat out for the last several months to get ready for the September 31sr rollout, and a lot of their recent effort has gone into either low-level upgrades (down at the protocol level) or into heavy bug fixing. So expect some pretty major improvements between now and Christmas.

I didn’t know there even were public waves until recently. (Search for with:public in your wave search tool.) They seem a bit chaotic, now, and it’s a bit of a hack to set them up. I don’t know if they’ll be worthwhile or not. For open, large-group discussion, comment threads like this one would seem to work better.

I also don’t know how fast they’re adding new people. None of my “nominations” from yesterday morning seem to have generated an invite yet.

But it does look like it has potential, despite the rough edges. I agree with John than small group collaboration seems the most obvious useful application, and it provides a number of useful integrated tools for that.

The troubles with chat is that it is completely non-searchable, and if you have multiple machines, there’s no way to integrate all your chat logs into one blob.

The current corporate email environment (Exchange) is also pretty much crap in terms of organization and search. Nothing is more irritating than remembering that someone sent you a vital piece of info and not being able to remember whether it was by email or IM.

It is/was my hope that Wave would solve a lot of this.

The “type as you go” seems to me a throwback to the very earliest chat system I ever used, back on Apple ][s in the early eighties. I don’t see any utility in it, and in my own work environment I would be afraid that it would scare off some of the non-native English speakers on the team. (Or even the bad typists/spellers…I sure as hell don’t want anyone to know how many words are underlined red before I’ve fixed them.)

I haven’t actually tried it myself. The guy I knew with invites a couple weeks ago reported it was buggy and unstable and so I didn’t take one. Now he has none. :-(

I really do think that Google has hit on a problem that needs solving. Whether they’ve done it is an open issue.