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One of the wisdoms in web application development is "Release early and often."
Google and Twitter have both released software "tests" to select hundreds of thousands of users, both with the idea that there will be problems, but let people try them out, and then improve the software iteratively, based upon real-life user experience.
This is my first blush impression of these previews I've been privileged to explore this week.
Get on my Wave!
I've been trying Google Wave for this past week now. It's been a bit hard, since hardly anybody I know is on Google Wave, and of all the people I invited, only two have received invites so far. (I got 8 "invitations" that turned out actually to be "nominations" once sent. Sorry, Google, but invitations and nominations are different things.) So I've had only limited exposure to what Wave might offer. One on one, it's pretty much a glorified instant messenger.
Then I was tipped to searching for "with:public" ... which brings in results every wave that has been posted for the public. There I found all kinds of waves on all kinds of topics.
Popping into random, seemingly interesting waves reminds me of the early CompuServe days, wandering around chatrooms, communicating with random people. Wave does afford the opportunity to get more in these wave connections than you might in a text-only IRC-style chatroom, but it takes time to engage. Do you have an abundance of time? I don't.
The biggest user experience change in what people might be used to is that you can see other people typing their messages in real time, as they type. You learn quickly can type and who bumbles around, who can do stream-of-consciousness and who is constantly editing every few words.
Shira Abel (whom I met on Wave) likes this real-time aspect:
And while some people would hate seeing what someone is writing while they are typing I’ve actually liked it from the few conversations I’ve had on there. It allows you to see the thought process – how fast or slow someone is typing shows how strongly they feel about something. Whether they take something out before pressing enter shows even more. Seeing the typing while it’s happening is the tone of the message. However, I would recommend that Google make the option to not see the typing for the Robert Scoble’s of the world – but please keep it for me. Living in Israel so far away from many of the people I collaborate with, having that little extra bit of psychological insight is actually very helpful in my opinion.
One of the biggest problems with Wave is getting drowned in wave after wave of threads (or "waves"). You have to create folders to organize them or you'll just get lost.
And call them waves all you want, it's pretty hard to surf them. Linking to other waves involves finding the other wave and drag-and-drop.
Google's help docs are their typical weak, uninformative obviousnesses that don't really illuminate much of anything. Embedding waves outside of the wave system is, so far, an arcane procedure I have not yet discovered yet. I'm still wondering how to install a robot. Maybe I'm not enough of a geek for this preview?
Bonnie Sandy seems to have made more headway:
Extending the functionality…
Apparently there are bots and robots to extend the functionality of Waves… that feature has to be simplified before the release to a wider audience.
Robots (To use robots, add them as a contact, then add the robot-contact to a wave)- that did not always work. Robots add functionality Chatbots Conversion Games Groups Integration Language Polling Search / Aggregation Utilities Wave Management figuring out if they are functioning is a bit confusing.
I NEED To Figure out how to use the Drop.io Robot. I aced the Posterous robot, which post a wave to Posterous , but I have no idea if the others are working, in process or done. So I spent a great deal of time just steering at the screen.
Gadgets directions- To use gadgets, once editing a blip, just click on the green puzzle piece, and enter the url into the bottom
