With invites sent, received, and a couple of actual threaded conversations under my belt, I’m now ready to share some less premature thoughts about Google Wave (VVave). Here they are, in no particular order:
* A lot of things still don’t work well, or at least not intuitively. It’s early beta, fair enough, and it’s not like they didn’t warn us. But I am a little surprised at how much they’ve let go. For example, it’s tough to delete waves, or leave public waves. I don’t mean the process is physically demanding; you just drag the object to the trash, but it doesn’t always work.
* For a web app, it’s incredibly CPU intensive. As I type this on my netbook (Asus EEE PC 1005HAB – 1.6 GHz Intel Atom running Windows 7 w/ 2GB RAM) with one Chrome window open, my CPU usage is fluctuating between 5% and 20%. Let’s open a Wave and see what happens…
Ok, CPU utilization jumps to between 60% and 80%, and that’s just opening a wave — not having a threaded conversation. Why so much? Because Wave depends heavily on Gears, so your machine is doing more of the heavy lifting than it usually does for web apps, where most of the processing takes place on the server side. This also matters because Gears performance is not the same in all browsers. Since Chrome is optimized for Gears, then one could say that Wave is optimized for Chrome.
* Conversations in Google Wave take some getting used to, and have a lot more to do with personal preferences. IM is real-time, and email is turn-based, (for all you strategy game nerds out there), but Wave is somewhere in-between. So I’ve chatted with one person who started a new “blip” with each response. On another chat with a different person, we kept our own blips running, so it was a chat in two separate windows.
Ok, I’m over my word limit, so I’m cutting off here. Lots more thoughts to follow.
Oh, and I still have one invite left.
Wow. Thanks for that very helpful tutorial.
Honestly, I didn’t know what the Wave was
and I even have an invite.