Google Wave Talk

Last night I went to a Google Wave presentation, the comedy highlight of which was Pulp Fiction, Wave Edition:

The talk was given by Lars & Steffani, who gave the Google I/O talk earlier this year. I think everyone there was secretly hoping for an exciting announcement, but it was essentially an adoption-so-far talk. Very interesting, but no new revelations.

The Q&A section was mostly, "Can we get feature X?". I felt for Lars during the Q&A, who was forced to answer a stream of questions with, "Yes, we're working on it, but no, I can't give you a release date."

Anyway, here are some snippets I did glean:

• Speed seems to be their number 1 development priority. I was surprised quite how much the speed was bothering them - I find it fine.
• There's a team of about 60 people, of which 50 are engineers.
• They really want people to press Shift+Enter a lot.
• The biggest reason they're losing new users is the classic network problem - when you first arrive, none of your friends have an account yet. It's scaling well, and they're opening a vast number of new accounts every day. Something in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Demand for invitations is still outstripping supply though.
• The second biggest 'leak' is a lack of notification. People don't know when they have new messages, or when friends are online, so they're not drawn back in.

That last point is the real thorn for me. When I've used wave with friends I've found it to be a terrific product. It really makes online conversations easier. It's as interactive as instant messaging - better even - but it keeps the 'threadyness' of email. A topic sits in one place, and you can keep chatting about it and coming back to it over the days & weeks.

It's a great user experience, but it's sadly hard to come by. It's rare that I'm online and one of my contacts is too. I really need an iGoogle gadget that says when people are online, and when I have new messages. I'll gladly build one as soon as they build the API.

In the pub afterwards I got to speak to Lars very briefly. I apologised, but asked when there'd be a notifications API. He rolled his eyes and said, "Soon, soon." Poor guy. He's probably going to spend most of their European tour saying that...