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Google Wave Too Bloated, Complicated

And its much-touted live-typing turns out to be a nightmare

By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff

Posted Oct 14, 2009 11:13 AM CDT

(Newser) – Google Wave, the long-awaited chat/email/collaboration doohickey, is ambitious and sturdy, and packed with bells and whistles… and Twitter kicks its butt. See, Twitter’s main feature is simplicity, writes Farhad Manjoo on Slate, but Wave asks the world of users. It tries to replace email with “an entirely alien interface that isn’t very intuitive and introduces new problems of its own.”

Developers were, for example, very excited by Wave’s live-typing ability. If you’re chatting, every letter you type shows up instantly on everyone else’s screen. Maybe that’s efficient in theory, but in practice it’s hair-raising: having no chance to change a letter or reconsider a word or a thought is “so corrosive to normal conversation that you’d think it was some kind of bug.” It’s hard to believe this came from Google, a company built on clean simplicity. “Wave is so bloated, it could have come from Microsoft.”

The Google Wave logo is seen in this YouTube Screenshot.
The Google Wave logo is seen in this YouTube Screenshot.
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A demo of Wave.   (youtube.com)

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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 9 comments
Animator
Oct 14, 2009 10:59 AM CDT
The wheel is archaic and in desperate need of reinvention.
Rembrandt_Q_Einstein
Oct 14, 2009 8:01 AM CDT
Didn't seem too complex to me, but then again I'm not a professional "tech-blogger".
maevealleine
Oct 14, 2009 7:42 AM CDT
I agree, it sounds like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel here.

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