The Debate Around Instant Typing
Google Wave is featured with a real-time typing functionality. Not everybody is too happy about that:
Farhad Manjoo writing in Slate about Google Wave
The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time—every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self conscious to get my thoughts across.
… Maybe I should just delete what I’d written and say, “Twitter works because it’s simple.” But I couldn’t do that, because Zach was watching me. He could see me struggling right now—he could see that I’d gotten myself stuck in a textual cul-de-sac and that I was desperately searching for a way out without looking foolish. Now I saw Zach beginning to type: “Don’t let the live-typing get you down!” The game was up; what was the point of making a point now? I ended my thought clumsily and then resolved never to attempt to say anything very deep on Wave.
Jens Alfke @ Thought Palace:
Part of the problem (…) is that live typing is one of those Cool Demo Features that looks really awesome when showing off the app. Features like that can be dangerous because they are legitimately very useful during the app’s gestation, when exciting demos are a key survival trait; but then they can’t be removed later on because they’re so well-known, even if they turn out to be useless. Sometimes these features aren’t actually harmful to the user experience, they just make the code more complex and harder to maintain. Instant typing is both, unfortunately. (The clever sync algorithms and rapid-fire network messages Wave uses would be needed even without live typing, but the fact that they have to run on every few keystrokes, not just every minute or so, pushes those things so much harder.)
What do you think about real live editing?
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I agree that having others “watch” me type is difficult. After writing a sentence/paragraph, I tend to speak the sentence out loud to ensure it “sounds right.” A wee bit more difficult with google wave, heh?
Matt Haggerty
Ridgehead Software
http://www.ridgehead.com