Google Wave

[the geek]

Well, I defer to you on that one. Just giving you my experience with several human translators in various countries over the years.

However I disagree that it isn't usable. Just invite a real person that can translate on the fly into the wave. The service is still better than any other option that has been created so far.

[Milado]

It's not usable for Arabic, but it's probably usable for English or Dutch!

Ask any Arabic native speaker who has tried it!
It's weak too for Hebrew and Persian.
Take it from me: Google Translation English <-> Arabic isn't good at all. I give it 4/10

[nexialys]

imagine, i give a 2/10 between english/french... and my own translations is more like 3/10 ... babelfish is unable to translate roman to german, because of the moods in the sentences... until babelfish add smilies to the texts, you can't get a proper translation nowhere...

[anthonyparsons]

Human nature to find and discuss just negatives...

I couldn't honestly believe it would be all that enthralling through the testing phases, especially when you cannot invite lots of people you know and who are within your circle of constant communication. Kinda makes it just another useless toy without that aspect, being the main purpose it is built. It's not a social networking site to meet and greet new people from my interpretation watching the demo... its a communication package that places many functions into one tool. This to me would mean you would need those within your communication circle to get the full benefit from it... or to find the positive uses of the tool?

Gmail sucked when it was in beta. It sucked when initially released, as it was still quite unpredictable at times. Over time it has become quite the functional piece of email client though. As even the designers stated in the demo... they got caught up in the send, read and response method that we are all so used too. I believe as we change and as the tool improves having a much greater user base over the years, this will pretty much knock MSN and even Yahoo groups out of the water, which have been Googles only demise from both those companies to date. Google have not been able to really crack that market... failing with Google Talk as a real competitor.

This tool as I can see it so far, looks to be a real danger to Yahoo and Microsoft. Time will tell I guess.