A quick look at Google Wave from a rather different view.
Yes, I am a total Google Freak. Yes, I applied for Google Wave months ago. Yes, I have been spreading the Wavey joy. I have been experimenting with the many uses of Google wave recently but last night I came across a rather interesting one. I was chatting with someone near and dear, poking the various gadgets and bots available already for Wave, and things evolved into something a little more intimate. I am not one to kiss and tell and therefore I am seriously de-personalising this but this really does show the power of Wave.
Roleplay and in this particular case, Cyber, using conventional communications. To my mind has always felt somewhat disjointed. There is a particular cycle that you are locked into. “Read.. Write.. Wait.. Read.. Write.. Wait”. Reading takes a fraction of what the Waiting takes, and when you are Writing your partner is just waiting. To me that feels somewhat like during the oh so long Wait part of the cycle you are a mere mannequin patiently waiting for your next chance to move. You seem to spend too much time watching a screen showing “XXXX XXXX is typing…”.
So this is the first major difference with Wave. “XXXX XXXX is typing…” no more. You can see exactly what your partner is typing as they type it. Typos, grammatical and spelling errors included. Personally this just adds to the experience in my opinion. Nothing is ever perfect and as your not writing something where errors are going to be too harshly judged Wave takes away that temptation to proof read what your writing and therefore adding to that Waiting time for your partner. It is also quite telling that as excitement rises that worry about being textually perfect fades more and more. It’s not like in RL you are sat there making sure each motion is perfectly timed with a stopwatch, calculating motion so that each movement quickens to an exponential.
Secondly Wave allows for you to respond to a “Blip” in several different ways. With conventional IM you have bits of text that you have to respond to as a whole. “I am doing A, B and C to you..”, however I cannot react to A, B or C until “XXXX XXXX is typing…” has finally change to what has actually been written. My reply would maybe be “A makes me feel D, B, I respond to with E and I ignore C and do F to you”.
I can do this in Wave, I just reply to your blip after yours. However, I can also do “inline blips”. Say I see “I am doing A..” and A is something that I feel very strongly about. I can inline blip that “A makes me feel D” as you am still typing the rest of my blip. A much stronger reaction letting you know that A is a thing I really like. It’s kept in context, not something you have to refer back to.
This nicely bring me to my third point. Multi-threading. Conventional Im, is very singular. I have to convey what is enjoyed through text. I have to say what could be many different things in a single message. To concentrate on one aspect of the encounter I more than likely have to ignore another. Wave allows for the conversation to branch. Going back to my A, B, C example. A could be you doing something with your hands, B something with your mouth. With the inline blip response to A that has branched the encounter. There are now two conversation streams to explore. As one thing is happening with A another could be happening with B. As I am replying on A stream you can be replying on B stream, and of course if while replying to B, I see something come up that is more interesting to me than my reply in A, I can instantly swap to another inline blip in B.
Now if I take this back to it’s RL equivalent. It does not take 30secs to a minute for you to see that a particular touch would have no effect on me or reduce me to a quivering blissed out wreck. I certainly would not be doing 3 or 4 things ever minute on the minute but nothing or just holding my particular state for the 50 seconds between my messages.
Besides the obvious joy of being with my significant other to be in that particular situation. It was also a total pleasure to try it on Wave and a significant step away from the more awkward and disjointed experience that cyber usually is. The only grain of sand to our experience in the waves (‘scuse the analogy) was that the wave did crash at a somewhat inopportune moment and left us with mere gChat. For the amount that was typed on what is still “Preview” software, I think that it did incredibly well.
And I should really make a special mention of Eva at this point, I think all I need to say is “Thank you” ;)
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