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Wave sounds confusing

But the what-everybody-else-is-doing visibility factor is also greatly diminished when you can’t see where others are working in the limited screen real estate of Wave. The immediacy of the visible edits vanishes as soon as the other work is happening elsewhere. With Wave, there are plenty of trees falling in the forest that you don’t hear. For example, in composing this document, I asked a question at the top of the Wave discussion thread. You didn’t see it, either because you were away from the discussion or working elsewhere, and there’s no notification about which particular part of the discussion changed. A green number next to the wave in the inbox provides some help.

Shankland: Right. Every Net communication technology goes through a honeymoon period where just you and your close contacts use it. Then the whole Net discovers it and your little paradise becomes just another conduit for spam, inane jokes, and trivia. Expect the same issues with Wave.

Needleman: I think Wave is a great platform for getting work done, but there are dangers. It can take a process that is deliberate and thoughtful and make it into a frothy and superficial back-and-forth. But there are some business process tools that could really benefit from real-time notifications and presence indicators, and from Wave’s capability to show people where others’ attentions are. I’m thinking of the Bugzillia platform, for example. It’d be great to know when a developer is working on a bug I’ve filed, so we can skip the e-mail ping-pong and work through problems in real-time.

Needleman: That’s easy to fix. A little arrow pointing up or down in a document could indicate where others are typing, if they’re off your screen.

Needleman: Wave does feel like modern e-mail, and it relies on the modern Internet to work. Unlike old-fashioned e-mail, which was created when servers didn’t have persistent connection to each other, Wave works because the machines on the Net are now, for the most part, constantly connected to each other. It also brings together different communication styles–e-mail, IM, chat, collaborative editing–into one app. I think that’s great, but I’m not sure how well this idea will scale or what will happen as a broader user base starts to adopt it.

Shankland: I acclimated rapidly, too, but I can see how the multi-edit chaos could be distracting even if you know what’s going on. If you’re the kind of person who can talk on the phone, send a text message, IM, and surf the Web at the same time, you’ll be fine with Wave, but most of us have only so much attention span to go around, and Wave has the potential to overtax.

Shankland: OK, fair point, and I’ll withhold some criticisms of search syntax and contacts management that probably will be improved. But I think this issue could be bigger. One problem with Wave is that the servers have to know which waves are open for editing and when. It’s easy for Google to shut off a user’s editing privileges after a period of inactivity so the server can free up the resources required to keep a communication channel open, but it’s a pain for the user to have to re-enable the privilege frequently, as I had to do while working on this piece. My preference would be that the reply/edit button hovers over the top-right corner of the window even as you scroll so it’s always available.

Shankland: Such as the question I asked you twice that took you two hours to respond to.

CNET Senior Writer Stephen Shankland: Gmail users accustomed to conversation view, which stacks the back-and-forth discussion into a single view, will have an easier time adjusting to Wave’s ways.

Needleman: Lighten up. It’s a developer preview.

Needleman: It’s fun to play with now, but we don’t know what using Wave will be like once we start getting overflowing inboxes of waves.

CNET Editor Rafe Needleman: In some ways, it really is. With Wave, you don’t reply to a message with a new message, you instead add your reply to the message itself. When there are multiple people involved in a conversation, this can prevent a lot of confusion. There’s only one “wave” in a conversation, not a volley of messages flying around that repeat each other.

Wave as a business platform

Needleman: Wave is a lot like Google Docs. Several people can work on a document at the same time. Wave actually is more responsive than Docs and does a better job at letting people know who’s editing what and where.

Shankland: Expect businesses to go through an adjustment period as Wave arrives. There was a day when e-mail was a novelty, and later instant messaging, too, but now they’re settling down to be ordinary tools. Arguably Twitter and social networking are headed that direction for some work purposes, too, and I suspect Wave will go through the same growing pains. Just as with other electronic communications, one person’s active and engaging chat channel is another person’s annoying, productivity-sapping distraction.

Debating the power of Google's Wave

Dell acquires Allin's Microsoft IT consulting business

“The expertise we gain from Allin further deepens our ability to help customers exploit Microsoft technologies for business advantage,” Stephen Murdoch, vice president of Dell’s Global Infrastructure Consulting Services, said in a statement.

Employers are also issuing a more extensive wish list in what they seek in a high-tech contractor, Shandrow added. In the past, a prospective employer would seek three or four primary skill sets when submitting an order to hire a contractor. Now employers want additional skills for the same level of pay, as well as stipulations relating to the length of the contract, number of hours to be worked and money to be paid, he said.

Although the overall unemployment rate reached 7.6 percent in January and for tech, the rate climbed to 4.8 percent, there are still opportunities for tech employment.

(Credit:Dice.com)

Help wanted: Techies with Android skills

Temporary-placement agency Manpower, meanwhile, finds some tech positions are still in demand, particularly for people skilled in mobile technologies. The problem is a surprisingly thin talent pool for those jobs. Adam Shandrow, area manager for Manpower, said there’s a shortage in finding tech workers who are familiar with Google’s Android smartphone platform and applications that can run on it.

“We still see a slight demand for high-tech engineering jobs, but the timing of placing candidates in those jobs is now very different,” Shandow added. “Before, we could fill a job in three to four weeks, now it takes five to six weeks. And for a permanent position, it used to take a month to fill a high-tech job and now it takes almost two months.”

Jobs posted on technology jobs site Dice.com rose 3.1 percent in February, its first sequential increase since late last summer, just before the economy started to really turn sour in September.

On the positive side, the figures can also indicate when permanent jobs may begin to pick up, Mann added. When the dot-com bust hit in 2001, for example, the number of contractor positions began to shrink. They began to pick up steam in the following year and posted year-over year growth in July 2003. Then four months later, the overall economy began to improve and job growth began in November. That followed a similar pattern in the 1991 recession, Mann said, pointing to a rise in the number of temporary and contract workers in January 1992, with job growth following three months later, Mann noted.

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“Overall, tech is still an attractive place to be, even though the number of job listings are down roughly 40 percent,” because there are still over 57,000 positions that need to be filled, Silver said.

Contract work fuels rise in tech job postings