Google Wave

[TheeXile]

http://wave.google.com/


Wiki


Discuss.

[Sharessa]

"The name is inspired by the Firefly television series in which a "Wave" is a video call. During the developer preview a number of references were made to the series, such as Lars Rasmussen replying to a message with "shiny", a word commonly used in the series to mean "cool", and the crash message of Wave being a popular quote from the series ("Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"). The names of the extensions spelly, linky and searchy are also an homage to the habit of Firefly's creator Joss Whedon to y-ify nouns/verbs into adjectives and then in turn use those as nouns."

Huh...

[TheeXile]

They want this to replace email, by the way.

[Gez]

Email + IM + wiki. Now you can edit other people's messages! This was obviously designed with retarded memes such as "disregard that, I suck cock" in mind. (Yeah, you can replay the history to see who wrote what, same as in wikis. And same as in wikis, 99% of the people will not bother with that 99% of the time.)

[TheeXile]

-snip-

[Jonathan]

I think it looks pretty cool. I'm glad Google are pushing HTML 5 and web apps forward, even if it's for selfish commercial reasons. I'd still rather see the open web triumph than for everyone to end up using Silverlight. I think how successful it is as an email replacement is going to depend very much on how enthusiastic non-techy companies are to adopt it. My instinct is, probably not much. Yeah, Email's been around forever and has some usability problems. But on the whole it works, people are comfortable with it, and it's very deeply embedded into business life. Switching to a system like Wave represents a pretty radical departure, that I don't think many companies will be willing to take the risk.

[TheeXile]

If they find a way to make email compatible with it, that might be different.

[GreyGhost]

All your wave are belong to us

I'll give it three years before being overtaken by another fad.

[Super Jamie]

Gez said:

DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS

It seems forums can do this as well.

Seriously though, did they just say "instant messaging" and "real-time spell/grammar check" in the one sentence? Only Google could come up with something this godlike.

I cbf watching the whole hour twenty video, but it seems like an interesting enough concept. I'm not sure if the whole ingrained traditional paradigms of email or IM can be replaced, but I'd like to be proven wrong, anything that makes the internet more interesting (read: not Twitter) is alright with me!

Mass props for the Firefly references too. If you haven't seen that series, I seriously suggest you do. Yet another great character-driven sci-fi series ended before its' time in place of lesser, empty pop culture garbage. See also: Terminator - The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

[Gez]

Super Jamie said:

It seems forums can do this as well. Also, "great character-driven sci-fi series" means "Summer Glau is in it".

It's not the same as editing someone else's posts. Someone who read the thread will know he hasn't read the quote before, so something's up.

[Snarboo]

So Google is banking on this replacing e-mail because it plagiarizes casually lifts some phrases from a dead scifi series that nerds pop boners over for some reason?

Edit:
I'd actually like to see how long a forum or messageboard with wiki style editing controls would last.

[AveryMaurice]

This is retarded and useless. We already some like that, its called discussion forums. Google just added shiny things to them. Why are they bothering with this? It will just be a huge amount add-on downloads for firefox and IE for a protocol that no one will use.

[Sharessa]

Snarboo said:

So Google is banking on this replacing e-mail because it plagiarizes casually lifts some phrases from a dead scifi series that nerds pop boners over for some reason?

Hey, Firefly was a seriously fucking awesome show.

This is just kind of weird, though.

[Snarboo]

I don't fault anyone for liking it because it was decent but I think people fawn too much over Whedon.

[Jodwin]

After watching the whole video the only possible problem I can foresee is if you can't toggle off editing for some waves, that might suck. But overall it has some interesting implications, and my biggest worry in the beginning of the presentation, that is, it would be based completely on Google's servers, was made moot when they got to the part that you can run it on your own servers and it'll be restricted to them as long as the wave's participants are based on that same server alone. Also, I guess you could make versions of Wave (as it's supposed to be open source) that doesn't allow participants from other servers. That way you could safely have full-fledged real time conversations/wikis/memos/whatever shared with a select group of people within the same organization.

The way they presented Wave, it really might create a lot of new tools for education* and business just as well as being a new flashy web app to waste your time on. Really, don't think of it as a "new email" or "new IM." Rather think of it as a flexible, extendable, real time, rich text application between chosen users with near infinite possible user case scenarios. Email and IM are just simply two of those scenarios, nothing more.



*I could imagine people using Wave as a tool for study peer groups, or for sharing notes, etc. Yeah, sure you can already do similar things with today's tools, but with Wave it ought to be easier.

[TheeXile]

Jodwin said:

But overall it has some interesting implications, and my biggest worry in the beginning of the presentation, that is, it would be based completely on Google's servers, was made moot when they got to the part that you can run it on your own servers and it'll be restricted to them as long as the wave's participants are based on that same server alone.

Yeah that had me worried too.

Though google certainly won't be getting short end of the stick with this technology, at least. I suspect alternate implementations elsewhere will lack key features compared to google's own implementation. They aren't releasing the whole thing open source, after all.

The way they presented Wave, it really might create a lot of new tools for education* and business just as well as being a new flashy web app to waste your time on. Really, don't think of it as a "new email" or "new IM." Rather think of it as a flexible, extendable, real time, rich text application between chosen users with near infinite possible user case scenarios. Email and IM are just simply two of those scenarios, nothing more.



*I could imagine people using Wave as a tool for study peer groups, or for sharing notes, etc. Yeah, sure you can already do similar things with today's tools, but with Wave it ought to be easier.

It's the sort of stuff we shoulda been using 10 years ago. :P

[Enjay]

Huh... Someone mention Firefly?

Oh, right, not really related.

Back to sleep.


ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

[deathbringer]

Seriously though, did they just say "instant messaging" and "real-time spell/grammar check" in the one sentence?

I guess the number of people wanting to suck somebody's coal is going to go up, then.

Google should focus more time on making Sketchup not shit. The video tutorials are all "hey look it's easy to make a house!", yeah shame that's about the only thing you can make without spending hours farting around (in which time you could just learn some other 3D program). Have a go at making a 50's classic car with fins and wrap around screens in it, not so easy!