The first Google Wave spam has started to hit, and it's annoying.
Google Wave is not even "beta" yet, meaning the only people who should be using it are developers and/or people who are somewhat technical and don't mind using something that will break quite often.
The way Wave works is that an individual "wave" allows people to communicate in a hybrid of email and instant messaging.
The underlying way that the information gets moved around is totally different than either of those. I've read that security will be much better with Wave because of that underlying technology. We'll see.
For now, however, it's quite open and -- as I've said -- buggy so sometimes messages are slow to load and it's hard to figure out what you are reading.
So with spam added in, the whole thing slows to a crawl.
Users within Wave can choose to go into waves that have been designated as public, and those are the ones that seem to be slowest. They also expose you to the possibility of spam, which I'm defining as a commercial message delivered to you from someone that you did not request it from and that you have no prior business relationship with.
So far it's been mild, but I'm sure all those who write emails that start with "My dearest benefactor" or whatever are busy now trying to figure out how to get Wave invites and start turning to a new way of urinating in the punch bowl that is Wave.
Now, I'm confident that all this will be better worked out by the time Wave is ready for wider release, but it's not yet.
So, make this the sixth reason to delay using Wave for now. (See the first five reasons not to use wave.)
I am playing with Wave every day and reading lots, but I am open to all suggestions about what aspects of Wave to cover. If you have a tip, well, I'm like a waiter: I live on the tips. Contact me on Scott, or in Wave on "scodtt" or via Twitter using the button below. Also, be sure to grab the RSS feed or subscribe to my email using the buttons above so you can get all the very best in Google Wave news and analysis from a non-technical perspective.
Comments
I'm saddened that spammers got to sign up before me :( thats all I got to say. But, I'm down with their method of getting Google Wave ready for the general public. You're minimal griping of their system means they need to shape it up NOW before mass amounts of people are using it. They already know the world is going to jump on it immediately. That's something none of us would be used to planning for when we launch our 0 traffic websites.
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