Google Wave Preview: Seven things to improve about you ...

While Google deserves credit for bringing out an early preview of their new Wave technology, there are several lessons to be learned from the experience.

1 No help link

If there is one thing wrong with the Wave Preview, it’s that there’s no Help link in the menu bar. Even a popup window telling us how to search for the (self-hosted) “Welcome Waves” documentation would make a huge difference.

2 Ambiguous bug reporting

The user interface has a “Create Bug” link (sic), but it’s broken. Outside of that, there is a Known Issues wave, and a Release Notes wave, and also a Google Code issue tracker. Not all of the issues listed elseswhere are reflected in the public issue tracker. While Team Wave must have their own comprehensive issue tracker, there is no one outward-facing place where we can see if a bug has been reported or not.

3 No roadmap to indicate planned features

While there unimplemented controls in the user interface, and scattered references to planned features, there does not seem to be an outward-facing roadmap that indicates which features are planned to be implemented and when. Not knowing what is already planned leads to a lot of general agnst, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Also, since there is no list of Google Team Members, we can’t discern between a pundit’s guess and a team member’s assurance.

4 No undo or revert

When you are testing alpha-quality editing software, it hurts not to have an undo. Worse, if something is deleted, by yourself or someone else, there’s is no revert. One recourse is to use the the Playback feature and copy and paste a prior version to the head. If a Wave has had many changes (some are in the 100s), it can take five or ten minutes for the Preview to “fast forward” to the latest version.

5 No editing restrictions

While Team Google can “hack” sometimes a wave to prevent editing, no type of access control feature has been implemented. Everyone can edit anything, which, without undo or revert, is leading to lost content.

6 No external documentation

The only documentation for the client application is spread out over half-a-dozen waves. It’s great that Team Wave is eager to be self-hosting, but, honestly, it’s way too early to present the documentation as a waves. As it is, we’re being giving a DVD player which ships with 100% of the setup instructions on a DVD. The Sandbox is hosted as a Google App, so it would be easy to provide documentation as a Google Doc. While that may not be eating your own dog foot, we’d at least be eating cat food by the same vendor.

7 No internal announcement mechanism

When improvements are made to the environment, the word trickles out. An announcement might be posted, or the release notes might be updated, but there is no central page where all changes are guaranteed to be posted. The sandbox inbox is chaotic, and it’s hard to discern between important updates from Team Wave and the general sandbox chatter. Again, a help page that indicated important changes would make a world of difference.

These points have been added to the Google API issue tracker. If you have a Preview account, and agree, drop by and star a few.