Google Wave Preview Opens Up On Sept 30th 118
snitch writes with this snippet from InfoQ about the current state of Google Wave: "With the Google Wave
Preview scheduled for public availability on September 30th,
Wave API Tech Lead Douwe Osinga has posted on the Wave Google Group about what the team has been working on along with some future directions. Up until now, with the limited availability of testing
accounts there have been complaints
on the Google Group from users that wanted to get their hands on this new
technology but didn't have access to the sandbox. As Douwe
explains, the
team has been busy all this time with stability issues and more."
What is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can someone tell me what Google Wave is? The video on the page is over an hour long which is a lot to sit through to just to find out what this slashdot article is about.
Re:I'm looking forwards to this (Score:4, Interesting)
This is what I want, which is no small request.
* phpbb or some other fully-functional, fantastic open source forum software that allows people to post and respond like a typical forum.
* Wordpress integration (you can already integrate Wordpress into phpbb) or some approximation there of, so you can post articles/stories on a front portal, written by the staff of a site. Articles would have a link to a forum thread to discuss the article.
* Gallery integration (again already possible) for photos.
The problem is that no one packages this together neatly with a nice consistent theme, great integration, and the right blend of plugins to keep spam-bots off your site.
Now throw Wave into the mix.
A Wave requires that you invite people into the way to see it, or edit it. However a Wave robot tied into a good forum/CMS platform really interests me. Authors on a website can invite a robot into a Wave, which posts the results into their Wordpress/phpbb hybrid. The website staff/authors can instantly and easily edit/collaborate the article itself. The article isn't posted on the site until you invite the Robot, which allows you to work on drafts, or have a workflow process of an editor to sign off on the article.
The CMS/forum is there for end users to read the finished article, and respond with the permissions the CMS/forum gives them. But Wave provides a better means for authors to put content on the site to begin with.
phpbb/Wordpress/Gallery2/Wave would be a fantastic framework for a community portal. I wish I were a php-guru to put it together.
Like a Word doc with "Track Changes" on... (Score:3, Interesting)
Call me a cynic, but the Wave format reminds me of a Word doc with "Track Changes" turned on. My first thoughts were that the most used features of Wave might be "ignore contributions" and "de-contextualize contributions and list as a change history instead". Otherwise, they could be as hard to read as a coherent thread as...Slashdot.
Re:What is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah but the hype is not coming from marketers so much as from people who have watched the live demo, and played with the bits and pieces that have been released so far and can see the potential.
If Wave was just a Google product and wasn't a set of open/federated protocols, then it probably wouldn't have much chance of actually changing anything. After all the telephone and email aren't products, they are ways of interoperably connecting different systems to each other world wide so that anyone can communicate with anyone else.
I don't know about you, but in my experience telephone and email usage is getting replaced by other things. email replaced a lot of phone calls and and nearly all fax usage, and now email is getting replaced by other things like task specific web apps (eg wikis, ticket trackers, project management apps etc etc) even without those apps being focused on communication. Most of this is limited to usage within an organisation.
Wave has the potential to transform the communication aspect of these kinds of web apps. I don't see it's potential as replacing email or IM or wikis etc, but as unifying them all and allowing a new generation of really collaborative and interoperable web apps to be built on top of it that can work easily within or between organisations.
I'm not going to claim it absolutely really will replace anything (I'm too cynical for that), but watching the demo was the first time I've got excited by a new communication technology in a long time (hell, I don't even like IM and think Twitter is moronic). I'm normally very jaded about this kind of thing, and I also thought it was just a bunch of hype at first.
Online desktop move (Score:3, Interesting)
So, is this suppose to be Googles first attempt at sort of online ajax desktop?
Re:What is it? (Score:3, Interesting)
google maps completely changed looking up directions online
gmail completely changed the free email landscape
I'm keeping a healthy amount of skepticism myself, but from what I have seen this has some solid potential.
If they do it right, they could make the entire wave system cryptographically sound, and completely eliminate spam, forgery, and cleartext communication. This is google though, so I am expecting a nice UI, extremely useful features, and a big fat security fail.
Re:What is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you'd asked me to name one Internet technology that was likely to stick around in its current form for a long time, it's likely that I would have said "email". Google Wave challenges that for me.
Yeah, after using Gmail, I would've certainly predicted that something would come along and challenge email. I would've guessed that email would still exist, in its current form, mostly because of inertia.
I'd probably have picked ssh. The Unix commandline isn't going away for a long time.
there's something about email, for example, that forces a sort of linearity of conversation. That is, its structure is fairly limiting, even when you put threads into the process.
I haven't really found that -- especially among technical people, where you can refer back to an archived post in a mailing list, for example.
And everything is an attachment instead of being part of the communication.
Contrast to IM, where everything is a link instead of being part of the communication.
Which reminds me: One thing that's going to absolutely suck about Google Wave is those people who insist on using animated emoticons. Seriously, it seems like half the people I talk to on MSN do this -- for example, they type brb, and it becomes a big animated BRB that turns into a stick figure and runs away. Cute the first time, but just distracting after that.
Do I really want to give these ADD-afflicted people the ability to send me fully interactive, inane little widgets?
what I hadn't considered until the past couple years was how much the particular standard we follow or file format we use also imposes the same limits. You can only put into your web page what HTML supports, and you can only put into emails what the clients will support.
Perhaps, but there is power in these limits.
For example, Google Wave imposes the limit that you can only add relatively low-bandwidth (or at least low-frequency), reversible changes -- you probably couldn't play an FPS in it. In return, you get all these cool little tools to browse through the history.
HTML imposes some limits of its own -- sure, there are ways to get around them, but when a web page behaves the way you expect, there's power there. Examples are bookmarking, back/forward, open in a new tab, and Greasemonkey scripts -- these are the kinds of things that are only possible on a common, restricted platform. People developing native apps often find themselves having to add this kind of functionality back in.
What has me excited about Google Wave is not so much this exact approach, but that people are trying to figure out how we could change the entire paradigm of our current interaction with the Internet, changing the distinctions between IM, email, and documents.
I don't think that's new. I think what's new is that they've presented something that actually could do just that.
I have to think a bit more about the actual implications, though. For example, what types of documents make sense, and what types don't? Is it possible that people would use this for collaboratively developing code? I know I like to be able to take text back to the commandline and grep through it, and use real version control like Git, but maybe I'm old-fashioned.