A Bit of Follow-Up on Wavelength

Tuesday, 4 April 2023

Lots of great feedback from my post last week about Wavelength. A few that I’ve noted:

  • Ben Thompson and I spent last Friday’s episode of Dithering talking about Wavelength. You should subscribe! We even started a Dithering group in Wavelength — the link is in the show notes for the episode. (And speaking of Dithering, the show is on vacation this week — a fact we neglected to mention on air. Sorry about that.)

  • Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith devoted the “One Good Chat” feature in this newsletter last week to a group chat between him, Wavelength’s founders, and the Wavelength AI bot. It’s brief, but it conveys a sense of how fun it is to engage AI chat in a group context.

  • Hacker News had a pretty good thread about Wavelength (and my post about it).

  • Matt Waller tweeted my very favorite AI interaction with Wavelength’s bot to date.

Everything else: Feedback from those of you who’ve started using Wavelength has been very consistent. The top missing features: reactions/tapbacks, editing messages to fix typos, and search. And the biggest issue is, perhaps, group discoverability: How do you find good groups to join? A side effect of Wavelength’s focus on privacy is that there’s no public directory of groups. I suspect this will sort itself out as Wavelength gains traction, but in the meantime, it can seem a bit quiet if you don’t know many other people using Wavelength.

One more thing: The fact that Wavelength has no Android app yet comes up repeatedly, for obvious reasons. Less obvious and very curious to me is this: I haven’t seen a single complaint about the fact that there is no Windows app, nor any announced plans to create one. I’m not sure why that is. The Mac app is very important to me — I really can’t imagine spending much time using any messaging platform that doesn’t have a Mac client, or at the very least a web app. But Windows users are OK with that?

Bonus postscript: Nick Punt wrote a thoughtful post with suggestions for making the presentation of threads in Wavelength feel more organized without increasing friction.