I love Wave's instant typing. Chat happens so much faster, and both parties stay engaged instead of drifting away while they wait. It raises the bandwidth.
This kind of editing isn't something you could have turned off by default in Wave, because otherwise you can't have multiple people editing the same thing at a time. For blips authored by one person, you could--and that'll be an option. I hope people don't use it, though.
Chat happens so much faster, and both parties stay engaged instead of drifting away while they wait.
What's wrong with drifting away? :)
This will sound cocky, but: I'm multitasking chat conversations simultaneously, can type fast, and can express my thoughts quickly. I'm sure a lot of Hackers are in this category. Why should I sit there with someone who's not so great at those things and watch them struggle along at typing, thinking, or pausing in the middle of a sentence because someone walked in the room? I'll be over here, just give me a visual beep and I'll instantly be back.
Put another way, I'm learning a foreign language at the moment, and I wouldn't dare want to put my native speaker friends through watching me find the right article...
If I want a high-bandwidth, high-commitment, high-intensity medium, (or to make my friends suffer through my horrible Dutch) I'll use voice or video.
Drifting away when the bandwidth is low is fine and can still be done. I should have said that avoiding drifting is novel for me when both (or more than two) parties are capable of expressing themselves quickly (both typing and composition). I just never had that experience before except in person. (Even voice and video were just laggy enough to make them lower bandwidth than face-to-face talking.)
Voice and video are fine, too, but there's no easy record of what happened, they're one-to-one only, and you still can't talk at the same time or edit what you say. And if you say something complicated, it can't be reread until grokked. Plus, you can't use them as easily with people you don't know as well.
Maybe I'm not explaining it clearly. I've just had great experiences with Wave so far, having discussions that I would have only been able to have in person (and would not afterward have a record of), at even higher speeds than I would have had in person. That's cool.
I think its a bit interesting that everyone is criticizing the "instant typing" when in the original presentation they almost immediately said that they were going to have the option to turn it off. It seems a neat feature but its not exactly deal breaking to just remove it.
This is fair. But much of the value of good software design is sensible defaults. If you need to twiddle 8 different inscrutable, independent knobs to just the right settings in order to make a default installation usable, that's not a good user experience. Most users will simply give up when faced with that level of UI hostility, which is hardly good for business.
I'm going to make a prediction that the default will become "not live typing", and the feature will disappear altogether later.
(And yes, a thousand times yes, sensible defaults. But even more than that, as few preferences/options as possible. I would much prefer people make a design choice, than no design choice.)
How about they start with telling you that it's turned on? I don't see anything in the web interface that tells me that others can also see my live typing.
The main point of the live typing, I'm guessing, is not for back and forth IM but for active document collaboration & editing. I'm betting in the final version of Wave it will be a lot smarter about when and where to enable live typing.
Yeah, this is why I can't be bothered with Wave at all. Add to that the "presence" aspects where people know whether you're on and reading the Wave and.. it adds up to a pile of anxiety if you're an asynchronous communicator.
I use to hate the "presence" aspect too about chat in gmail so I would always leave it logged off. Then I came up with a better solution. I leave myself logged in to gtalk on my phone 24/7 and now people don't know whether I'm really there or not. Best of both worlds!
The eye is drawn to motion, which is another key problem with instant typing.
I would bet you actually spend more total time & mental energy reading a sequence of characters that keep disappearing and appearing than you do an IM conversation, where you can scan several (complete) lines in a second.
You can also multi-task and multi-convo on IM without being rude, which is why it's so much better than a phone call for technical conversations w/ colleagues.
I haven't used Wave yet. My good friend nominated me (or whatever they are calling it) and I'm just waiting. But, I can't help but feel the backlash at the instant typing is just the anti-Google backlash that happens with their new releases and dies back down after a bit.
The complaints, starting with Farhad Manjoo from Slate all boil down to this sentence, "I don't like instant type because it makes me feel like / shows that I am not as witty or well spoken if I can't carefully craft a message before sending, this makes me self conscious".
I think, perhaps, people just need to adjust to this new, old, form of communication. I suspect that this can deliver a similar experience to speech if users put in the time to develop new habits. In speech most languages / cultures have developed ways to show they are thinking mid sentence... This may be in the form of a sound "uhhhh" or a facial expression (furrowed brow). We just need an acceptable way to do this as we type.
We've had the benefit of live communication before, in face to face communication and over the phone, and it has many benefits, but it is not an unalloyed good by any means.
Live communication is full of repetition, verbal tics, and inexactness. Necessary mechanisms as one thinks out loud and mentally edits their own words until they circle in on the best expression of their idea. There are many downsides to this. For example, it's much easier to get into a meaningless argument as people stumble or become fixated on conversational detritus (the words and thoughts that would have been edited out of conversation in the final draft), either because people are needlessly confused by awkward wording or use of an inapt metaphor, or because they are being intentionally confrontational. Anyone who has ever read a transcript of a live interview has almost certainly been struck by the degree to which live speech seems convoluted, distracted, and poorly structured when compared to typical written communication.
I can see why google thought it was "neat" to put live chat into wave, it makes for a slick demo. But if their goal is to build a communication medium that is superior to existing technologies (phone, IM, email), then relying on live chat is a step in the wrong direction.
Does anyone remember video phones ... from the 1950s??
Obviously, Google Wave isn't the same thing but anyone following communications media over time should draw the conclusion that more information, more quickly, is no always useful.
No one wants their boss to see their undone hair, no one wants to have to respond in real time to some document and have their keystrokes visible. The delay of email as compared to chat, has it's advantages, otherwise some form of chat would have 'won' already.
I've been using etherpad for collaborating on documents. I've found that live conversation often breaks out in the middle of the document itself. I love this, and prefer it to the normal chat area offered on the right side. (The only problem is that the in-document conversation often ends up deleted.)
I'm no longer worried if I'll sound stupid, though this did bother me when I used this feature on ICQ many years ago. I do worry about accidentally typing something rude, but I think I'm getting over this too. Communication really is much faster and more engaging this way. (It's also edifying to see how others compose their messages).
We have a similar problem with letting others see our code. The trick to getting over this is to just put it out there. In that spirit, I've made my writing of this message public at the link below; feel free to watch me stutter and change things. You can also try out live chat there, if you've never tried it before.
This kind of editing isn't something you could have turned off by default in Wave, because otherwise you can't have multiple people editing the same thing at a time. For blips authored by one person, you could--and that'll be an option. I hope people don't use it, though.