If you ever saw that impressive video of how Google Wave worked when it was released, you might remember that it “looked” amazing. Everything about Wave after that release, however, left a little to be desired… so much so, that it was finally abandoned (actually split into pieces) and labeled a (marketing) failure.
Now, I could be wrong here, but I think I just watched something that looks very “Wave-like” in the presentation. At TechCrunch yesterday, there was a video of what a few animators did with Google Docs’ Presentation app. I’m a big-time user of Google Docs, and love using the presentation app for collaborative work and actual presentations. So when I saw this video of what could be done to animate the presentation, I was seriously impressed. Unfortunately, when I found the actual presentation, and tried to run it the way it (at least looked like it) was done in the video… I was reminded of the false-hopes that the hype surrounding Google Wave gave us. The short 1 1/2 minute video presentation took over 20 minutes to actually run (and that was after I waited for all of the slides to download… and I tested it multiple times, only to get the same slow results.)
I have a joke I like to tell about the difference between “theory” and “reality” that kind of matches this situation… when you see me at a conference, buy me a beer, and I’ll tell you the joke.
To be fair, I did see in the comments that in order to get the presentation to run the way that it shows in the video, you can click on the “next” button in Google Docs at a rate of 7 times per second and replicate what was done in the video. I got through about 10 seconds of that before my hand gave out.
Take a look for yourself and see what 1:30 of what was presented, versus 1:30 of what I could replicate. You’ll see that it doesn’t exactly match the hype.
Here is what I was able to view in that same amount of time.
Doesn’t quite match up to the hype.