SIDEBAR
»
S
I
D
E
B
A
R
«
The Lost Lesson Of Instant Typing
October 14th, 2009 by jens

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.

The same thing happened seven years ago with the live-typing feature that I implemented in iChat 1.0 (which was only supported for Bonjour chats.) I thought it was an awesome idea, and I’d wanted to have it in a chat program since about 1997. But it turned out that, in actual use, people hated it, for exactly the reasons Manjoo describes: it makes you self-conscious. We took it out in the next release.

(Interestingly, I hate video chat for a very similar reason. Somehow, the fact that my picture is being shown in real time to the remote person makes me horrifically self-conscious, even though it wouldn’t bother me at all to talk face-to-face with that person. I don’t know whether it’s the little preview on my screen, or the fact that the person is spookily both present and not-present, but the few times I’ve tried video-chat have been really unpleasant.)

I’m usually on the side of more technology. I believe that our online communications tools are still horribly primitive and have only scratched the surface of what’s possible. But this was a case where more technology was bad.

The low-tech alternative that lots of people use in IM,
is to write in short fragments,
each a separate message,
so the other person can see them one by one
without waiting for you to finish the whole sentence.

The difference is that you’re in control over when to send a partial message, and the other person knows you’re in control, and so on. I still think it might be possible to do this in a higher-tech way, like using a hot-key to send a partial message on demand without having the funky line-breaks, but the current approach isn’t so bad as long as you’re not embarrassed about unintentional free verse.

I could have told the Wave people about what I’d learned, except I didn’t know Wave existed until April (shortly before the public announcement), and even then I was just some guy lost in the crowd at the demos….

Part of the problem, in both cases, 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.)


37 Responses  
  • Dave writes:
    October 15th, 200912:16 PMat

    ICQ actually had live chat back in 1996 or 1997 also.

           
  • Matthew Brown writes:
    October 15th, 20091:27 PMat

    UNIX ‘talk’ has implemented such communication since the 70s, and previous incarnations existed for earlier systems.

    And yes, it’s always a problem.

           
  • Michael H. writes:
    October 15th, 20093:37 PMat

    I think live-typing is useful in a number of ways. I’ve used EtherPad to collaboratively work on a todo list, like a web-based SubEthaEdit. It’s great. Today, I used Google Wave to take notes with someone else during a group conference call. It was very useful to see what he was adding while I was talking, and vice-versa.

    So, I liked live-typing for that. But it seems like it should have an off switch for email or IM or other less-dynamic situations.

           
  • Alex writes:
    October 16th, 200912:35 AMat

    Is this a case of, “those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”?

    Which I believe has been paraphrased at least once as, “those who do not know Unix are doomed to re-implement it, poorly.”

    As for me, “talk” never worked for me because I’d be live-typing up here, my friend would be live-typing down there, and there was no sense of chronology. You couldn’t look at the screen after five minutes and figure out that “Yes” was an answer to “do you hate high heels as much as I do?”, and not “will you go out with me?” :)

           
  • David Vallner writes:
    October 16th, 200912:49 AMat

    As an aside
    People who chat
    or IM
    like this
    drive me up walls
    because sometimes
    it goes on and on
    for ages

    Although that’s when their (possibly subconscious) motivation is non-stop conversation control. I.e. never ever being done with a “sentence” so that you feel like you’re interrupting them whenever you want to say anything.

    I can imagine live-typing reinforcing this behaviour even more.

           
  • Ryan writes:
    October 16th, 20094:20 AMat

    I don’t get why some people get so hung up on live typing?

    I guess I type relatively quickly, and make few errors; few enough that I’m not bothered if anybody sees me make one. But even when I’m talking with a grammatically impaired poor speller, I don’t really care about their typos unless they get in the way of communication. Some of my friends are even proud of their high rate of typos.

    Why do you care who sees your goof-ups? A little bit of humility goes a long ways.

           
    • jens writes:
      October 16th, 20098:34 AMat

      It’s not primarily about typos, I think, it’s about unfinished thoughts, and revisions. Many people go back and edit what they wrote before sending it, or pause halfway through to decide if it made sense. That’s the kind of thing you can get hung up on having someone else see the innards of.

      You may not get this, but that doesn’t make it any less true of many other people. And blaming it on a lack of “humility”, paradoxically, comes off as arrogance.

             
  • paul s writes:
    October 17th, 20091:16 AMat

    Between ytalk & ICQ, this prob. explains why I hate chat so much. And yes I am normally a fast typist

    Due to a recent injury I’ve lost the use of my dominant hand and I’ve been typing — laboriously, maybe 20wpm — 1handed using the Dvorak left keylayout. I tried wave 1ce, it was utterly mortifying. I felt like an idiot.

    I cant imagine what it would be like for a person with extreme mobility limits like ALS (eg Stephen Hawking). Such people look to social technology for liberation. on the internet no one knows you’re a dog. at 20wpm Wave feels like a betrayal.

           
  • Mic Edwards writes:
    October 18th, 20094:52 AMat

    I’d hate to have a conversation with those of you who think that instant typing is a retro step … how long would I have to wait for you to fully compose a sentence before you speak it?

    If it’s about slow typing … then go and improve it …

           
    • jens writes:
      October 18th, 200911:49 AMat

      Mic— Don’t make the mistake of conflating different media. Written communication, even IM, is absolutely not the same thing as talking, and you can’t assume that all the behaviors of one translate identically to the other.

      For me, a large part of figuring out how to make social media work successfully has been the task of disentangling them and figuring out what each one’s strengths and weaknesses are.

             
  • Josh Grams writes:
    December 4th, 20099:13 AMat

    Huh. I remember choosing ICQ over IM or whatever else precisely because it *had* the live typing feature, and I never understood why they took it out. It would never have occurred to me to be self-conscious over something like that…I *like* seeing other people’s thought processes; much easier to tell if you’re on the same wavelength.

           

« previous
»  Substance:WordPress   »  Style:Ahren Ahimsa