First Impressions of the Google Wave
This is only a very small blog to get a couple of things off my chest:
A long time ago I watched that fantastic 80 minute video by the inventors of the google wave and was so smitten by the demonstration that I immediately signed up for the trial. And a few days ago I was one of the few “lucky” ones to receive an invite to try out the new and shiny wave.
I was given 9 invites to send to friends or colleagues to try out whatever the wave was offering. After a few days of waiting they all received their invites and we started trying all the buttons or should I say we tried to try out the new buttons. After the first day of stumbling through all the new stuff all my waves suddenly told me that I wasn’t a participant anymore despite my avatar stating quite clearly that I was and that included the preinstalled wave of *how to use the wave* – not very helpful at all.
The installed extras (little apps to make the experience even more fun) did not turn up on my tool bar until three days later – hey, my toolbar needed a whole day to appear. Then without rhyme or reason half of my contacts lost their avatars. Then all of a sudden for about half an hour everything worked, one of my contacts was on the wave and for that short and sweet time we managed to get all excited about the wonders of the wave before it then crumbled again and left us very frustrated and lonely.
Apart from all these glitches (at least I hope that’s what they are) there are a few things just not right:
- There is no scroll bar on the bottom of the wave, so if you don’t have a wide screen you lose a good portion of any gadget on the wave (in my case a Sudoku).
- You can’t access the profiles with one easy click.
- There is always a problem adding new contacts – google can’t decide which of your e-mails to use (you get a googlewave one and if you get confused in the process of constructing your profile you get a gmail one as well – and then there is your real one) so it uses all of them and then can’t decide and tells everybody that you are not there. Frustrating!
- It takes ages to sync your wave and then it warns you that your wave might explode (google for *this wave has crashed*), which happens way too frequently.
- There is a very tight limit on the size of the gadget you can download.
- If you stretch one or the other column the smaller on will lose half of its toolbar.
This is my very first impression of the wave and I sincerely hope that it will get better very fast – we have been promised so much and I hate disappointment. And I can see Microsoft rubbing its little hands with glee while preparing to send out a perfect version of the wave. That would be horrid indeed because I really don’t like Microsoft very much.
