Google Wave Pulse | Wave Limits
Posted under: On this week’s Google Wave Pulse I will be addressing something that has been affecting lots of Google Wave users: Wave Limits. If you have embraced Google Wave, and are using it on a daily basis, you probably know about these. Google Wave is still on its Preview stage and things get pretty rocky sometimes. Erratic behavior, slow system, features that are working, stop working, start working again after a few days, have taken its toll on some users that are now taking a more careful approach to Google Wave but, in Google’s defense, they have been listening to users, giving more feedback and improving the overall performance of the system.
Sometimes I think that users are using Google Wave in ways that Google never thought of (this much is true for public waves that were not a part of the original plans) and they are trying to adapt to it as well. This applies to a wave’s size limit as well. Remember when GMail came out and you had a 10Mb quota? Have you noticed that you now have almost 6GBs or more? Expect the same to happen with the amount of information you have on Wave. The original permitted size for any wave was around 50kb when Google Wave opened to public preview (around 51200 characters). Now those limits have been raised to around 100kb but waves keep reaching their size limit.
Remember that you don’t get any warning that the wave is about to reach its limit. What you get when you try to edit a wave that did is this:
“This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence, and may explode. If you don’t wanna explode, please re-open the wave. Some recent changes may not be saved.”
This doesn’t explain much does it? I will try to shed some light on this. A wave explodes when it reaches its size limit. This is not about how many blips or wavelets a wave has but about the amount of data that they contain. A wave with a single wavelet can explode (just paste a whole e-book in it and you will see what happens for yourself). Also, the waves that “explode” become read only. There is no point in clicking on the “Re-Open wave” button because that will just take you to the same menacing message. There are signs coming from Google that these waves will be again editable when the size limit is raised once again but for now there is only one thing you can do:
If you are starting a discussion wave where you expect to have a of lot content being written on it plan ahead: Start that wave and immediately create a new one that will be your backup wave. When you start to feel that the wave is starting to get heavy (meaning taking more time to load than usual) edit your initial blip and paste the link to the backup wave there (you can do this by dragging and dropping the wave into the blip). This way when those taking part on the discussion receive the “explode” message then will not explode in rage: they will just think of you as someone that has it all covered.
What is your experience? How are you managing and overcoming Google Wave’s obstacles? Let us know in the comments!
Picture Credits: Hamed Saber under a CC License