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Saturday, 10 October 2009

What Wave needs (before you get an invite)

There was allot of hype about Google Wave and rightly so: the fundamental ideas are interesting and sound (if people manage to make the shift in thinking which is require with a means of communication and collaboration which doesn't slot neatly into any of the current models).

If you didn't get an invite yet don't fret. Wave isn't ready for you and you're not ready for wave.
A few of the things which need to be sorted out before Wave can be useful are:
  1. Permissions: Currently everyone can edit everything and there's no "undo", which makes using wave outside of trusted groups pretty useless.
  2. Admins: The person who starts a wave needs to have some choices as to what the wave can do or how it can grow. For instance a check box which only allows "admins" to add bots. etc.
  3. Read only: This is already in the works. A "read only" version which can be embeded and be "viewable" by people not logged into wave would be very useful; allowing a number or people to edit the information in a "current news" page for a small site for example.
The Wave UI is reasonably sound. My current biggest gripe (appart from all the bugs) is that when someone links to a different wave and you click it, there doesn't seem to be an easy (logical) way to get back to the wave you were in. Apart from finding it and opening it again.
If you click and open a new wave it should open the new one and minimise the one you were viewing.

Ok, that's my first thoughts on wave.
I am looking forward to see how things develop, which they need to before wave is ready for opening up to a wider audience.

Have an opinion on Google Wave? Feel free to leave a comment!

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