The Geekorium

Home of Rex Havoc, Space Adventurer and other assorted Geekeries.

  1. Get Your Wave Peeves Off Your Chest!

    Something that’s been bugging me about the Google Wave interface are the icons that show you three participants from each wave in your inbox (and other searches). The origins of the feature make sense — in email we’re used to seeing who an email is from right from our inbox. In one and two person waves it does kind of make sense, but when you have multiple participants the icons stop being useful and just become clutter. To me it adds nothing to my ability to identify a wave and just makes my inbox “noisy”. The icons in the wave make sense, but I’d like a more thought out approach to identifying waves. Something like:

    • Make waves I’ve started a slightly different colour (like sites where the author’s comments are shaded slightly blue).
    • Don’t show icons at all in the inbox/searches (or make it easy to show and hide).
    • Let me tag or bookmark specific blips within waves and make it obvious from the inbox which waves have “starred blips”.

    Now this post wasn’t started just as a gripe against something I’d like to see changed — I’d like to hear what things you’d change about wave if you could. I’m not necessarily talking features we know might come (like the recently switched on “Remove” button). I mean interface and behaviour changes that don’t make sense to you, or made sense at first, but don’t now you’ve used it a bit. What are your specific gripes and revolutionary ideas that would make using Wave more of a delight for you?

    More!

  2. French, Postboxes and Wave

    When I was in grade 8 I learnt French. I say learn, but it was a handful of disconnected words and maybe a sentence or two that I couldn’t possibly remember now. The problem for me was that I knew I was going about learning it the wrong way, but relied on the teacher to teach me the “best way”. See, when I wanted to say a word in French, I first had to think of the word in English, then check my mental filing system for the equivalent word in French. It’s a slow and cumbersome way of recall that never really worked for me, no matter how many times we repeated the words by rote.

    élégance by héctor*

    I’m not bringing it up now to point out the flaws in my year 8 education, but to highlight something about the way people learn. When Wave was first announced and launched it was described by various people as “sort of like email” or “part instant messenger, part Google Docs”. This is because we often find it easier to understand something new when we “pin” it on a concept we already know and understand. Likening one thing to something else is sort of like my metal filing cabinet I had in 8th grade, useful up to a point, but no way to go about using something on an advanced day-to-day basis.

    Which is why I think Google or a third party need to seriously consider how the non-tech-minded are going to learn how to use Wave.

    More!

  3. Wave on Slow Cook

    I get the feeling talking to regular web-folk that Google Wave was a huge disappointment for them. With the introduction of Buzz, comments and posts flew asking “will this be better than that Google Wave failure?”

    crock pot

    It’s taken me this long to figure out that people are not viewing Google Wave the way I do. The current technology life cycle goes something like this:

    1. Readers are on the lookout for new products to try, and better yet — beta invites to get early exclusive access to the next big thing.
    2. They try the site, decide if it fits in with their day-to-day activities and if it gives them any benefit over the last shiny new thing they tried.
    3. They talk it up to their friends to get them to join, as these sites are almost always no fun without a large number of people you know and respect.
    Then the cycle repeats for all manner of sites and services.

    I do this. Every day I pop open Techcrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Web Worker Daily and others to keep informed of the latest hot places I can claim my name on. I’ve joined Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Plurk, and others too numerous to mention all vying to be the place I share my daily activities. It’s almost addictive to keep on top of the latest sites.

    More!

  4. “Crazy Crossbreed”

    Wave feels like some crazy crossbreed of Docs, Gmail, and IM, but I overall I find that refreshing more than troubling.
    Debating the power of Google’s Wave.

    CNET Editor Rafe Needleman and Senior Writer Stephen Shankland debate the Google Wave product. Their assessment is that there are some rough edges, and some questions it raises about information overload, but overall the preview is a solid start to a new idea.