{tech}.Ben Buckman.net

I got a sandbox account to Google Wave a few months ago, but didn't know anyone else with an account, so I didn't use it much. Wave launched to the public a few weeks ago and I got a regular account, and while I still don't have anyone in my contact list to have an actual wave with, I've been using it anyway.

My overall impression is that Wave was released prematurely. The UI isn't intuitive enough; it took too long to figure out what to do. And some of the functionality that is available doesn't seem to be working properly.

I wanted to add some extensions, like Tweety. How to do that isn't clear - the Extensions wave that came with the account had only two listed - and then I realized each extension is a user that has to be added to the wave. (I'm not sure why it's done that way.) So apparently Tweety is tweety-wave@appspot.com, and emoticons are emoticonbot@appspot.com, etc. Embedding a wave - this is the weirdest one - apparently requires embeddy@appspot.com to be added. (Embedding should be built into the UI, in my opinion, not added as a participant.)

So I got the extensions into the wave (without their icons, for some reason). But adding each of these bots takes over the whole wave: with Tweety included, the rest of the Wave disappears; removing Tweety doesn't bring it back.

The Playback button is supposed to allow you to "investigate and manipulate a wave," but there's no way to revert to an earlier point, only review it. That seems like missing functionality.

The Contacts are confusing: you have to know an extension's address to add it, it won't show up in search; when it's filtering by keywords, there's no button to clear the filter; and Manage Contacts brings up all Google Contacts, not just Wave ones.

There are a bunch of little bugs too. Like the More Actions button opens a dropdown, from which I click on the Add Map item, so it adds a map, but doesn't hide the dropdown.

Oh, and the wave I just added the map to - I have no idea where it went. I reloaded the page thinking the wave list wasn't refreshing, but it showed dozens of gibberish items and hung. (And this in Chrome, which it should be optimized for.)

It obviously needs a lot more work before it's ready for prime time.