I received a Google Wave invite a few days ago and decided to try it out. I watched the goofy video from Doctor Wave, which lagged to the point that five minutes later, I had watched one minute of video. My Internet connection may be less than excellent, but it isn’t that terrible either despite the flickering.
The video was a good test of Wave’s plugins, though. After that I opened a wave for NaNoWriMo participants created by another Wrimo. This was a huge Wave with at least 300 blips, and I couldn’t even scroll through the entire Wave at first. The scroll button was nearly impossible to grab, it kept taking me to parts of the Wave that I had already read or far ahead of where I wanted to read, and it was overall very hard to control. While the feature of being able to click and reply exactly where you want to is handy, replacing that with a reply button on the wave you want to reply to will suffice, and I’d be happy, if not happier, with that. The keystrokes lag, which is unfortunate for fast typists like me. Typing my first blip of two sentences in the NaNoWriMo wave took at least five minutes.
Google really needs to address the lag before this product can be as influential as people say it will be. If it isn’t, my invite may have been acquired in vain.
And before you ask, I don’t know if I have any invites. The answer is probably no since I received an invite in the past week. The site interface was too slow for me to navigate in a reasonable period of time, and I gave up out of frustration, choosing to do something where I could type freely. This something involved my NaNo novel.
One day when I’m less easily frustrated by the lag, there will be a more substantial review.
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