A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave 197
rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."
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A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave
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Please repost your article. (Score:4, Informative)
Please repost your article on a site that doesn't use Vibrant's rollover advertising technology.
Given that Daniweb not only uses Vibrant's abusive rollovers but doesn't allow you to disable them without signing up, I'm going to blackhole their site in my DNS until they change that absurd policy.
Re:Please repost your article. (Score:5, Informative)
NoScript [noscript.net].
Re:Bandwidth and Hosting (Score:4, Informative)
Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
Nope, the wave protocol allows for email like hosting. Its not centralized at all other than the fact that Google will be the most popular wave provider for a long time.
Re:Can't See Comment Titles (Score:2, Informative)
Modded off-topic, sure, but Slashdot is a broken mess. Wish they'd stop trying to be cute with their useless ajax bullshit and just fix their fucking code. An ideal non-broken Slashdot should look and behave like this [imageshack.us].
Re:Please repost your article. (Score:2, Informative)
My solution:
1) Click on printable view
2) Immediately copy/paste into notepad
3) ???
4) Profit!
Re:Bandwidth and Hosting (Score:3, Informative)
Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.
I don't see the difference. Right now we use e-mail servers to centrally manage e-mail and they interact with other e-mail servers. Wave works the same way. Jabber works the same way. Wave just consolidates the two and adds some more features in.
Bandwidth. Every change, send character by character to whoever happens to have it open. That's a lot of 'real-time' bandwidth for this central location.
It's not so different from chat servers today. With the move towards video and audio chat, this will be the least of the real time bandwidth issue.
Especially with the concept of wave enabled blogs. If you blog hits DIGG, then the wave server will be sending out your edits to thousands of people simultaneously.
For most blogs this is more like sending it to your grandmother immediately. There are a few really popular blogs, but that's a niche issue.
I just wonder about the scalability of the hosting solution.
It's not so different from e-mail. The protocols are open and there is an OSS reference so the market should take care of the problem if it arises.
They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works.
I believe it actually uses an extended version of XMPP.
Re:Waste of time (Score:3, Informative)
Why does slashdot allow people to submit stories about their own blog posts?
Are you familiar with the Firehose? It's just how it works, don't complain about options, etc.. Clearly, someone thought this was interesting enough to get modded up to a level where The Editors noticed it and thought it was worthy (or, in this case, might incite enough bloodshed to become amusing).
...or, with even more cynicism:
1) submit ad-laden story to Slashdot
2) submit kick-back to editors
3) Profit!
Re:Can't See Comment Titles (Score:3, Informative)
If it's such a problem, browse in Low Bandwidth mode with NoScript turned on. Turns into a very nice website indeed with those options.
Re:Bandwidth and Hosting (Score:2, Informative)
They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works. But still, if this catches on, I see a future of new congestion problems.
It is XMPP Extension. http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec
Re:Give me THREADED multi-user chat. (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen the video?
That's what it does. Exactly.
You can split the thread into further sub-threads at any point, and also limit certain threads to a specific group of people.
Re:Can't See Comment Titles (Score:5, Informative)
I know it sucks, I get the same problem; but here's a quick-and-dirty work-around: Click the "Change" button, even without making any changes. The page re-post will cause the titles to magically appear.
-dZ.
Re:Rebuttle (Score:3, Informative)
* Key Stroke by Key Stroke View Could Be Annoying
Could be useful too. Turn it off if you don't like it. Another non-point.
Reading this point, I wondered what the guy does in meetings. You know, the real world kind of meetings, where a bunch of people are sitting in a room together, talking. Because, you see, when you speak in a meeting, the other attendees hear each word in real time. There is no backspace key.
The only potentially good point he made was at the very end, which is basically that nobody's really looking for an alternative to IM/email.
Re:Too integrated (Score:3, Informative)
Probably because, realistically speaking, it is. Non-advertising revenue makes up a tiny fraction of Google's overall earnings. Their most recent quarterly SEC filing [sec.gov] makes this plain: "Advertising revenues made up 97% [of our revenues] for the three months ended March 31, 2009." All the other stuff (like selling search appliances, GDocs licensing, and the like) is the other 3%.
Re:Too integrated (Score:3, Informative)
Google Wave is an XMPP (Jabber) [wikipedia.org] extension. Like XMPP, servers choose which other servers to federate [wikipedia.org] with. Also, communications will only touch servers which the wave's participants are connected to. Therefore, it is perfectly possible for a company to run its own Wave server(s) and keep internal communications within their control while allowing external communications through the same server.
In short, unlike someone using a Google account is invited to a wave or it is made public, Google can't see it.