Google Wave: Top 10 Improvements for 2010

by David · 28 Comments

December 30 th

Google Wave: Top 10 Improvements for 2010

by David

In May 2009 at I/O 09, Google Wave was launched to much deserved fanfare. A lot of the initial prognostications declaring Google Wave to be a replacement for just about everything and as an important an invention comparable to “the wheel” have, thank god, died down. In fact, because of much of the initial nonsense calling it a Twitter, Facebook and e-mail replacement (Google did that one) have turned many off of the pre-Alpha Preview version.

Of course, readers of this blog know that while Google Wave may not be ready to replace anything just yet, it still holds unbelievable promise for transforming how we currently collaborate on everything from projects and documents to meetings and online shopping. If we take the current definition of Web 2.0 to be associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Then, Google Wave is the first true web 2.0 application for business.

That being said, the current preview version (pre-Alpha) of Google Wave, although functional and gives folks an understanding of the product, is starting to do more harm than good. I understand the reason for the early preview: trying to understand server load problems, uncover shaky code and desperately searching for use cases. But the time has come to show that this application/protocol is much, much more than a glorified chat program with a few neat extensions. I think 2010 will be that time.

Thus, my TOP 10 IMPROVEMENTS for GOOGLE WAVE in 2010:

10. Developmental Timeline. I blogged about this extensively in another post recently titled: Where is Google Wave Going? In that post I laid out the following:

Develop your Google Wave strategy for the way ahead.
Release your vision of Google Wave and your vision for what you will be further developing for the product.
Release some milestones that you have for the product.
Talk about document support and how it will evolve and when you think it will be available.
More info about a robot/gadget store would be wonderful.
Outline a clear business support model. – Accreditation and/or certification credentials, building an appliance, etc, etc

9. Delete a Wave Permanently. The closest thing that you can now do is send your Wave to the trash. However, when you click on “All” you still see that Wave. It lives. Moreover, regardless of being the owner I cannot permanently delete a Wave, everybody else still has that Wave. I am only putting it in my trash. There is currently no delete. The owner should be allowed to delete the Wave. In business I don’t necessarily want to have collaboration work live forever. That would be another post by itself as to why that is a bad idea, but suffice to say the reasons are not nefarious….just good business practice.

8. Integration of Moderation Features. This was a topic of another post titled: Google Wave Etiquette – Moderating Your Wave. This post talked about the good work done by those currently using Google Wave to put in place a set of rules that help ensure we have a civil real-time collaborative discussion or workgroup, that obeys certain rules or customs. These ideas are good ones and Google needs to take a hard look at what so many are adopting for their Waves and make it a functional part of the Google Wave client.

7. Google Wave Client Code Released. Ok Google, thanks for the Federation protocol being open-source and all. Great, wonderful! But without a really slick client…federating is kind of worthless. The client is the great part. Now, one could develop a client but that would take great effort (for a good one) and with nothing released regarding Google strategy (see number 10) I could be wasting my time and money. Thus, if they want more people to actually federate with a meaningful Wave server they need to release the client code.

6. Google Groups Integration. Well, they claim to have integration with Google Groups. But,…have you tried it. I dare you. Come back and let me know how long it took and how it worked out for you. Enough said. Fix this!

5. Inbox Management. I spent a quite a bit of time thinking about this before deciding to add it to the list, let alone make it in the top 5 improvements. There is a lot of Waves out there that describe hints of inbox management with Google Wave. My problem is that it is way to similar to the email inbox. I think some real thought needs to given to this problem to make it work for Wave. I don’t think just replicating an email inbox management solution works. One simple example to highlight this point would be the problem with finding a reply to Wave. Somehow that should be evident from your Inbox. This needs work and a new approach to looking at this problem, I think.

4. Draft Typing. The box is there but the functionality is still not available. I expect this will be an easy one for 2010, but it is a big one. Depending on how sensitive something is, this becomes critical…as in, I won’t use Google Wave for this correspondence because I don’t want anybody seeing what I’m writing until I am finished.

3. Owner Only Remove. The owner of a Wave must be able to remove participants from that Wave. Let’s say someone inadvertently gets added to a sensitive Wave they were not intended to be part of. The owner needs to have the ability to control his Wave and remove folks as he see fit.

2. Owner Only Invite. Keeping with same theme as the above improvement. There needs to be a function where the only person who can add a person to a Wave is the owner. It doesn’t need to be a default setting but its needs to available otherwise real business will not take place on Google Wave. If anybody can be invited into any Wave by anybody…I will share nothing of relevance with anyone.

1. Document Collaboration. The Holy Grail for Google Wave. I have written many posts, the latest titled: Google Wave Preparing to add Document Collaboration. This improvement is a must and needs to happen sooner rather than later. The problem with Google Wave right now is that nothing really serious is happening on it. Folks go looking for a Twitter like experience and find it lacking. Folks go to do collaboration and find that it is extremely limited because no office suite is integrated. Google Wave’s real power will lie in document collaboration and they must introduce it in the early part of 2010.

I, for one, will be at I/O 10 this year and hope to see Google unveil all of the improvements I mentioned above. So, “Don't fret Cap'n, everything is Shiny!“

Did I miss something that is tops on your list? Leave a comment on what you think should have made the list, or just leave a comment on the current list. We love hearing your feedback.
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{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }

Chethan December 30, 2009 at 9:33 am: Excellent Post! Loved It!
I agree with all your 10 suggestions.. even i have same feeling
Chethan´s last blog ..2009 – A look at the Newsmakers
David December 30, 2009 at 9:59 am: Thanks Chethan. Hopefully Google will agree with me also .
Brett McQueen December 30, 2009 at 3:24 pm: Great list. I really like the idea of Draft typing. I know for some things I want to have the ability to be more thought out in what I’m about to say. For those times, I’ve ended up opening up a text file document on my computer, type what I want to say, then copy and paste into Wave.

I guess we’ll see what the new year brings.
David December 30, 2009 at 4:29 pm: Thanks Brett,

I do the same thing. I open the text editor and type what I want and then copy it in.

Doing code with Google Wave is a great experience though. Especially when the person’s sitting right beside you. You really start to understand the power of the whole thing then.
vks December 30, 2009 at 11:02 pm: Thank you for ur post!
I have visited a nice tutorial about google wave here http://freshnewz.co.cc/
BDW January 1, 2010 at 5:40 am: I appreciate your post and ideas.
I do feel they double up a lot and seem to be heavy on ownership and control.
While I do agree on the one hand and have at times wished for similar features I have also questioned myself on this.
Does starting a collaboration imply ownership? Once others have responded or contributed do you have the right to delete their work?
If you start a conversation do you have the right to just shut everyone up for any reason?
The policy that a Wave is not deleted until everyone has signed off on it has merit.
David January 1, 2010 at 12:08 pm: BDW,

You ask a great question – Do you own the collaboration simply because you start it?

I think some I want too. Thus, I want the functionality to be able to own it and control it. Again, I mainly think of business uses. If I start a collaborative Wave with my employees…I own it. I want to control it. I don’t want to have to worry about it leaving my control. I think a public Wave is just that…a public Wave and you should probably not be able to use this functionality once you make it public. Private Waves you should have the option to control.

I think the reason this list is heavy on ownership and control is again because of my focus on business use cases.

Thanks for the comments. Appreciate your feedback.
Steven Birnam January 4, 2010 at 5:52 am: Great set of ideas, but first on my liswt, is better relieability and speed.
Google Wave is a great concept, the next step after GMail and GTalk, but it is slow, and unreliable.
Along with adding the wanted functions listed, Google has to trim the processes, and very possible do some work on the basic protocol – remember, this is a beta offering.
Enrico Poli January 4, 2010 at 11:16 pm: Hi everybody,

I’m surprised to see this not listed it: maybe it’s already possible and I’m not aware of it… anyway: I’d love to be able to save or back-up a Wave. I’m putting on Wave important thoughts and documents, and the only way I have to save them is copy and past each single blip. Restoring a deleted wave would be a time consuming mess.

So I’d like a simple way of exporting a wave (ideally, in some xml format) and importing it back if it becomes corrupted or if it’s vandalized. That can’t be so difficult, can it?

I would also like a quick way to see just the last “n” posts of a wave. It makes no sense to load each Wave from the beginning, each time. Think of a discussion going on for months, or years…! It could take forever to load, and then you’d have to jump around, but most probably to the bottom of it.

Wave need a smart way of letting us see what’s new in a wave. A new kind of pagination – standard blog or forum pagination won’t do. It will need some good idea in visualization, maybe a zoomable view Prezi-style (http://prezi.com/)… I really don’t know. And it will have to be fast!

Thanks, bye, Enrico
David January 5, 2010 at 5:54 am: Enrico,

Thanks for your thoughts. I would agree that we need some kind of quick way to see last “n” posts.

Perhaps we will see save/export/import/delete in another release.

Not sure if the GUI has gone through human factors engineering yet.

Like most, looking forward to the Alpha and Beta release and the host of improvements they will implement.
imma January 8, 2010 at 6:22 am: Have to say the idea of being able to delete completely or force-remove people from a wave seem kinda silly for a federated system. Just like for email you cannot delete the messages that I have received & if you wish to do so you must ask me to perform that action voluntarily. Also owner-only invite will just encourage people to create copies, it just needs to be less easy to add people accidentally…

Those sorts of actions are *not* generally available for email (they’re only available for internal email within a company, where it all stays on the same server – the same would be ‘easy’ to add to your own internal wave server)

Restricting the editing permissions seems much more reasonable, although people will be able to create writeable copies, your original would be much easier to keep under control.
Chris Nwakalo January 8, 2010 at 8:30 am: Pretty good post. what I would add though is some form of notifications since you curreny can’t determine if people reply back to your comments on the wave unless you use chrome with the wave extension, are logged into your google account, and refreshing your page constantly. Kind of annoying.

Also to comment on 1. Google is working towards doc collaboration. They recently acquired Etherpad (a easy to use doc collab service) and have assigned there team to be a part of Google Wave. If that isn’t a sign I don’t know what is. 2010 will usher in a new wave

Chris Nwakalo
JamesR404 January 8, 2010 at 9:11 am: I agree with most of the suggestions, but suggestions 2, 3 and 9 are really off the mark in my modest opinion.

If someone forwards me a wave, I don’t want someone else to be able to delete it. Especially not if I participated in the wave.

Owner only invite, hell I suppose it could be an optional feature, but really why add to the bureaucracy? With e-mails or documents people can add contributors without having to go back to the owner, it’s something called trust in your employees I believe
JamesR404´s last blog ..JamesR404: @huskyr Nog een reden waarom het digitalizeren van boeken zo belangrijk is. http://trunc.it/4l0is
JamesR404 January 8, 2010 at 9:23 am: … I should add improvement 11) for me would be that wave would be more stable and speedy. I’m expect federation to play a big role in that.
David January 8, 2010 at 10:57 pm: The idea of being able to totally delete a Wave seems to be one most folks (that commented anyway) took some exception too.

My idea behind that was from a business prospective…let’s say I want to collaborate on an idea with a few folks. Once finished I didn’t want any record of that Wave anymore for whatever reason.

It is like having a piece of paper or working on chalk board on white board and erasing it. It shouldn’t be for everything. But it is a value function from a business perspective. Same as owning a Wave and controlling who can enter.

Both of these improvements would be valuable to business workflow. Heck we have closed door meetings every other day at my work, where we white board out some ideas but make damn sure we erase that sketch for not all to see afterwards. In big business they take this stuff very seriously. They would not want ideas living forever in the cloud.

Keep the comments coming! Great discussion and I love to hear the counter opinions.
Karl Sydow January 9, 2010 at 3:29 pm: I couldn’t agree more with the need of a delete Wave by author feature and the ability to remove contacts from the Wave if I create it. in addition to your list there are several items I would like to see:
1. The ability to delete Ping blips.
2. Removal of blips, from the Playback.
3. Removal of Blips from removed extensions/bots.
4. I would like the actual invitations sent to me instead of directly to the invited person. (I have sent out several invitations and the people have no ability to get them up and running. If it were sent to me I would put togeather a package of all the necessary steps and links to guide them through and attach the actual invite.)
5. if I send an invite to the wrong email, I would like it back. I am running out of invites because half the people give me the wrong address to send it or they cant get it installed.

Karl
karlsydow.com
Karl Sydow January 9, 2010 at 3:37 pm: In response to: Enrico Poli January 4, 2010 at 11:16 pm
Hi everybody,

I’m surprised to see this not listed it: maybe it’s already possible and I’m not aware of it… anyway: I’d love to be able to save or back-up a Wave. I’m putting on Wave important thoughts and documents, and the only way I have to save them is copy and past each single blip. Restoring a deleted wave would be a time consuming mess.

So I’d like a simple way of exporting a wave (ideally, in some xml format) and importing it back if it becomes corrupted or if it’s vandalized. That can’t be so difficult, can it?

If you have Adobe Acrobat Extended and a Website, you can post the wave to a URL With iframe http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml
and then create a PDF from a website. I know this is a lot to do but it has worked for me.
Karl
Karl Sydow´s last blog ..Industry Mashup’s – Remix Innovation
James Radford January 15, 2010 at 4:22 am: Great post… I agree with your list of 10 improvements needed to Wave, particularly with the need for some form of author ownership/ super user type functionality within Wave. I think this is actually partly why Facebook applications/ events are particularly useful because they allow authors to delegate privileges to other participants, whilst maintaining overall control…

Think as you rightly mention in points 2 and 3, the business world is very different and if/ when Google Wave is fully embraced within this medium some form of permission workflow is indispensable… For example, think of taxation accountants that handle payroll information on a daily basis.. Although I’m not an accountant by any means, I know their permissions operate on salary brackets for who has access to whose salary information…

But, on the other hand, Google Wave is all about open collaboration so maybe the presence of ownership and control is against this mentality…? But, as your points rightly say and something I agree with, the use of Google Wave in business needs to embrace this difference.. Maybe the options for wave accessibility, namely private and public need to be addressed, maybe further categories are needed, maybe even with pre-set permissions etc…

Anyway, thanks for the post, looking forward to the next one David,
James
Mike February 3, 2010 at 4:11 am: I use wave daily for our internal communications between the members of my wedding band. Unfortunately, since there’s no mobile client, the drummer of the band can’t join in. This is a real killer one for me. If there was just a mobile client, I know scores of people who’d join the revolution!