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This post is pretty much information-free.

This seems to be his only criticism of the product, and it isn't even correct:

>It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email.

This was explicitly thought about. The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting. The perceived problem is that most of the time people spend chatting is waiting for the other person to finish typing. No one quite knew what sort of social effects this would have, but by taking a poll they would have just built a "faster horse."



Really? ICQ built character by character typing all the way back in the late 90s, and users back then stumbled across basically all of the same landmines Google Wave exposed.

The issue is that the problem Google's engineers perceived simply did not exist. The latency of waiting 30 seconds for a person to finish forming their thought into something coherent just isn't something worth overcoming.


Every single person I know who used Wave thought the character-by-character thing was terrible and wanted it turned off. A few of them actually stopped using it as soon as they realized it did this since they didn't want to broadcast half-formed thoughts to the world.


I'm not saying it was the right decision, but the thesis that they didn't think about it because they're engineers just isn't true.


Broadcasting half-formed thoughts can be desirable; we do it everyday when talking face-to-face.


Typing/reading is a very different experience to speaking/hearing.

I might type something that comes across as unnecessarily harsh, which if I said it would not, because of the tone of voice and posture I took.

The timelag of allowing me to reread to see if my statement can be misconstrued is far more important in writing.


>The reason this feature was included was to fix the latency of chatting.

Gnu talk does this.




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