Wave is doing a poor job of sitting on the fence

After playing with Google Wave for a few days, I think it has a long way to go. I don’t mean just in terms of adding more widgets and gadgets and buttons to make it a collaborative, colorful new toy for which to figure out an actual use. I mean that Wave is doing a terrible job so far of sitting on the fence between IM and email.

Waves (a string of messages akin to a forum “thread” or a Gmail “conversation”) are like IM in a way—they are indeed instant, right down to the letter, so you can see what your co-wavers are typing as they type it (this is where you, the audience, say “oooooh!”). After living with IM for nearly two decades now, we as computer users expect that level of immediacy and all the UI baggage that comes in an app with “instant” in its mantra.

IMs happen in near-real-time, and we typically expect the other party to reply almost immediately to a question or a LOL-worthy zinger. If you walk away from your computer during an IM, your client will likely change your status to “idle” after a short time and alert the other party. If you’re gone for long enough, your status changes to “away” or offline altogether, and the conversation is over. If you have a decent chat client, your IMs are logged somewhere and searchable, but IMs are never really “replied to” or picked back up like a forum thread or email conversation. Most people don’t log their IMs, and if they do, they don’t do or say much that requires cataloging or searching at a later time.

Wave is also a lot like email. Waves arrive in an inbox, can be arranged into folders, and even tagged to fit that awesome, awesome GTD process you read about on Digg. You can reply to a wave weeks after the last message was sent, you can add new members to a wave at any time, and you can send private messages to individual participants in a wave, just like replying directly to someone on an email conversation instead of to the entire list.

Email’s strength is that it is most certainly *not* in real time. Yes, we can send and receive “instantly” with modern “push” services, but from a usability and cultural standpoint, email is designed so that I can send you a message and get back to work on other things while I wait for a response. You can draft a reply, sit on it for a bit, wait until you get a crucial nugget of information you want to share, and send your reply tomorrow, next week, or next month.

Wave attempts to meld some aspects of both IM and email, but it has so far failed to address some of the most fundamental usability contexts of either medium. For example, there is no way to see whether a contact participating in a wave is online. So if you are trying to use Wave for all of its live, collaborative worth, you have no idea whether a member is present to provide their 2¢ in real-time. You will most likely have to hop over to something like iChat to prod person back into the wave. Viva la future.

Further, I have yet to see or hear of a practical, convincing use for the “you can see what I’m typing while I’m typing it” feature in a chat product. It’s been available in iChat when chatting over Bonjour for some time, but I’ve never seen it click. The only thing I have seen come of a live typing feature is misunderstanding and, at worst, hurt feelings because a conversation got heated and someone typed something out of frustration that they never meant to send. Hey, everybody’s human. Well, almost everybody. Also: live typing collaborative products like SubEthaEdit and Coda are totally different, so don’t bother.

The way I see it, Wave’s biggest challenges are not made of technical limitations, protocol documentation, or scaling to meet a Yahoo-sized audience. Google and any nerds who have already fallen head over heels for Wave need to meet some significant usability and design challenges, then whip up a killer elevator pitch to convince common users why they should bother switching from Yahoo mail, Facebook chat, Gmail, or AIM. For now, Wave still feels like it’s trying to fix a problem that does not yet quite exist with a solution that is, at its absolute best, half-baked. Yes, Wave is a “technology preview” or whatever phrase Google is using for “we don’t have a clue where to go with it” this week. But I’m not enthusiastic about the fact that Google couldn’t be bothered to even try and tackle some of these basic necessities before tossing this wet noodle at the wall.