Google Wave Too Bloated, Complicated

Google Wave, the long-awaited chat/email/collaboration doohickey, is ambitious and sturdy, and packed with bells and whistles… and Twitter kicks its butt. See, Twitter’s main feature is simplicity, writes Farhad Manjoo on Slate, but Wave asks the world of users. It tries to replace email with “an entirely alien interface that isn’t very intuitive and introduces new problems of its own.”

Developers were, for example, very excited by Wave’s live-typing ability. If you’re chatting, every letter you type shows up instantly on everyone else’s screen. Maybe that’s efficient in theory, but in practice it’s hair-raising: having no chance to change a letter or reconsider a word or a thought is “so corrosive to normal conversation that you’d think it was some kind of bug.” It’s hard to believe this came from Google, a company built on clean simplicity. “Wave is so bloated, it could have come from Microsoft.” (More Google Wave stories.)