Google Wave Out of Beta 255
googlePLEXS writes "Google Wave is open to all users at wave.google.com, as a Google Labs product — no invitation needed. Google Apps administrators will also have the option to add Wave as a Labs feature for their domains, helping groups of people communicate and work together more productively." If you haven't played with it, it's worth your time just to try to think beyond the bounds of IRC/Email. It's not going to change your work flow, but I still think it's worth a bit of your time to see it.
How old is this news? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually not difficult to see what it can be used with. Basically, anything you type can be a wave. Any content you create can be a wave. The problem is people see Google Wave as the product. Google Wave is just the interface. Gmail would be useless if Email wasn't as widely used as it is. The Wave protocol exists for a reason.
These comments here could all be waves. Facebook could be based on waves. Forums as well. You would still use the same interfaces as you do now, but you'd have the added benefit of a standard API to access that information, the way email works today.
Google Wave is Thunderbird. Wave is Email.
why you might care (Score:4, Interesting)
I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Real-time collaboration.
How do I get others to use it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time I've tried to use it, the conversation dies off quickly and new ones go right back to Email. As a last ditch effort I even added a small paragraph at the top of a Wave that explained how to use it, and still the very first reply to it was sent over Email.
It's just not intuitive or compelling enough to replace anything with.
Re:why you might care (Score:3, Interesting)
But what you wind up with is something that looks like an interactive chat session - you can put together ideas that way but there's no structure to the end result.
If you're collaborating on something that, say, will eventually become a document, it's next to useless because you still need to re-write the fruits of your labour into that document. With a Wiki, that's a non-issue because you're working towards the final version.
More useful would be real-time collaboration integrated with Google Sites and Google Docs.
I love wave (Score:5, Interesting)
last week my wife made a schedule for potluck plans, in a wave.
bulleted list of items, detailed dates and times, some friendly ribbing about doing the dishes, and a lot of things involving many other people.
she included me in the wave, but no one else at first.
some side bar sort of things got added, I sent some funny pics, we added a little "will you attend" applet, deleted the whole dishes thread, added the potluck menu items, and went back and corrected my spelling.
she looked over that, made a few more changes while I was watching this time, then added several other people to the wave.
they then looked at it... MORE side bar conversations happened,the potluck items started including pictures and diet information, and we got a rundown of who was coming.
an hour before the potluck, one person changed his rsvp, and several more people wanted to come, we added them to the wave, they saw the entire thread of events, and picked up complementary things from the store on the way over. we threw in a map. and used a sketching tool to draw on it.
I love wave.
the coolest thing about this is how seemless that all was. My mother in law, and several non-techy neighbors were able to puzzle out the entire thing and add to it with very little problem.
on a completely unrelated series of waves, I'm having political debates, discussing singularity related web-finds and running a hell of a mage game.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, if only now someone who understands something about good interfaces came out with a Wave client, I'd be happy.
I love the concept behind Wave. But Google Wave is a close-to-unusable mess. And yes, I've tried pretty hard to use it, with several different groups of people.
i think Google Wave is like the Apple Newton (Score:3, Interesting)
the Apple Newton is the Apple iPhone, 10 years too early:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform) [wikipedia.org]
in other words, Google Wave is where we are headed, yes. but its too early. it has to be the most painful of technology-related efforts: your passion is correct, your efforts are noble... but no one adapts it only because there is no critical mass of people to use the tech to its righteous, intended effect, just yet
or more exactly, Google Wave is like AJAX. everyone knows AJAX as the ascendent internet development model that pretty much came to public conscience with Google Maps: "you mean i don't have to click and submit a form and reload the page entirely every time? wow!"
but did you know XmlHttpRequest (the X in AJAX) was originally a Microsoft Exchange Plug-in for IE 5.0 in 1999?
and that Microsoft dominance in browsers at the time (and its noncompliance) made use of the technology feasible, and therefore other browsers adapted it? too many people believe standards drive technological development. when the truth is, everything starts out as nonstandard, the standards only lag behind, making uniform the popular feature sets of the time. standards do NOT drive innovation. if you want to do exciting groundbreaking tech: fuck the standards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History_and_support [wikipedia.org]
do you think Microsoft knew where their minor sideshow Exchange Server ActiveX tech was headed? Microsoft constantly lags in the innovation department: silverlight competing with flash, zune, their tablet technology upstaged by iPad, their moribund smartphone OS competing with blackberry, android, apple, etc.
and yet Microsoft actually had a truly groundbreaking world changing piece of tech on their hands... and they pretty much relegated it to Microsoft Exchange Server plumbing. hilarious
this will be the development arc of Google Wave:
1. eventually forgotten after the initial publicity blitz
2. then someone rediscovers it in obscurity, repurposes it, and reintroduces it
3. 5-10 years from now, Google Wave
Re:Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesnt have to be "interesting" to be phenomenally better or useful.
Re:So why should I care? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you can't see a reason for using it, you either don't understand how it works, or don't have a use for it. Both are valid reasons.
I use it a lot at work myself, and absolutely love it. For example, instead of sending an email to 5 people, each of them replying with different bits of information that I then have to collate myself, we use a wave.
Instead of sending the boss email updates on critical on-going tasks, I keep them in a wave the boss has access to and update that as I go along.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't understand it... (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know how to use it, and it's not from a lack of trying I can assure you.
I read all the tutorials and watched all the videos.
Some things in Wave are just weird/annoying,
For instance, threading.
Why are the replies on the same level as the post being replied to? EXCEPT when you reply to a post in the middle of a chain of replies, then suddenly it indents.
This is totally different from every forum on the internet.
Then there are in-post replies. Why aren't these collapsed by default? They break up a block of text into unreadable fragments upon load, and you have to explicitly use a command to collapse them all make the post readable.
What aren't there "write controls" to prevent people from editing something. I know there is a playback feature.
But honestly I don't see the harm in letting a moderator control what is a "public area" and what is not.
Maybe I'm not getting it - this whole new paradigm. But I doubt I'm the only one.
It would be nice if Google provide a detailed step-by-step video as to how to use it.
And by that I mean details like, when to use the reply "button" at the bottom of a chain, and when to use the reply button on the toolbar at the top, should be included.
They will literally have to explain the whole paradigm or most of us won't get it.
The closed Beta killed this. (Score:3, Interesting)
I started using Wave in the Beta. At first my level of excitement was very high as I figured out ways that technology could be useful.
Unfortunately that excitement waned as I discovered I had very few people to share it with as invites were scarce and not many people I wanted to communicate with regularly had one.
Now the product is free and open but it has missed its opportunity to integrate itself into my routine. I think that Google might have lost a lot of community Evangelists on this one.
Re:So why should I care? (Score:3, Interesting)