Nerds united are all up in hoops about Google Wave’s live chat feature. I actually thought that it was interesting, fun and nice nostalgic touch to the oh so modern Wave.
Chatting on Wave is like talking to an overcurious mind reader. On a conventional IM, you only see what other people say once they hit Enter. (True, the IM program will tell your partner whether or not you’re typing, but this is too little information to get embarrassed about.) On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you’d think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it’s a feature—indeed, it’s one of the Wave team’s proudest accomplishments. When Google first unveiled Wave this spring, the program’s inventors hailed real-time typing as a way to mimic real-life conversations online. Because you can see what your chat partner is trying to say before she’s finished saying it, you can start replying immediately, making conversations much faster, Wave’s proponents argue. In practice, though, live typing either slows conversations to a crawl or renders them anodyne. Because you’ve got to second-guess every word you put down, you find yourself agonizing over the keyboard. (Farhad Manjoo for Slate)
More than anything else, the live chat feature did not restrict me but made me feel happy, happy because I had already lived the Wave. Back in our days live chatting was really popular. We called it ICQ.
