Google Wave and the uncanny valley of communication

Last week I saw a tweet wondering if Google Wave could have been successful, had it launched now instead of 2010. I suspect it was more of a rhetorical question, possibly hinting at the recent launch of Inbox, which was introduced in similar terms to Wave (the next evolution of email and invite-only rollout). For me, the answer is pretty clear: as much as I loved Wave, it was too complex to ever gain mainstream adoption. Real-time communication has since become the fastest growing segment of social media, but collaborative editing hasn’t taken off, and I can’t think of an app doing both successfully. The combination of features Wave offered would have had a hard time entering corporate space as well simply because companies are reluctant to radically change their existing systems. Some concepts have been adapted into other products – for example on Medium people can comment anywhere in an article, starting a local thread, although it’s unclear if that was inspired by Wave or just a similar idea developed independently.

If Google released Wave again today - literally same product, just a few years later - do you think uptake would be different?

— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) October 22, 2014

Google Wave: a communication tool to rule them all?

More than three months have passed since Google Wave was released to a wider audience. Even though the initial buzz around the launch and the frantic search for invites has now largely cooled off, there is still room for talks and opinions around it, as more and more people discover how to use it. Here are my thoughts on how Google Wave compares to the more traditional forms of communication:

As a decade-old technology, e-mail would need the most improvements and Google Wave brings a whole new vision. I remember a presentation video for Google Docs that talked about eliminating the need to send attachments back-and-forth and instead having a single version on the web. The way I see it, Wave works exactly like that, only for e-mail.

Another way you could describe Google Wave is a whiteboard, where everyone in the room can write their opinions, erase/edit what others wrote and also follow the text evolving in real-time. In this comparison, e-mail would be everyone in the room writing things down on pieces of paper and circulating them for feedback, without talking to each-other in the process. Now ask yourself, which of those scenarios is more efficient?

Shortcuts and searches in Google Wave

I've been playing around with Google Wave ever since I received my invite from a Romanian blogger almost two weeks ago. Generally it made a positive impression on me, but more on that later. Right now, let's see how you can improve the Wave experience with some neat keyboard tricks.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Although only a preview product, Google Wave has some nice keyboard shortcuts that can really help speed up things:

• > Use Space/Shift+Space to navigate to the next/previous unread message in a wave. If you're at the last unread message, hitting Space moves the focus to the next unread wave in your inbox, something I find confusing and annoying.
• > You can also navigate through the messages in a wave, regardless of their read-status, with the Up/Down arrows and with Tab/Shift+Tab. Like Space, it marks messages as read, but it doesn't jump to other waves when it reaches the last message.
• > With Enter you can reply to a message. If you select some text before hitting Enter, Wave inserts a comment at the cursor position. Combining Enter with Shift places the reply at the bottom of the wave, below all other messages.
• > Shift+Enter also exits editing mode when you have finished writing your reply, like hitting "Done".
• > If you want to go back to editing, you can use Ctrl+E.

I find these shortcuts related to replying and editing the most useful; with the mouse you need to click three times for these actions: twice to bring up the floating menu and another one to select one of them. Not to mention how easy it is to click 'reply' instead of 'edit' or vice-versa!