Day six with Google Wave

Well, I am starting to get a real understanding of why they made the UI decisions that seemed weird at first. I am even considering reading the specs and seeing if I get talk to their implementation of the server with my own client (to get things like growl/libnotify notifications working).

On the browser side, it seems to work best with Google Chrome. This is not a big shock. It doesn't seem as memory hungry with Google Chrome (63 MB vs 200 MB in Safari or Firefox on the first page), but it does seem to grow in size over time as I access waves (102 MB after accessing 10 waves). Another nice thing about Chrome is its model for tabs. Each runs in its own process, so killing a tab frees all of the memory associated with it. This means that when it starts eating too much memory, I can simply start a new Google Wave tab and close the old one instead of having to shutdown the whole application (which is what I have resorted to with Firefox and Safari). The downside is that Google Chrome has not been released for OS X. Luckily there is a developer version available for Linux and OS X (which is what I have been running).

Google Wave day two

I have finally had an IM-like exchange with one of my friends. It is confusing to say the least. Should I start a new blip after each exchange? Should I modify my blip in response to the other one instead? Should I clean the exchange up for others on the Wave? I figure social rules will develop similar to how bottom vs top vs inline rules developed for email; of course, that means we are in for another round of religious debates and flames.

The idea of flames brings up another thought. What will flames look like when you can edit not only your own messages, but other's messages as well? Google Wave needs a reputation system of some form. One that weights a person's reputation based on the opinion's of people you already trust. It also needs a way to control who can see a wave vs who can edit it. There are already read-only waves, but only the system can create them. I think it might become important for blips to be marked read-only, or writable only by a specific subset of the wave participants.

As for the memory issue I mentioned yesterday, it isn't so bad if I stay away from Waves that have many blips. Firefox (on OS X) is eating about 300 MB, which is up from the 100 MB it normally eats, but it has not yet exploded to the 1 GB mark like it did yesterday.

Day one with Google Wave

So I got a Google Wave invite yesterday morning and immediately signed up. The interface is nice, if a bit slow at times on my 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM. It also ate 1 GB at one point and Firefox started acting weirdly (left clicks on flash apps were generating right click behavior). Firefox normally eats around 100 MB of RAM on my machine, but right now with Google Wave open, and having only worked with two waves, it is eating 300 MB.

If have mostly used it like email so far, I haven't had a chance to play with the IM like features. I have used the wiki-like editing feature though, replayed the history of a couple of waves, and used the map gadget and everything worked pretty much the way I expected it to. I played a little with the kasyntaxy bot and it was interesting, but its Perl syntax highlighting leaves a lot to be desired.

If you are on Google Wave as well, drop me a line at chas.owens.