Google Wave Reviewed

Michael_Curator writes "Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of Google's Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of what it's really like to use, unfiltered by Google's own programmers. Ben Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged that, it's 'probably the most advanced application in a browser that I've seen.' Wave is like giant Web page onto which users can drag and drop any kind of object, including instant messaging and IRC [Internet Relay Client] clients, e-mail, and wikis, as well as gadgets like maps and video. All conversations, work product and applications are stored on remote servers — presumably forever. 'It's like real time email. On crack,' he wrote. And unlike the typically minimalist Google UI, 'It feels a lot more like a desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser.'" User molex333 has already written a Slashdot app and shares his initial reactions here.

Comments

This may seem obvious to some, but...

[popo]

Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[93 Escort Wagon]

Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?

I always interpreted that phrase to mean "way more hyper and totally unpredictable". So in my mind, anyway, that's a "no".

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Master Moose]

He's probably talking about how lean it is.. Have you ever seen an obsese crack whore?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[AnonymousIslander]

Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?

A very good question indeed, perhaps you should smoke a few rocks and let us know whether or not things are better for ya...

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[pushing-robot]

Normally it means "bad" or "messed up", but I think in this case it's more "hyperactive". The author seems to be stating "if your email program could get high on cocaine, it would be like Google Wave."

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[omeomi]

It's a fairly common American expression, or at least it was. Generally anything on crack is something supercharged. Bigger, faster, better. I have no idea where the saying originated from. It's best not to think about it, I guess.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[RichardJenkins]

I think the implication is that "real time email" usually jittery, paranoid, and willing to do anything however depraved, demeaning or desperate for a hit of sweet sweet crack.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

you're right what he should have said is "on a whole lot of his friend's adderall"

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Tumbleweed]

Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?

It's like the word 'better', but on crack! It's whacked! It's dope! The roof is on fire! That's bad-ass! Just keepin' it real, dude. You should get with the times, and be a hep cat. Word.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Nerdfest]

The more appropriate expression might be 'on steroids'. If it was 'on crack', it would look like a MySpace page.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you'd tried crack you would understand

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Twinbee]

Well come on, it's just semantics in the end.

However, I like the idea of unifying existing protocols into one.

I wish the same would happen with HTML/Word/PDF files. One killer 'html/text/graphic/hyperlink' format which is light, but very powerful and flexible, and which is universally used.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[rhyder128k]

I wasn't really seeing her, it was more of an one-nighter.

Maybe the guy is a crack addict and he means that it's really really great program that he'd happily steal and lie to get some more of.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[42forty-two42]

Given how chaotic and unstable Wave is at the moment (based on my experiences with it anyway), I think "on crack" is a very good metaphor for the situation right now.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[omeomi]

Now that you mention it, it probably comes out of the fervor in the 80's over crack. Back then, the story was that it made people into these super-crazy super-strong unstoppable criminals. You could shoot a crack-head in the face 5 times back then, and they'd still lift up your police car and throw it across the street. From what I've heard, the punishment for crack possession is still far worse than it is for cocaine possession. And yes, I get my drug insight from NPR, so yes, I am a nerd.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Miseph]

Crack is, in essence, cocaine on steroids... and speed. And PCP.

In a lot of ways, crack really is the "all-American" drug, we took a decent import, then beefed the hell out of it by mixing it up with all sorts of other drugs and better living through science to make it stronger, faster, easier and cheaper and built one of the world's last unadulterated capitalist markets around it.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

One killer 'html/text/graphic/hyperlink' format which is light, but very powerful and flexible, and which is universally used.

You're kidding, right? Let's adhere to the standards that we have now, and at least get that right first. >_>

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Ihmhi]

Watch an episode of COPS. The odds are 1 to 3 that you'll see a criminal who is "On Crack".

You ever see one of those guys really doped up? They run around naked and play tag with police officers. Sometimes they try to jump fences or run through other people's houses.

So in short, "on crack" means "FUN!"

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it's because crack cocaine is much more powerful than cocaine.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Faster and out of control is more accurate ... you know ... like someone on crack cocaine. Since thats where it came from. ... Are you on crack?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a fairly common American expression, or at least it was. Generally anything on crack is something supercharged. Bigger, faster, better. I have no idea where the saying originated from. It's best not to think about it, I guess.

Might have originated from something being, "on acid".

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always took it to mean 'The first hit is free...'

But hey, I haven't blown a guy in a public restroom just to get my next hit, so what do I know? :D

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Jurily]

That's "on steroids". "On crack" means totally fucked up.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[stephanruby]

Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?

The "on crack" comment is so vague, it says a lot more about the reviewer than the technology being reviewed.

That being said, since I also participated in two Google events in which we were using the Google Wave technology, I'm going to give you my own personal review (which may be as bad as the initial review, it's mostly a disorganized brain dump at this point, so bear with me as well). I did agree to an NDA during those google events, these last couple of times you actually can't get in if you don't agree to one, but I don't think Google is the type to enforce it on me, especially since my review is mostly positive overall (even if it includes a few barbs).

First off, here is my description of Google Wave, it's a cross between a Wiki and an Instant Messenger (with some added capabilities that may not seem initially obvious to everyone, but that will seem completely obvious to power users of the wiki technology and power users of the instant messengers technology). And each Wave itself is the equivalent of a wiki page (if that makes any sense).

Now here is my first impression of Google Wave, which differs significantly from my overall final impression of it. Google Wave is buggy (even in Windows Chrome and Firefox, and even in Windows Safari which does support HTML 5 and which is supposedly faster, and I was advised not to use IE with it -- so I assume that this part is even more buggier still). The initial inbox interface looks rather busy and clunky (especially from a Company like Google, I just didn't expect an interface like that). Searching for your friends (who already have wave sandbox accounts) and adding them to your address book works only 90% of the time (although, that part does work 100% of the time if you go to your gmail address book that comes with your new wave sandbox account, you just have to know to use that workaround -- otherwise you just get frustrated by it especially since the interface doesn't give you back useful informative feedback that something went wrong). Also, the inbox doesn't always refresh (even on a blazing fast guest connection inside the googleplex campus). And initially, I was quite baffled by the wave inbox interface. I had created ten empty waves by mistake, that I didn't know how to delete (now, I know how thought, at least I think I would know how to delete them, I haven't tried it yet).

Where Google Wave shines however is in its actual use (even in its buggy alpha state, it's actually quite useful, I would totally use it if I could get my colleagues accounts), and it's in the actual wave itself (not the surrounding interface). I don't know how many we were, may be 150 or 200? May be 70% of us had laptops in front of us. May be 30 or 40% of us had the actual wave opened, others were doing something else on their laptops or had them semi-closed. And may be only 4 or 5 were taking actual notes (one or two were doing the bulk of the notes). The notes were excellent. Everything that was being said was transcribed live, "livewaving" that's what the google employees called it (just like for Twitter, the Google employees had many cutesy-cheesy names for everything wave was doing), and the notes/statements/questions said out lout during the presentations were clarified, corrected, rephrased, and formatted by two or three people (just a couple of lines above where they had been captured). There was no coordination whatsoever, people just added things wherever they felt they could contribute. Also, the initial attempt at coordination by the Google organizers was foiled, because they were too slow to create the group and start an official wave on their own, the participants already had a wave underway by the time they started -- so that became the official one by default.

At the same time the notes were being taken, there were a few more participants who started a couple of threads (within the wave itself, just at the bottom -- a couple of scroll

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[stephanruby]

So overall, I'd give Google Wave a five stars out of five.

And I should also mention, that although the Google Wave Inbox wave inbox didn't refresh reliably for me, the Wave itself (on the other hand) had no problem refreshing (even with all the simultaneous edits going on at the same time, that part actually performed flawlessly thru out).

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Yeef]

My understanding of the term was always that the speaker was supposed to be on crack, not the subject. Sort of like Jon Stewart's character in Half Baked. So Google Wave would be akin to experiencing email while on crack.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new Google wave / Google Epic overlords. (link related)

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[quadrox]

Thanks for the review, but I still have absolutely no clue what problem wave is supposed to solve. Would you mind clarifying?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[stephanruby]

Have you ever tried editing a document through back and forth emails? If so, that should cut down on that. It will never completely replace email, but it should help reduce the number of messages, and/or the number of threads you have in your inbox.

A wiki, or a google doc, could do that too, but not in real-time. And also, using a separate wiki, or a separate google doc, forces you to change context, so in a way -- it pulls those different ways of communicating into workspace/work flow -- so you're not forced to switch context every time you change content type (which can make you waste a lot of time).

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Antidamage]

I don't know if 'on crack' is supposed to imply things being better normally. I thought it meant they were over the top.

Anyway, I think Wave is one of the coolest things to happen in years. Here's how I'd like to use it, in the setting of indie game development:

- Art buddy takes time off his work to make a new animated character in FBX format, complete with skins in a prescribed format

- Adds it to the Art Resources wave. A wizard appears asking him a few questions and generates a class from a template to handle this new piece of art

- The Art Resources wave commits the art and code to Subversion

- The Codebase wave looks at Subversion, sees the testing version has been updated and checks out the new changes. A dedicated Visual Studio machine rebuilds and publishes the binary to the Builds wave for the testing team

- The XNA coder finishes his changes and updates his version with the new classes and artwork from Subversion. After some testing he marks this build for publication and the Builds wave is updated again.

- Artist and coder wonder how they ever had time to work before Google Wave.

It seems like it'd take a lot of the pain out of open source collaboration and even make it easier to get beta versions out for public testing while reaping in feedback.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[quadrox]

Alright... so it's a wiki that is quicker to collaborate on in real time. But if the others are not available for realtime collaboration or collaboration is not required at all - it has no advantage?

And isn't it more complicated to use then sending simple emails?

I'm not trying to be overly critic, but I'm just failing to see the reason for all the hype. I can think of a couple of situations where it seems something like this might have been useful, yes. But it's not exactly revolutionary or anything, is it?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It combines aspects of e-mail, wikis and instant messaging in a way that makes it practical to use in ways you wouldn't use any of the three separately, for instance the bot applications.
That makes it a potential game changer.
If you just focus on how you normally use wikis, it may be hard to see how instant collaboration isn't a lot more convenient for forming consensus with another person, or how setting up a private wave between a couple of persons with no more effort than sending an email isn't a lot easier than a wiki would be.
If you just want to use it as email, you just write the thing and add the recipients, just the same as you would with an email. And then one of them adds some comments, and you realize that, wow, this is better than email.

What makes it potentiality revolutionary is the prospect of being as easy to use as any of them, while retaining the features of all of them. IOW, a superset of functionality.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Steroids can be pretty up fucking.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/27/steroid-abusers-horr.html

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Ed Avis]

It means when you've tried it once, you'll want some more?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[ichimunki]

And how would that be any different from just using commit hooks in any old source control system? Any idea how much more/less work it will take to set up these "wizards" and code templates correctly in Wave, as opposed to, say, just building them in your IDE of choice?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

On steroids to me means your girlfriend dumps you for being a freak after workouts, and you go and blow your brains out with a shotgun in your car in front of your house, so again, no it's not exactly an enhancement.

But on crack is pretty f***ed up.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The "on crack" comment is so vague, it says a lot more about the reviewer than the technology being reviewed.

For most U.S. citizens, "on crack" is not vague at all, and is a common enough expression that its usage really doesn't say anything at all about the author to the readers.

As to the rest of your post, tl;dr. I honestly don't give a shit about Google Wave. I didn't care about blogs when they came out, I didn't care about myspace, I don't care about facebook, and I don't care about twitter. I have IRC, various IM clients, a couple forums, and my cell phone to communicate with friends. I don't feel the need to narcissistically post every day to day event of my life for all the world to see unfiltered (or through a filter that tries to create a false sense of my personality). The new generation of web users seems to just want to shout "LOOK AT ME!" over and over again until someone finally looks. It's depressing.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Saint Fnordius]

I always parsed "on crack" to refer to speed and (perceived) agility, and "on steroids" to refer to muscle and power. A program on crack is one that reacts so blazingly fast it's scary. A program on steroids is one that suddenly takes over so many other tasks you wonder how it got the muscles. Lean versus beefed up.

Reading TFH, I would say Google Wave is both. A system that has gulped down tonnes of steroids, but is smoking so much crack it still zips around (unless you have an older browser, in which case it loses balance and crashes into the walls).

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Eli Gottlieb]

That doesn't sound like crack, that sounds like PCP coupled with immortality. If you shoot a guy 5 times in the face and he still throws your car across the street, you've got a supervillain problem rather than a drug problem.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[mcvos]

I think they meant "on steroids".

But it's a stupid article anyway. They end with a seemingly interesting question that has already been answered at the original Google I/O demo.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[mcvos]

Generally anything on crack is something supercharged. Bigger, faster, better.

Are you on crack?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[gfreeman]

And by "bad" you mean good, right? Is "messed up" like "sick", which is also good?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[GooberToo]

Yes. Language pedants ruin almost every conversation they touch.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Ajaxamander]

Good luck explaining the hows and whys of subversion to your art team. Or getting them to use an IDE.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps it means innately irresistible... is that good or bad?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

MySpace page with conflicting audio and video automatically play on page load.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[stephanruby]

Revolutionary, no. Evolutionary, yes (although, I'm sure that some people will keep on being overly enthusiastic about Google Wave, hype is going to happen either way).

Also, if you accept my premise that Wikis and/or Google Docs can be very useful already, I think Wave improves on those two because it's far less Web-site-centric and less Document-centric than those are.

So for instance, if you're an Engineer as opposed to an HR employee in the same company, only a cross-section of your HR wiki may only be even relevant to you. And yet, a wiki is very much like a web site, its navigation must be very carefully thought out, and often it's often being supplemented with people emailing specific links to wiki pages -- to workaround the fact that the wiki is structured like a web site.

So in a sense, Google Wave integrates all of that. Google Wave is much more communication-centric as opposed to site-centric or page-centric. With Google Wave, you don't need to keep tabs on the Recent Changes of an entire Wiki site, and/or you don't need to subscribe to individual wiki pages each time you're interested in one (most wiki engines I've seen don't have elegant subscription-systems). And it's not like maintaining a large list of Documents, because over time the cross-section of Waves you've been invited too (or that you've started yourself) disappears from view if they haven't changed. So in that sense as well, Google Wave should help cut down on clutter.

Also, if you want to have a private side-conversation with someone on a Wave, Wave allows anyone to start a Private Wave within a Wave (without it being visible to everyone in the parent wave who weren't invited to it). That again, cuts down on clutter.

So a Wave can be a much more informal, organic, and even ephemeral, way of communicating. Google Wave, when finished, is even supposed to have an 'Off the Record' button. That button won't be full-proof. People will be able to override it if they want to, but basically pressing that button will prevent the Wave from being saved, being archived/versioned (otherwise, Wave will version every little change, which can be played back from a slider), and/or being sent to anyone else (although, like they said, Google has no intention of building DRM into Wave, which would be an exercise in futility (it runs so contrary to the underlying principles Wave is inspired from), but at least, this 'Off The Record' button would provide a reasonable way to have an informal conversation 'off the record' -- 'off the archive' -- so to speak).

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[iluvcapra]

Waves are persistent like emails, so the people working on it don't have to work on it at the same time, and the infrastructure records all of the actions that bring a wave to it's current state, so someone looking at it a few days later can hit a " playback" button (literally) and see every change every person made. Granted, you can do this now with Word to an extent, but not over the network using an open standard, and not in a way that is deeply integrated into your messaging system, with one server and some editors in a different server in federation with the first one.

That's the really NEW aspect of the thing. Its web interface is a lot like a live-updating Slashdot thread, but the magic is that wave essentially defines a protocol for multiple servers at different organizations collectively mutating and publishing such an object, in such a way that all the users, regardless of where they are, can see the changes a they happen. It's sortof like netnews, if nntp allowed live-editing of threads, and had rich text and media support, and saved every change ever made to any message.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks! This review is far better than TFA.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Twinbee]

Funny how your 'disorganized brain dump' was actually pretty interesting to read and probably more so in some ways than had it been organized. Perhaps that kind of writing captures more nuances etc. (being so fresh in your head maybe).

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[stephanruby]

For most U.S. citizens, "on crack" is not vague at all, and is a common enough expression that its usage really doesn't say anything at all about the author to the readers.

Just to clarify, I didn't mean to say that the author was "on crack", but I do stand by my statement that the language we use to describe something can say a lot about ourselves. If that second part offends you, I certainly don't have a problem with that (although, I could have certainly been more diplomatic about my comment, that's true).

As to the rest of your post, tl;dr. I honestly don't give a shit about Google Wave. I didn't care about blogs when they came out, I didn't care about myspace, I don't care about facebook, and I don't care about twitter. I have IRC, various IM clients, a couple forums, and my cell phone to communicate with friends. I don't feel the need to narcissistically post every day to day event of my life for all the world to see unfiltered (or through a filter that tries to create a false sense of my personality). The new generation of web users seems to just want to shout "LOOK AT ME!" over and over again until someone finally looks. It's depressing.

Perhaps, the word 'wave' might be communicating the wrong connotations to you. Google wave has nothing to do with waving to others. And the part that I said about Twitter is more about the cutesy-cheesy names, Google wave has nothing to do with Twitter (although, I'm sure someone has probably written a bot posting his waves to Twitter, becoming just another Twitter client is not Google Wave's primary aim). Google wave is more like email, or more like private wiki pages. It will definitely be used publicly, but most of it will be done privately between individuals -- just like email is done -- and for serious reasons (at least, as much as email is currently being used for serious reasons) -- and not for social networking -- nor for any facebook/fake-friendly types of reasons (I'm actually with you on that).

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Antidamage]

Exactly. The whole point of Wave is the seamless convergence of many different tools. I personally wouldn't mind setting up some basic code templates if it allows my artists to add resources and trigger builds themselves. I wouldn't envision the template being anything more than a way of filling out a few properties.

Not to mention I'm not that great at Subversion myself, I've only just started using it and I'm not going to be extending it myself. If I want to build a house, I'm damn sure not going to forge the tools myself or cast my own nails.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[Loyola Nerd]

It came from the experience one gets when smoking crack. i.e. crystallized cocaine in the form of rocks that goes into a pipe... I thought crack was a common drug, but I guess not?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[pinkushun]

It's a bad reference on the reviewers part. If you've smoked crack before, you'll know this - He should put that in his pipe and smoke it!

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[mcvos]

Sounds like it'd be a lot more reliable as a desktop app. Have it organise your inbox the way a regular mailreader does, but instead of emails (or perhaps even as well as emails?), the inbox contains these funky IM/wiki-like conversations.

If I understand correctly, it's actually Jabber underneath, so there's no need to restrict it to a web interface at all.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[omeomi]

Yeah, I know what it is. I was saying I don't know how the expression got to be so commonplace.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[idlemachine]

If I understand correctly, it's actually Jabber underneath, so there's no need to restrict it to a web interface at all.

I believe that in the developer preview video it was mentioned that Waves is more the set of protocols than any specific implementation. I expect the first wave (ahaha no pun intended) of client apps will be platform-specific desktop variants of the browser-based original.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[badkarmadayaccount]

Inter-IDE integration?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[badkarmadayaccount]

Does anybody see google wave in slashdot's future?

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[iluvcapra]

The gotcha in the wave model, it seems to me, is the permissions system. As it is, if for example a Slashdot thread were a Wave, you would have everyone who was a reader of the wave be an editor of the original posting. Something they've handwaved over in all of the presentations has been that nothing in the text of a wave can apparently be "protected" or "locked." (Though you probably could write an extension that accomplished this.)

There's a real impedence mismatch between waves and a site like slashdot, and in the demos they use "robots" and extensions to bridge the gap to an extent, just as they do with "twitter waves/twaves," but in the demo it seems a lilttle kludgy. The best example of the system working well was their demo of the "bloggy" robot, but even then you could see how the permission/user identification system of people within the wave domain and outside the wave domain could cause problems.

Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...

[LostAlaska]

Perhaps all they meant was that Google has a crack team of scientists working on the project, and that got mangled into a group of crackhead scientists working on the project. Just a thought.

Great!

[csueiras]

Google is probably one of the most if not the most innovative companies in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if they have just created the next generation of communication!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed! The insightful mod is the funniest part.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

Google is probably one of the most if not the most innovative companies in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if they have just created the next generation of communication!

Are you kidding? Again, Google has cobbled together existing technology and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years. Why create new technology when you can duct tape existing things together?


While I'm teetering on the brink of ranting, so Google is releasing an OS, while they continue to overload the web browser with javascript and flash in an effort to turn it into an operating system. Again, we've already done this. We have these tools already. It's called a Native Application. Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app. Maybe some QT/OpenGL? Writing all these applications for the browser is putting a square peg in a round hole.

I want my flying cars. I was promised flying cars......

Re:Great!

[John Hasler]

> Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app.

How is that going to get them more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers?

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

> Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app.

How is that going to get them more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers?

well-played sir, well played.

Re:Great!

[RichardDeVries]

Google has cobbled together existing technology

This is the mother of all 'get off my lawn' arguments. Using existing technology is what brings us most innovations. In fact, using existing technology is what every programmer does.

... and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years.

SMTP is in beta?
I've only seen the demovideo and done a bit of reading. The ideas behind wave are innovative, ambitious and pretty well thought through. If wave becomes a success, it will take years before it's massively deployed. It might also take years to fail spectacularly, either through bad development decisions, or just through failing to come up with the killer-app.
But to bash it now is stupid. Google is doing this the right way. They're following a vision that might be wrong, or might not be what you're looking for. But it will be open-sourced, so you can create your own wave services. And it doesn't have to be inside a browser, as far as I understand it.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

This is the mother of all 'get off my lawn' arguments. Using existing technology is what brings us most innovations. In fact, using existing technology is what every programmer does.

I'm really not flaming you, but you missed my points almost entirely. Google isn't simply "using" existing technology - they are repackaging existing technologies. Outlook with Groove was doing "Google Wave" 7 years ago, albeit in a win32 app. Google is using the web browser as a proxy for software, essentially trying to get the write-once,run-anywhere grail that java had as a goal.


A web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory to view my open tabs - but FF 3.5 does frequently because of all the JS that it's running. It's one thing to evolve a technology(Web, html, other 2.0 synonyms), quite another to bastardize it into a swiss army knife.

Re:Great!

[buchner.johannes]

Google is probably one of the most if not the most innovative companies in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if they have just created the next generation of communication!

Are you kidding? Again, Google has cobbled together existing technology

I think that might be the "innovation". Also, why do innovations have to be perfect suddenly?

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

The don't need to be perfect - they just need to be substantially different in a productive way.

Re:Great!

[Norsefire]

A web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory to view my open tabs

If you don't like it, don't use it. While you sit around telling kids to get off your lawn the rest of us will bask in the new technology that's on offer.

Re:Great!

[gmuslera]

Are you kidding? Again, Google has cobbled together existing technology and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years. Why create new technology when you can duct tape existing things together?

If something taught us SMTP is that is not panacea, there is a big hole in that specification and is called "real time" (well, if you want, add spam to the mix). Wave goes directly to the heart of it, having communication between one or several people (like smtp), but in real time, adding authentication, easy to use and powerful web interface, multimedia and more things that will be disclosed/developed in time. And takes on instant messaging/xmpp if you want too, adding things that are more from smtp realm.

Could had done it mixing and matching existing protocols? Maybe yes, maybe not. And maybe those alternatives dont have the flexibility needed for wild evolution that this could have.

While I'm teetering on the brink of ranting, so Google is releasing an OS, while they continue to overload the web browser with javascript and flash in an effort to turn it into an operating system. Again, we've already done this. We have these tools already. It's called a Native Application. Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app. Maybe some QT/OpenGL? Writing all these applications for the browser is putting a square peg in a round hole.

Considering how safe proved to be the most used operating system around, taking most of the responsibility into something that they could control and fix is not a very bad move. Native Applications could be faster (faster than all the push google and others had done to have a very fast javascript engines, but not for so much now), but could pass easily the ball to the underlying operating system, and of course, not be future proof (future as in other architectures at the very least, both because be totally new or gains more popularity alternative ones).

And maybe you could be right... for local, very cpu intensive applications. But for writting internet applications building them over existing internet clients (i.e. browser, you have there all the portability, all the security, etc) looks reasonable.

Re:Great!

[lena_10326]

"Cobbling together", ahem, building applications by reusing existing protocols and formats is a good thing--not a bad thing. Also, I'm not sure why you're associating this particular app with an OS in a browser because if you watch the preview video it's clearly a collaboration and communication application, but.. anyway...

I thought the goal was to run these apps anywhere while maintaining the same user experience regardless of OS and browser, yet feature lightweight on the fly downloads. Getting users to download a native application and keeping it instantly updated is a big hassle. Have you ever had to deal with writing software that executes on a variety of hardware, OS versions, libraries, and JVM versions? Have you had to deal with ensuring a critical software update gets quickly deployed to millions of installations? I doubt it. A centralized, remote software platform implemented on web standards is easy to deploy and keep updated (by comparision). It also reduces the installation footprint required on a user's machine (such as junking up the registry, etc).

Even considering google OS as a complementary offering, I think this dev team clearly wants deep accessibility and platform independence and not be limited to deploying on their own OS. That's very difficult to accomplish with native apps (Java or C based).

You can complain if you want I suppose, but stuff like this is progress.

Re:Great!

[bonch]

You touched on my biggest reason for not buying into the hype about web applications. People are desperate to create another layer in the system via the web browser, encouraging developers to venture forth into a GUI-less world like the MS-DOS days where everyone must develop UI toolkits and other APIs from scratch, even though there are desktop APIs developed 20 years ago that were already written to do this stuff.

If the internet is supposed to be an app platform, why not develop a remote app delivery protocol for running native applications? Why rely on a web browser, which was first developed to view static, magazine-like pages that have links to other pages? That gets you thinking about other things that were supposed to deliver cross-platform remote apps in the past, like Java. But it didn't take over.

Re:Great!

[fabs64]

"instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago " which lesson in particular are they ignoring?

As for the thick app argument, why do you care? Seriously, if the solution works it works. The toggle switch guys scoffed at the punch card guys, the punch card guys scoffed at the interactive asm editor guys, the asm guys scoffed at the C guys, the C guys scoffed at the Java guys, the Java guys scoff at the Ruby/Python/PHP/JS guys.
You don't see the trend?

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that if all of those tabs were individual traditional native applications that they wouldn't have the same storage requirements? The platform that the code runs on doesn't change the problem that the software solves and therefore it's unlikely that the code would be radically different in terms of resource needs.

Re:Great!

[bursch-X]

The automobile was invented by Karl Benz using existing technology, that didn't make it less of an innovation. The wheel was invented using existing technologies (wood carving, punching holes into things etc.), but... get the gist? It's of the innovative use of these technologies in different ways, or the combination and application of known technologies in unexpected places or ways that makes innovation.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

Are you saying that if all of those tabs were individual traditional native applications that they wouldn't have the same storage requirements?

Exactly correct. Open firefox into google apps' spreadsheet then open MS excel. I just did and excel took ~21 MB of ram and FF used over 100 MB of ram. Running apps in a browser is adding another layer of work the hardware has to do: you're introducing inefficiencies.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

If the internet is supposed to be an app platform, why not develop a remote app delivery protocol for running native applications? Why rely on a web browser, which was first developed to view static, magazine-like pages that have links to other pages? That gets you thinking about other things that were supposed to deliver cross-platform remote apps in the past, like Java. But it didn't take over.

There is one, it's called X11. =)

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

You missed the point entirely!! REUSE IS A GOOD THING PROVIDED YOU BUILD ON THE FOUNDATION. Google doesn't reuse ideas or technology to create new things, they just repackage and recycle existing technology. Pagerank was the last innovation they had.

Re:Great!

[lena_10326]

I don't see how the design and implementation of 1st generation browsers applies when assessing the quality or correctness of the current browser generation. The original browser concept morphed into a general content delivery system. We got there by expanding the definition of "content" to include dynamic content generated on the server-side. Then it expanded again to include client-side generated content (animated images, streaming audio and video, javascript, java applets, flash). Then once again to include DOM aware applications capable of modifying in-page structure and styling (primarily javascript). It was then that the explosion of Web 2.0 apps began. Saying that the browser should not implement these things is like saying it should not support images, or pipelining, or compression, or streaming audio, because originally it didn't.

Re:Great!

[rossifer]

What you're not seeing is Google's strategic intent (I work for Google, but this stuff is public).

Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on. The hardware is pretty much commodified already. Plenty of competitors and the profit margins are razor thin. Next levels are the OS and the applications. These are not yet commodified due to Microsoft's aggressively maintained monopoly. Contrary to common knowledge, Microsoft's real monopoly is in the Office file formats. From that, they've levered a monopoly into basic individual productivity applications and then (with Apple's cooperation) the operating system. They are also a serious player in second-generation collaboration tools (extensions to basic email).

In order to reduce Microsoft's war chest and eliminate their competitiveness, Google seeks to lower the profit margin on everything Microsoft currently produces at a profit (Windows and Office). So they produce a cheaper operating system, cheaper productivity applications, and cheaper collaboration tools (ideally free to the typical user). Google doesn't need to make money (though breaking even would be nice), Google just needs to apply pressure to Microsoft to cut their revenues/profits and the strategic goals are being met.

Writing apps that run on Windows? Doesn't help Google very much (though SketchUp and Picasa and a few other things are native apps).
Writing protocols that run on any machine? Helps Google a lot.
Writing web applications that use those protocols and run on any machine? Helps Google a lot.

Look at the bigger picture. Google is acting extremely rationally here.

As for whether Wave is innovative or not, I don't think you've tried it and are speaking without informing yourself. Wave is to email as email is to snail mail (single addressee, no broadcast, etc.). Wave tackles the problem of a widely CC:'d email with an attached Word or Excel document (two threads of changes: one in the email thread, one in the document) (multiple obsolete copies of the document available) (possible confusion and delay as people are added to the thread and have to re-read the history duplicated in most of the recent emails). Wave creates a "place" for this discussion/collaborative authoring to happen and then let's everyone bring whatever they want to help out. Wave is not email++ (which is what Outlook and Gmail are).

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

This isn't a coke vs. pepsi thing. I can run MS excel with 20 megs of ram. Google spreedsheet in firefox takes over 100 megs of ram. An ftp socket and script to upload my excel file somewhere for sharing doesn't account for 80 megs worth of space complexity: 400% more resources than the thick client app! Once more, someone could have a macro in excel that does the uploading with one-click, so grandma can do it, and maybe you'll see 21 megs of ram used. I just don't understand why we aren't see new and DIFFERNT types of software instead of office applications, photo editors, audio editors, 3d games, and anything else you've used before appear on the web, but with Social 3.0!


I'm all about the right tool for the right job: I don't care who makes it as long as it works well, is reliable and efficient. Google does a lot of things, none particularly well, sans advertising; Wolfram even has better search then they do and I really to hate to say this, but Bing has decent results. (i still default to google search though)

Re:Great!

[lena_10326]

You missed the point entirely!! REUSE IS A GOOD THING PROVIDED YOU BUILD ON THE FOUNDATION.

Now you're talking gibberish. So, HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript are not considered foundational tools? Odd. I would rather you point out their design or implementation flaws (there are many) rather than make obviously untrue silly statements. You can say the foundation is poorly implemented, but you cannot argue that these tools are not foundational.

Google doesn't reuse ideas or technology to create new things, they just repackage and recycle existing technology. Pagerank was the last innovation they had.

Uhhh.. Map Reduce? By the way, an automotive store doesn't create new things nor do they innovate yet they're important.

Re:Great!

[sillycibin]

Do you not get the point that by running in a browser, it essentially runs anywhere? Linux, Mac, Windows, future smartphones and MIDS. Further, by running in the browser, the application will always be the most current version. You won't have people running outlook version x, y, and z. Social communication or whatever you want to call it is a huge area of growth and a direction the internets is going. Would you rather have Google or Facebook the steward? Google very much tries to be open and "not evil." I honestly don't get the Google bashing.

Re:Great!

[Ortega-Starfire]

>a web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory to view my open tabs

Hmm. 512MB of ram should be enough for any web browser?

If it bothers you that much though, just go to your about:config page and edit the

browser.cache.memory.capacity

key to however much ram you think your browser should use.

Re:Great!

[VGPowerlord]

Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app.

How is that going to get them more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers?

The corollary to that is what exactly does it offer to users?

I have this great application that allows me to drag and drop things ("applications") where I want them on the screen. It's called "Windows" and if you don't like it, there's several similar applications called "OSX," "GNOME," and "KDE" that do the same thing.

Right now, my chain goes:
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Application
or
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Virtual Machine -> Application
Google Wave is several abstractions farther down the chain:
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Browser -> Virtual Machine -> Google Wave -> Application

Each step along the chain takes a performance hit.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

That was a good read - thanks for sharing the insight. I honestly didn't look at the POV of google reducing profit margins on its competitor's services, that it offers, in order to squeeze them out. They get a 2for: more customers and fewer competitors. Smart move really.

I do want to share the fact that I haven't used Wave, you are correct. Based on your description of Wave and what I perceived it to be from reading articles and seeing demos, I am still correct in my analysis. Here is an old writeup of Groove before MS was involved. MS eventually bought it and well, it is what it is. The point being that all that integration and synchronization you described was done, integrated with MS word and Outlook, 7 years ago.

Based on your description of Google's strategy I can't help but notice they're trying to pull people away from, in general, a thick-client model. Even PCs, hell even Notebooks, are too thick for the cloud. I can see Google wanting access to light-weight devices: phones, etc. Perhaps call them "Thin" clients? Maybe the could will one day have a way of allocating(sharing) time among all these light-weight devices, giving each just the amount of resources it needs.

By now you're realized that this time sharing model is a mainframe, just like we had 40 years ago. Please don't misunderstand, I comprehend that things move in waves/cycles - my beef comes from us(the industry) not innovating this time around. When I see people call a design or technology "revolutionary" and I've seen this same feature-set before(I'm only 30) it honest-to-god makes me wonder why there are people that act like this is brand new stuff.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

great, so it can thrash the disk when GWT needs to dynamically create 20k objects for my spreadsheet....... =)

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

HTML is foundational - Flash is not

JS is foundational - GWT is not



And using your automotive example, people don't think that because the store is stocking a new brand of motor oil they invented it, or even that it's the best oil there is.

Re:Great!

[fabs64]

I'm not sure how bolding makes your point, I didn't say it was a coke vs. pepsi thing I was saying it was a grandpa vs grandson thing.

It uses 400% more resources, big whoop. 9 iterations of moore's law and that amount of resources is just as negligible as the office client is now, let alone *manageable* which is the important number and where 100mb squarely sits at the moment.
The *difference* the "magic sauce" is specifically in the automatic collaboration and portability enabled by the server-side nature. Whether it will be revolutionary or not time will tell but claiming it's just the same as before seems to me like sticking your fingers in your ears.

Wolfram alpha is kind of interesting, I've yet to coax it into answering a question I actually wanted the answer to though, traditional search engines do that for me every day though they do make it seem deceptively simple.

I'd still like to know what lesson we learnt from SMTP that wave hasn't attempted to address.

Re:Great!

[TheMeuge]

Superb analysis. Please mod parent up.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

And the game programmers are always two iterations behind. In the heyday of C, the games were all assembly. In the heyday of assembly we just filled a tank with punch cards and swam around in it. Nasty paper cuts, but kids are gonna be kids.

Going back further...when punch cards were big, the kids would just play around on Jacquard looms. If memory serves, this was the reason for the first workplace safety law.

Re:Great!

[derGoldstein]

Google Wave is several abstractions farther down the chain: Operating System -> Windowing System -> Browser -> Virtual Machine -> Google Wave -> Application

Each step along the chain takes a performance hit.

In their minds it's more like:
Chrome OS -> Google Wave -> Application

But then, that really translates into:
Linux -> Chrome OS (windowing + browser) -> V8(or whatever in the future) -> Google Wave -> Application
...and that's on a Netbook.

But if they get it responsive and functional enough, no one will care.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

My underlying point is that Moore's law won't help this because Moore's law assumes we're moving in a single direction: forward. We spent time writing software to build widgets. We made it good and fast, and hardware got faster and the widget software got even faster and more robust. Moore's law help in an ancillary fashion, separate from the progress the software makes.


Now, we're recreating the widget software from scratch and losing all those improvements we built over the years, just because we can. Not only that, the new software is slower on day one because, despite our bleeding-edge hardware, we added many layers of tools(browser, JS runtimes, etc.) that we need to use to get 10% of the functionality. Eventually this iteration of our widget software will improve to the point that people forgot all about that old version, but the reality is the new version, even though it's as fast as the old version and has all its features, and then some, but has large amounts of wasted time invested. I can write a spreedsheet for my PS3 - doesn't make it a good idea. Some people will think it's cool and find a use for it though....


And SMTP? The point was SMTP has things that could be done better, but we don't need to address them: that's not what SMTP is for. SMTP does what it was made for very well, as does RTMP, HTTP, FTP and VNC. Take those protocols, spin some code, and you can screenshare, video/audio conference, send email, chat and share documents. Security? Tunnel the sockets.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh quit whining, Ram is cheap, and you are substituting a native app for an existing app. While I don't think Javascript/CSS/HTML apps are the holy grail here are some good things about the apps:

- Completely sandboxed so you don't have to worry about anything running rampant on your system, especially systems that are inherently single user
- More portable, it is much easier to tweak your applications to the other main stream browsers and engines than it is generally is to abstract your C/C++ code to accommodate Windows/X/OSX/etc and it also saved a lot of time
- Like I said RAM is cheap and even on netbooks you will usually have a boatload of ram and like any sort of implementation, it can be abused (See Slashdot heavy handedness of AJAX and javascript utilities)

I mean with a lot of the javsscript frameworks around like GWT, optimized javascript is a trivial thing.

I think your sentiments are rooted in your own personal preferences rather than whether the technology is useful or not. As another poster stated, this is open source so it one's usage of it doesn't have to depend on Google. Don't you think that most progressions of technology is made by cobbling together existing tools to make something else useful?

Re:Great!

[BitZtream]

Yes, that the toggle switch guys were probably right.

Trends like the one you're pointing out are silly to begin with, but that does not mean that there isn't a point where it should end. Just because the first round of guys weren't dead on right with the next level doesn't mean they got the idea wrong, it means they were premature, something I'm sure you're well versed in.

Re:Great!

[ahabswhale]

Your reductionist argument is pathetic. From the looks of it, you have no fucking clue what Wave really is, and you certainly have no clue as to why it's important. Do everyone a favor and stick to commenting on things you actually understand.

Re:Great!

[whoop]

I see your problem, you're using Firefox. That's what's eating your RAM, sir. Google spreadsheet in Chrome: 33MB.

Running apps from your desktop adds another layer in your file storage. If you leave your desk, you have to bring your files with you to use them.

It's a trade-off. Desktop apps have their purpose, web apps do as well. Find what suits YOUR needs and use the best choice. No one is forcing you to go one way or another, you are free to keep Excel, Word, etc. Calm down. Breathe.

There. All is better.

Re:Great!

[linhares]

>a web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory to view my open tabs Hmm. 512MB of ram should be enough for any web browser? If it bothers you that much though, just go to your about:config page and edit the browser.cache.memory.capacity

Perhaps if you close the tabs with pr0n that may help

Re:Great!

[rilister]

thanks for that: what you say sounds believable, but a little spooky. The way you frame it Google's strategy is primarily about weakening competitors (specifically Microsoft). Where does this strategy end? Who does Google intend to target after Microsoft? What is the actual value of this?

What you're describing sounds like a corporate sociopath...

Re:Great!

[Allicorn]

A web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory

A word processing app should never come on more than one floppy disk.

Games should not be in 3D.

Computers do not need sound cards goshdarnit!

Gah... change!

Re:Great!

[fabs64]

Hey, maybe you're right. Maybe we've reached the endgame as far as computing abstractions go... But I doubt it.

You'll find few people who've done significant development with multiple generations of languages who don't prefer the later ones. This is because it makes *them* more productive. Google writing a spreadsheet as a web app might absolutely murder the hardware and consume resources like a madman, but I'm betting there was a lot less developer effort put into that cross-platform app than say openoffice.org.

Of course there will always be the speed freaks who prefer to develop at lower levels of abstraction and that's fine, they have a different goal to the majority of developers but I'm sure glad they're the guys who write the kernel I use daily, where spending an extra 40 hours development time for slight performance advantages actually makes sense.

Hmm. That got quite rambling.

Re:Great!

[bennomatic]

A web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory to view my open tabs

Well, apparently Bill Gates didn't really say it, but here you are on record, saying that 512 MB should be enough for anybody's browser needs.

Good thing that your /. ID isn't PII, or people would be able to attribute it to you and you'd be heckled for life.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but did Outlook with Groove, 7 years ago, allow all traffic to pass through a server, where it can be processed, enabling (for example) a Russian speaker to speak in Russian, while an English speaker replies in English, and each sees a translation of the other's words, live? And that done through a server-side statistical translation model which is based on a huge dataset that was simply nonexistent 7 years ago, and is probably too large to download to your machine even today?

If you view Wave as "email integrated with chat", then yes, nothing new here. But that view is pretty short-sighted, and Wave is so much more than that.

Re:Great!

[stop bothering me]

I think that The Programmer Hierarchy needs an update.

Tho Ruby programmers still consider themselves superior to everyone else.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I read that right? You're saying, as a Google employee, that it's public knowledge that Google releases free stuff in order to stifle Microsoft's competitive possibilities?

Re:Great!

[fabs64]

Lack of inferiority doesn't necessarily imply superiority :-)

Personally I'm currently scrambling to go from a RoR project to a horrible C/BASIC/Canvas based ETL *thingy*. As always it's more about the project/how long you've been on it/what stage it's in than the specific technology.

Re:Great!

[lena_10326]

Wave is open source implemented in JS, XML, and HTML5. Not Flash. Secondly, GWT is open source written in Java and Javascript. Why in the world would you expect google's application library (slash Java->Javascript converter) to be "foundational" (as in used by everyone, everywhere)? That word implies something like W3C specification standards. It's a freakin application library. Lastly, writing some core functionality and bundling it into AWT and then REUSING that in a web application doesn't count as code reuse? Wtf. I suspect this is more about hating Google than anything else.

Still doesn't sound like cobbling together at all. Sounds like solid software design and implementation.

Re:Great!

[rossifer]

First of all, it's very difficult for corporations to not be sociopathic, but in my experience, Google management does try to avoid most of the pathological problems of modern corporations. "Don't be evil" has been getting pretty rough treatment in the press, but from my inside perspective, the whole company perks up and pays very close attention if it looks like the company might be reneging on that statement. Upper management keeps on trying to be transparent, which also helps a lot.

In this case, the behavior is a rational response to an aggressive competitor known for doing underhanded things to eliminate competition. I don't mean to make excuses, as Google's behavior is not defensive in nature, but in the (sometimes, occasionally) free market, competition is rough business and Google is willing to step up, even if our culture does put some big ethical boundaries around what we will do. Microsoft has been famously big on much shadier tactics. Starting acquisition talks with competitors to get strategic information, then screwing them over. Google won't do that.

The value of Google's behavior is a situation where the consumer spends less and less for more capabilities until they only have to pay for the marginal value of the hardware to do just about anything a computer can do.

Next sub-question: who's at risk? Without needing to ask anyone inside Google, any organization who can throttle or put a toll on Google's services is at risk. Speculatively, telecommunications companies, mobile carriers, governments, etc. are all vulnerable to various tactics intended to minimize the chance that they'll be able to cash in on or otherwise interfere with how Google makes money.

Re:Great!

[FalcDot]

That's not quite what I read into that post: "Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on."

The reason for this is simple: every Google consumer must first have a PC and an Internet connection (ignoring Android for now). So, to have as many customers as possible, Google must first make sure as many people as possible have a PC and an Internet connection. The best way to achieve that is to make these items both as cheap and as attractive as possible.

Thus, it isn't about weakening competitors. Microsoft does NOT want to sell as many copies of Windows as possible, it wants to earn as much profit as possible. At some price point, reducing the price by 1% might only earn MS 0.5% more customers, so to them, going below this price is not a good move. But, every customer that Microsoft 'ignores' in this way is almost always also lost to Google (and every other software producer).

So, in order to maximize its own potential consumer base (= potential profits), Google must put pressure on Microsoft to allow even more people into the software marketplace. How? By changing the perceived value of OSes and office packages, also known as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If I can get an OS and an office suite for free, why would I buy MS stuff? Well, if the free office package can't read the dominant file format, that's a huge increase to my TCO. If the free package also has a bunch of useful elements not present in the other one, then that might balance things out.

Google's aim is to drive down the TCO of a typical computer setup, including OS and office tools and then make their profit on additional software.
Microsoft's aim is to drive down the TCO of a typical computer WITHOUT OS and office tools and then make their profit on those items.

So yes, Google is directly aiming at Microsoft, but that in and of itself is not their strategy, it's just a simple fact that they cannot both win in the current situation.

Re:Great!

[rossifer]

Commodify everything the customer needs to use your product. This is taught in business school 101. That Google is pursuing such a strategy is not newsworthy. It would be newsworthy if a company stacked with this much brainpower wasn't aware of such a strategy and making sure that their competition was on it's toes. Microsoft, for their part, argues quite correctly that Windows and Office have many more features than the oversimplified little trinkets that Google is putting out. We'll just have to wait and see what the market really wants (which is the whole point).

Is Google using our current dominance of search to distort other markets? I don't think so. Linux was already free and being used by netbook makers, and nobody will be coerced into using Chrome OS. Firefox and Safari and Opera are all free so Chrome is just another free browser. Even search is a pretty precarious monopoly. Someone comes out with a better search (and Microsoft is trying very, very hard: look how fast Bing changed from sucky to pretty interesting) and the masses will shift just as quickly as everyone abandoned altavista back in the day.

Ultimately, the question of whether Google is levering an arguable search monopoly into other markets is a question for lawyers to answer. I certainly don't see it. Google really is trying to make a profit in Apps and Gmail and will move in that direction for Chrome and Chrome OS as they mature.

Re:Great!

[rs79]

" Right now, my chain goes:
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Application
or
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Virtual Machine -> Application
Google Wave is several abstractions farther down the chain:
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Browser -> Virtual Machine -> Google Wave -> Application "

Yeah.

What I want is:

BIOS --> that shit they had in minority report

Re:Great!

[siyavash]

It's the problem of genes, sadly we can not pass knowledge to our children by genes. So things go into cycles. They have to reinvent the wheel all over again and they think it's new... because they don't know enough history.

And I fully agree with everything you say, this is no innovation. I can not understand why not use a thick client either where we have EVERY good tool and developed components which work well... but no, we have to remake those in html+javascript instead, buggy crap... humanity tends to not learn from the past generation too much, hence eventhough we have super fast CPUs... we still have no flying cars.

Re:Great!

[bonch]

Wave is to email as email is to snail mail (single addressee, no broadcast, etc.).

Oh, please. No offense, but this is goofy marketing hype.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why create new technology when you can duct tape existing things together?

Because it's cheaper, it get products to market quicker, and it uses proven, tested tech. Never forget Netscape? In other words, it's very, very good business.

We have these tools already. It's called a Native Application. Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app.

You need to get your head out of the 80s and 90s. They're gone. Forever.

Writing all these applications for the browser is putting a square peg in a round hole.

You're ignoring three huge benefits of web-based apps: distribution, maintenance, and platform independence. When your audience for an app is anyone with a browser, and your distribution costs are, in effect, zero, then that's an attractive business proposition. And maintenance is cheap too, which directly reduces support costs.

Re:Great!

[LKM]

So what? That's what we've been doing regularly in since the Apple ][. We're trading efficiency for abstraction.

Re:Great!

[LKM]

Outlook isn't free, and it's not a standard. I can't install it on my friends' computers. It's never going to amount to anything outside of the Enterprise.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're not seeing is Google's strategic intent (I work for Google, but this stuff is public).

Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on.

That isn't what commodify means! And heaven only knows what you mean by "commodify of".

The rest of your post is gibberish. A litany of non sequiturs.

It doesn't bode well for Google that they employ illiterates. Being in the communication market and all.

Re:Great!

[severoon]

I agree with everything you've said...except for the punch card guys. Screw the punch card guys, they deserved every scoff they got. Screw them!

Re:Great!

[rs79]

"SMTP is in beta?"

who cares it's a crap protocol written by a psych major that was barely appropriate for the glass crt 24x80 world and had to be extended bizarrely to do anything useful and took 20 years to get a decent daemon on certain platforms.

maybe wave isn't the end all be all, maybe it's the multics that causes unix to be born or maybe wave will be the shizzle.

the sooner i can break away from this spam infested, made worse by anti-spam (oh look the worst of both worlds) nightmare of 1976 technology, the better.

Re:Great!

[rs79]

"If something taught us SMTP is that is not panacea, there is a big hole in that specification and is called "real time" (well, if you want, add spam to the mix). Wave goes directly to the heart of it, having communication between one or several people (like smtp), but in real time, adding authentication, easy to use and powerful web interface, multimedia and more things that will be disclosed/developed in time. And takes on instant messaging/xmpp if you want too, adding things that are more from smtp realm"

No, what smtp and ftp and even dns taught is is we don't need them any more, http can do all this just fine.

Re:Great!

[rs79]

"What you're not seeing is Google's strategic intent (I work for Google, but this stuff is public).

Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on. The hardware is pretty much commodified already. Plenty of competitors and the profit margins are razor thin. Next levels are the OS and the applications. These are not yet commodified due to Microsoft's aggressively maintained monopoly. Contrary to common knowledge, Microsoft's real monopoly is in the Office file formats. From that, they've levered a monopoly into basic individual productivity applications and then (with Apple's cooperation) the operating system. They are also a serious player in second-generation collaboration tools (extensions to basic email)."

Dear Google;
Could you please compete with ICANN next? 500 ninnies are gonna plonk down a million dollars each (a half a billion for something I did once in an evening?!?) and with your servers and common snese it would really save some money.

And the international tld guys could use some help too, they spent 10 years making tlds work in 11 languages and now icann want to charge them $50K per 2 line table entry in one file on a computer that they don't even run. It shouldn't cost $150 million just so people can read the net in their own language especially when their people spent so much time and money doing the actual work.

But if you think icann needs two billion dollars more to run around the world ignoring poeple, carry on.

Thanks,
the net

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you have a point I mean they are basing this thing on the internet (thats so 1980's ) and using the web (so 1990!). Isn't it about time they came up with something original.

Re:Great!

[biovoid]

I can run MS excel with 20 megs of ram. Google spreedsheet in firefox takes over 100 megs of ram.

And how much RAM does your OS take up? You know, the OS that looks after all of the GUI controls (buttons, windows, scrollbars etc) that Excel uses? And by saying that, I'm probably not even scraping the surface of the number of resources built into Windows that Excel uses and relies on.

Re:Great!

[styrotech]

While I'm teetering on the brink of ranting, so Google is releasing an OS, while they continue to overload the web browser with javascript and flash in an effort to turn it into an operating system. Again, we've already done this. We have these tools already. It's called a Native Application. Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app. Maybe some QT/OpenGL? Writing all these applications for the browser is putting a square peg in a round hole.

Nothing about Wave prevents that.

Wave is a bunch of things: a server app that handles the live syncing stuff, a Google web interface built with GWT, a bunch of APIs and libraries for extensions, and an open network protocol based on XMPP (ie jabber). The protocols and APIs aren't tied to the current implementations.

People will be able to use the protocols, libraries and APIs to build their own clients and servers. One of the Google videos showed a curses based client running in a terminal - no web browser or javascript in sight.

If this stuff takes off, you can bet people will be writing native clients.

Re:Great!

[Cyberllama]

I don't think there's any Flash involved. Google Wave leverages the new HTML5 standard (actually I'm not sure it is a *standard* yet) to do lots of neat new stuff natively within the browser. For instance, you no longer need to load flash to play a video as .flv, it can simply be done with the tag and the video can be played as if in a media player.

At any rate, when I simply read a description of Google wave I was unimpressed. Then, on a whim, I checked out the I/O keynote where it was announced. It's available on youtube, I highly recommend you check it out -- I bet you're going to be impressed. I could give you examples of what makes Wave neat, but unless you see it for yourself you might not really understand. Suffice to say that this is not your mothers webapp -- so much of this stuff is impossible without HTML5.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's a trend of getting increasingly large binaries while the speed/efficiency of the software is constantly falling down, all in expense of the programmer's ignorance. The only people who happen to think that the latest and greatest tool is somehow the end all, be all solution to any and all programming problem (i.e., write desktop apps in javascript, write scientific computation apps in python, etc...) while despising the tried and proof solutions are mindless, ignorant idiots who are only able to back their technical option (which shouldn't even be considered a solution) with some irrelevant, subjective disdain of them old timey tools such as assembly, C, C++, lisp and what not.

The CS and IT world hasn't started in 2002, you know?

Re:Great!

[martyros]

I still scoff at Java guys. -A C Programmer

Re:Great!

[dzfoo]

And everybody scoffs at the PHP guys, including the punch-card guys.

        -dZ.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed to mention the reason that google is commodifying everything, so they can steal the market segment and sell advertising. The more market share they have and more applications that you rely on Google then makes them the new monopoly.

Google is not giving you all these free apps because they are your friend, they do it to sell ad space and what better way then to inject ads directly into applications you are using.

Re:Great!

[hattig]

So, what is it?

I read the article, and I read this:

How it is presented. Google has to come up with a coherent, one sentence answer to âoeWhat is it?â

So, err, that's not good. Even Google don't know what it is!

It looks like desktop widgets, ON THE INTARWEB!

Re:Great!

[gander666]

F-Yeah, I want that Minority report shit too.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want is:

BIOS --> that shit they had in minority report

Dude, Tom Cruise was the BIOS.

Re:Great!

[koolfy]

and

Why rely on a web browser, which was first developed to view static, magazine-like pages that have links to other pages?

That's why they created Google Chrome (browser), Isn't it ? Designed to view non-static, non-magazine-like pages that run JS and html5 stuff.

Re:Great!

[Evanisincontrol]

What you're not seeing is Google's strategic intent (I work for Google, but this stuff is public).

Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on.

That isn't what commodify means!

Meriam-Webster definition of commodify:

to turn (as an intrinsic value or a work of art) into a commodity

Meriam-Webster definition of commodity (truncated):

...4: a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price...

Emphasis mine in both cases.

Re:Great!

[Late Adopter]

Could had done it mixing and matching existing protocols? Maybe yes, maybe not. And maybe those alternatives dont have the flexibility needed for wild evolution that this could have.

Wave is built on top of Jabber/XMPP, with the AJAX side being just one of many possible presentation layers. You can build your own console-based server if you really want, and federate it with the main Wave servers (and people have done this, go watch the demo video).

Re:Great!

[claar]

Wow, that's weird -- I just got my developer account today and have been playing with the interface. As I was reading your post, I saw something I wanted to comment on, and I instinctively tried to write my comment inside of yours as I might in Google Wave. Spooky.

Re:Great!

[sorak]

"instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago " which lesson in particular are they ignoring?

As for the thick app argument, why do you care? Seriously, if the solution works it works. The toggle switch guys scoffed at the punch card guys, the punch card guys scoffed at the interactive asm editor guys, the asm guys scoffed at the C guys, the C guys scoffed at the Java guys, the Java guys scoff at the Ruby/Python/PHP/JS guys.
You don't see the trend?

No. Speaking as a PHP guy, will I finally get someone to make fun of?

Re:Great!

[sorak]

So how is this not evil? It looks like they are taking money from one near monopoly and using it in anti-competitive ways.

Re:Great!

[named]

This is rather more than groove, actually. I use groove at work, and while it's nice, it doesn't allow the kind of real-time collaboration on documents that wave will. Both people can be editing a document simultaneously, and both see the changes each other is making appear in the doc in real-ish time (if the demo can be believed, It'll be interesting to see how high latency links play with this).

That aspect is what excites me about this tech. It's been done before (as a plugin for word, even), but not in such an accessible way.

Re:Great!

[kamatsu]

Your problem isn't Google Apps, it's Firefox. Try running it in Chromium or Safari and see how much ram it uses.. for me, 30 mb.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

I'm really not getting as bent out of shape about things as I'm coming across. What I take issue with is when people get googley-eyed over things like web-based spreadsheets and ajax webmail. These products and techs have been around, in arguably better incarnations, for a long time.

I really would just like to see some progress, not just retracement of functionality we already have.

And no - if I'm using excel or photoshop I don't "have to bring my files with me" - I have a webdav mount where my files live. Now what value-proposition does google provide?

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

It will always be less than what's required for a browser, that runs on top of an OS.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

You can make fun of the Flash guys. If they give you shit, them them this way.... And yes - the LISP guys can still make fun of you.

Re:Great!

[teknopurge]

This is the issue I see also. People that believe this don't understand, or haven't experienced, things that already exist that are similar.

Re:Great!

[MathiasRav]

Each step along the chain takes a performance hit.

Of course every step along the abstraction chain incurs a performance hit - but using that fact as an argument against abstraction altogether is like saying we shouldn't use Java because it's bytecode and not assembled into native whatever.

By that reasoning, we might as well regress back to nuts, bolts, light bulbs and mechanical switches. Except that would overburden the developers - which brings me to my point, that every iteration/abstraction serves to convert extra CPU cycles to minimised effort in development.

It's the recurring decision about payoffs, akin to the common consideration of time vs. space (why we compress data, for instance), that we decide that the perpetually improving processors and the extra clock cycles they yield may be better spent when the application is developed.

Ten years ago, it wouldn't have made sense to run an application/framework like Wave in a browser, but today it offers quicker development cycles for applications that run within it, compared to the equivalent applications in C or C++ with optimised bits in asm, but without significantly reduced response times in the final application.

Re:Great!

[Blakey Rat]

This is the mother of all 'get off my lawn' arguments. Using existing technology is what brings us most innovations. In fact, using existing technology is what every programmer does.

I'm sure there's some complete open source nerd who is, right now, attempting to write his own BIOS.

But not only is using existing technologies the best way to innovate, it's also the best way to write software. If you don't use the C++ STL, odds your containers will have memory leaks and bugs. (Time spent debugging those *could* have been spend adding features!) If you don't use the OS' widgets, odds are your software will be difficult to use and not support accessibility features. (Just try using a GTK+ application on Windows on a tablet-- or using Windows voice recognition. Does not work.)

Do you think Napster (one of the most, if not the most, innovative applications in recent memory) could have been built if Fanning spent all his time writing his own button and menu code? He'd have given up.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on.

That isn't what commodify means! And heaven only knows what you mean by "commodify of".

The rest of your post is gibberish. A litany of non sequiturs.

Um, just because you don't understand it doesn't make it gibberish. As for the definition of commodify, check the dictionary. The GP used it exactly correctly.

It doesn't bode well for Google that they employ illiterates. Being in the communication market and all.

You must be thanking your lucky stars that you posted as an AC so that your moronic post can't be linked back to you.

Re:Great!

[Blakey Rat]

This isn't a coke vs. pepsi thing. I can run MS excel with 20 megs of ram. Google spreedsheet in firefox takes over 100 megs of ram. An ftp socket and script to upload my excel file somewhere for sharing doesn't account for 80 megs worth of space complexity: 400% more resources than the thick client app!

Ok, I just checked NewEgg. You can buy 4 GB of RAM for $50.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231166&cm_sp=DailyDeal-_-20-231-166-_-Product

So that's 4096 MB for $50.99, or 1.2 cents per megabyte. (Not dollars, cents.)

Your "memory gap" of 80 MB costs you... strangely, exactly one dollar when rounded. Assuming you have a job, and that you were at that job when you wrote your little boldfaced rant, you probably made well over a dollar in the time it took you to type it out.

In short, you have absolutely NO sense of proportion. Get a grip.

(That all said, there are good reasons to use Excel over Google Spreadsheet-- for example, the fact that Google Spreadsheet has crappy usability and lacks tons of features-- but memory cost ain't one of them.)

Re:Great!

[rossifer]

Of course.

Just like "free" television programming, "free" web services absolutely need to be paid for.*

It may be worthwhile for Google to offer some things that are truly free if it means that there's more money coming in overall, but in general, Google definitely wants to offer attractive services that can pay their own way via subscriptions, advertising, or something else we haven't thought of yet...

* I offer Twitter as a temporary counter-example to this. I still have no idea how they're going to make money.

Re:Great!

[Nerdposeur]

Do you not get the point that by running in a browser, it essentially runs anywhere? Linux, Mac, Windows, future smartphones and MIDS.

Yes! And some day, when all apps are in the cloud, it won't matter in the slightest which OS you use, as long as you have a browser! Your company will let you use whichever one you want!

Then, finally, my fellow nerds, it will be The Year of Linux On the Desktop. (For you. Not that it will matter.)

Re:Great!

[RiotingPacifist]

Batshit
Insane
Old
Scientologist
???

Re:Great!

[biovoid]

Of course it will. I wasn't arguing that. I was simply pointing out the falacy that you can run MS Excel in 20MB RAM.

Yes, Google Docs uses 100MB in Firefox. It also runs on all major browsers for all major operating systems. Where can you run Excel? Complaining about RAM usage for cross-platform software compared to native applications is pointless.

Re:Great!

[whoop]

I have a webdav mount where my files live.
That right there is what will catch a vast majority of Google's users. They don't want to, or don't have the resources, to set up something like that. Google Apps are very simple. Sign up and you're ready to go. Go to a friend's house, log in, and you've got your stuff. That works for the vast, vast majority of people out there.

Re:Great!

[mjwx]

"Don't be evil" has been getting pretty rough treatment in the press, but from my inside perspective, the whole company perks up and pays very close attention if it looks like the company might be reneging on that statement.

The problem Google has with this statement is that many people can only see "Dont be Evil" as "Always be Good" with no middle ground. So any action that google takes that is slightly grey is instantly misinterpreted as evil. Of course the media loves this kind of thinking as it gets ratings.

Google likes operating in the grey area, this is not bad. Google is still a corporation and needs to make money, everyone/thing seeks to further its own aims, this in itself is not inherently evil. Only the methods towards furthering those aims can be inherently evil (or good) for example when a corporation willingly does harm or attempts to stifle other entities to prevent competition it is evil.

Google is a search monopoly, this is not bad as monopolies can come about naturally when there is no actual room for competition or one product is so advanced that it makes no sense not to use it. The question is, is google an abusive monopoly? I don't think google are abusive but it is a question that must be asked and investigated fully. I think it's good that Google is competing with MS and other companies and am yet to see any actual evil being perpetrated.

Re:Great!

[Ortega-Starfire]

SSD drive. Problem solved!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

No one scoffs at Perl guys!

Re:Great!

[metaforest]

Operating System -> Windowing System -> Virtual Machine -> Application

I think you mean:

Operating System -> Windowing System -> Virtual Machine -> Operating system -> Windowing System -> Application

Or for Java and similar sandboxes:

Operating System -> Windowing System - > Virtual Machine -> Operating Environment(OS Lite) -> Application

Re:Great!

[mcvos]

Wave is to email as Ruby is to Basic.

Re:Great!

[badkarmadayaccount]

Do we really need to trade? A low-level program specializer, integrated with both the hardware and OS ought to give us the best from both worlds. Also, running emulators would be near bare metal speed, so along with hardware implemented support for capabilities/jump-tables that ought to accelerate system/function call capture and virtualization, giving you the platform of the future.
This OT ramble brought to you by lots of coffee.

Re:Great!

[bhiestand]

So how is this not evil? It looks like they are taking money from one near monopoly and using it in anti-competitive ways.

I'd say it looks like they're taking money from one near monopoly and using it in highly competitive ways. They're certainly not abusing their near monopoly.

Re:Great!

[badkarmadayaccount]

Which has a Java based Web implementation (the server is an applet). Don't know what to make of that... (Google it yourself... I'm too stoned...)

Re:Great!

[badkarmadayaccount]

Takes 33 MB in Chrome. You were saying?

Re:Great!

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Do you not get the point that by running in a browser, it essentially runs anywhere?

My laptop runs anywhere. Including places there is no internet connection.

Further, by running in the browser, the application will always be the most current version.

And that's a good thing? Later versions of iTunes start forcing Safari. RealPlayer was great, until a specific version number. Office 2003 is better than 2007. I upgrade when I want to. I don't want bloat, crazy new interfaces, removed features that I use, to use something before SP2, and certianly not without my okay. When someone else controls your device, they can do whatever they want, including delete your copy of 1984.

Would you rather have Google or Facebook the steward?

Neither.

Google very much tries to be open and "not evil."

All marketing hype. What do they do that is less evil than Microsoft? Seriously... what is less evil about Google?

Re:Great!

[jesset77]

My concern with Google being a monopoly is that monoculture harms whatever ecosystem it belongs to. Even if Google were to take great pains and bend over backwards to be a benevolent monopoly, it would still leave the industry 2 mistakes and a corrupt action from disaster.

I subscribe to the maxim that Honest People (or corporations) ought to be kept Honest by policy. It is a Good Thing for any person or organization to be trustworthy, to work to prove their reputation and to earn accolades. Nonetheless, it is always preferable to protect oneself by policy from whatever entities one can afford to, trustworthy or not. You should always value trustworthiness in third parties with which you transact, however actually relying on that trust should always be your last resort and ideally the result of a degenerate condition (for example: getting started, emergent events). Put another way, you should always reduce the surface area of your vulnerability, so that it does not take herculean amount of trust in others to patch over said vulnerability. To that end, organizations actually maximize profit by submitting to and encouraging such precaution of their client base.

To give an auto example (srsly, can't slashdot provide a CSS class or tag for these, already? ;D) you buckle up even if you know the car is being driven by a skilled and cautious expert. By our correct cultural convention, this habit does not impune the driver's skills, and to be honest any driver would be ethically remiss (fine liability notwithstanding) to start the car without insisting you first buckle up.

With this in mind, Google is completely missing many opportunities to protect other participants in it's industries from itself. From a Game Theory perspective, Google can avoid a classic monopolistic Nash Equilibrium in order to optimize profit better than it's current strategy will allow it by acting in a well thought out, systematic way to defeat it's very own stranglehold on affected industries.

For example, openly releasing the code for new products is important to prevent Google's own service provisions from being baked into the very fabric of new industries it spawns, which would mortally taint them. Google choosing not to be the only Wave server in town is vital for the acceptance of Wave as a platform. However, they do not seem to subscribe to this wisdom in some of their most vital industries. They wish all users to embrace cloud computing, but then do not open source their own cloud computing infrastructure. I'm sorry, but if I am not allowed to breathe this benfit into the big iron at my own corporate NOC first then I'll end up staying away from closed cloud computing solutions for as long as possible and when I do relent, I may lock myself into a platform Google's goods fail to interoperate with. This outcome is lose-lose, but only the cloud providers can take action to puncture this barrier to entry. Furthermore, the first one to do so wins an influential de facto standard. Also, losing a percentage of marketshare to self-starters may be quickly outweighed if your action also engorges the market so that your smaller "cut" is larger than the entire market would have otherwise been.

This holds not only for server app source code, but for trade secrets as well. Google is in such an over-powerful position in many of it's industries that it would economically benefit from releasing part (not all!) of it's portfolio of trade secrets on matters like search and advertising specifically to allow it's competitors to enrich themselves. This should be done just enough to diffuse the common argument "Man! I hate that Google does X, but there is no other reasonably effective search in town". Whenever your customers are not allowed to vote with their feet, your own innovation and by extension the very health of your industry decays.

Sounds like g.ho.st

[sanjosanjo]

I've dabbled with http://g.ho.st/ and it sounds similar. I've been impressed at how snappy g.ho.st is, so I would expect good things from Google, also.

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[BasilBrush]

G.ho.st is interesting, but no, wave isn;t like that. Wave isn't an emulation of a notional desktop computer on a web page. Wave is like a mixture of email, IM and live collaborative document editing, with a open API such that 3rd parties can create additional communication centric applications.

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[Sporkinum]

I had never heard about g.ho.st before your post. It's interesting technology, but looks like it has a ways to go. Less than 10k views of their demo video on youtube. Also, it ran pretty slow in my browser (firefox 3.5). On a good note, since it is a web page, adblock+ works.

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[Orion Blastar]

Well G.ho.st allows email, IM, and live collaborative document editing via Zoho and Google Docs via the G.ho.st virtual machine. It also has an open API if you read the forums that developers can create additional communication centric applications.

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[BasilBrush]

Yes. But Google Wave really isn't that.

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[Sir_Lewk]

Of course you're not going to go through the paiins of explaining what it really is?

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[aj50]

It is explained reasonably well in the summary.

If you want to know more, I suggest watching the video on http://wave.google.com/

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[Pentagram]

That's pretty weird. I've just had a play with it and I'm struggling to think what to do with it. What's particularly weird is that the desktop has a web browser. Why would you need a browser if you're already using a browser to view the desktop? Naturally, the first thing I did with it was go to http://g.ho.st/ and open a new guest account...

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[BasilBrush]

I'm not your teacher. Try: http://www.justgoogleit.com/

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[chabotc]

It really isn't similar at all.

G.ho.st is a 'virtual desktop' where you can access your gmail, facebook, twitter etc from one login and have virtual windows in that env for each one of them.

Google Wave is a communication platform that could be described *like* wiki, email and im, but it doesn't actually contain those apps, it's a platform of it's own.

Ah that's the tricky thing of explaining new concepts. The best analogy I've read is "It's like Edison going around the country showing people electricity, to demonstrate it he plugs in a light bulb, and the crowd goes wild ... Light without smoke and flame!, but that completely missing the point of what electricity is about".

Google Wave is much like that, if you try to describe it with analogies like "email", "wiki", "im", it makes people think it's something they already know, while actually it's a completely new thing

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[sanjosanjo]

That's interesting about the speed - I'm running in Firefox 3.5.1 and it seems snappy. My main disappointment with it, so far, is that the music player doesn't work. I was going to use it as a place to hold my large mp3 collection and play from that interface. They give you 15GB of space, so I was hoping to use it better. Other than that, I think it's cool how you can link your Google documents and access them in a manner that you would from the folders on your desktop OS. It even preserves the folder structure that you have with your Google documents.

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[Sir_Lewk]

I have watched it smartass and failed to see anything particularly "revolutionary".

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[Twinbee]

That word you used - "snappy". It's one of most fuzzy, but under-rated concepts going.

Hard to measure, difficult to get people to care about it, but in the end, even 20ms can make a difference in how good, responsive or indeed how snappy a GUI feels. Windows has a lot to learn in this respect sigh...

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why were you asking for an explanation of what it is smartass?

Re:Sounds like g.ho.st

[jesset77]

That is some good leverage to drill through some of the wood presented by the obtuse commenters on this article.

You can say Wave is "realtime email", "conversational wiki", "IM that can build documents", "Office Suite with Version Control", or "Collaborative Content Management System".

Doing this improperly leverages things people already understand, but in a pretty systematic way people can be flatlanded beyond if necessary.

For example:
An automobile is "horseless carriage"
Email is like postal mail, but somehow electronic in nature.
Instant Messaging is like a phone call, but with text and always over the internet.
An Office Productivity Suite is pen-and-paperless pen and paper.
A Wiki is a collaborative CMS where you let raw edits act as check and balance over raw edits.
In turn, a CMS is a webpage who's content can be managed via a form on another webpage.
And finally, a webpage is like a magazine insert delivered over computer networks.

Every one of these descriptions leverages previously familiar comparisons and is technically accurate. Each one is also left somewhat lackluster to the uninitiated, due to unfamiliarity with how the advantages of the new format are leveraged to significantly alter the underlying expectations of the medium.

Email is like Snail mail, but you simply do not use it the same way. It changes the very method by which you work due to it's instant and electronic nature, and the added features this new environment allows both enhances and alters the stale practice of delivering textual missives dramatically.

A car gets passengers and goods from point A to B much like a horse-drawn carriage, but it's maintenance and upkeep are significantly different. Given roads, it's top and sustainable speeds are much faster. Given assembly line production, it's initial and total cost of ownership are magnitudes cheaper. These added benefits are both subtle enough to not be guessed by the uninitiated, and comprise "killer" application at the same time.

So to with Wave. The theory behind it is that it allows you to reap all the rewards of Email, Mailing lists, Usenet, IM, Wiki, CMS, comment threads, collaborative Document Creation with version control, and whiteboarding (among many other standalone apps) in one seamless application: replacing all of these disparate functions with one single, well crafted function that happens to accomplish all of their goals, and without increasing the complication for the user to tap into any subset of these features whatsoever (including, but not limited to each of the boring old models actually listed).

It allows conversations to be treated just like we do email, save that annoying comment quotes are entirely obviated by direct in-post replies. Replies are realtime, so you are never required to switch gears into a separate IM environment for that interactive benefit. Other's content is editable, and changes are traceable and accountable so "fixed that for you" becomes actually fixing that for them. Multiple people fixing the same thing is (allegedly) handled with greater conflict management than any present Wiki or Version Control system presently extant.

If product discussed in a conversation happens to be a document, then a Wave discussing the document inexorably evolves into actually writing the document in situ. Seriously, you don't even plan for it; the document crystallizes in front of you while you collaboratively imagine it so trying to export it elsewhere always presents as a wasteful excersize. If said document needs to be printed and collated, you hit the print button or export to ODF, PDF or DOC. If said document needs to be text on a web page, you hit the "embed" button and your continuing work to refine the final document in the wave (minus chatter, optionally with editorially controlled release cycles) is made transparently visible to the public wherever you've put the embed with no further intervention of server-side sof

More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

So this is pretty much Sharepoint?

Re:More info, please...

[BasilBrush]

No. Sharepoint is a marketing term covering a disparate range of collaborative applications from Microsoft. Similar to how the .NET label was a marketing label for a bunch of disparate technologies.

Google Wave is a single innovative new technology on which many collaborative tools are and may be built.

Re:More info, please...

[teknopurge]

No. Sharepoint is a marketing term covering a disparate range of collaborative applications from Microsoft. Similar to how the .NET label was a marketing label for a bunch of disparate technologies.

Google Wave is a single innovative new technology on which many collaborative tools are and may be built.

Do you work for google PR? Sharepoint is a portal server and a webapp framework. Disparate huh?

Re:More info, please...

[BasilBrush]

Do you work for google PR?

Funny, on another thread I'm being accused of being an Apple Fanboi. You guys should stop being so juvenile. I won't come down to your silly level and accuse you of being in MS PR. But instead just give a citation to prove my point:

The term "SharePoint" can collectively refer to a number of products ranging from the base platform to various services. The platform is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), which is included with Windows Server and available as a free download for those with Windows Server licenses. Services such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) provide additional functionality and features and are licensed accordingly.[2]
Microsoft identifies the following as part of the current SharePoint products and technologies family:
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS)
Search Server 2008 Express
Search Server 2008
Forms Server 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 MOSS Standard
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 MOSS Enterprise
Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007
Microsoft Office Project Server 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, a free[3] editor to help administrators develop and customize SharePoint solutions, is also in the SharePoint family.
Previous versions of elements of this software used different names such as "SharePoint Portal Server 2003" and "SharePoint Team Services" but are also referred to as SharePoint or SharePoint Technologies. Since the beginning, when the SharePoint initiative was collectively called Tahoe, SharePoint development has been a mixed bag of products and technologies and included the now defunct Site Server 3.0.
SharePoint, as a collection of technologies, is not intended to simply replace a full file server or to be a single use solution. Instead, it is geared and positioned to play various roles in the business and enterprise environment. Microsoft markets these vectors as Collaboration, Processes, and People.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharepoint

Re:More info, please...

[iluvcapra]

There's this popular misconception that Google Wave is some sort of service, when in fact it's a protocol built on XMPP. Google's offering of the service is of course a major part of this, but the essential character of the thing is a protocol and messaging semantic.

Re:More info, please...

[rossifer]

Sharepoint is a way of "sort of" sharing Word >=2003 documents to "sort of" make a wiki.

Other than that (which isn't much that twiki can't do), it's basically a gigantic waste of everyone's time.

(I do work for Google)

Re:More info, please...

[Achromatic1978]

Nice citation. I'm amused that you think it "proves" that there are multiple disparate technologies involved, by quoting a link that lists both: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 MOSS Standard and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 MOSS Enterprise as saying "look, not integrated".

And there's an editor application, and a search engine.

Hint: One can have an integrated set of tools, without requiring only one .exe file.

Re:More info, please...

[BasilBrush]

I guess there was too many words for you. I'll cut some out, and see if it gets through to you.

Since the beginning, when the SharePoint initiative was collectively called Tahoe, SharePoint development has been a mixed bag of products and technologies and included the now defunct Site Server 3.0.

"A mixed bag of products and technologies". Just like .NET.

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is pretty much Chrome OS

Re:More info, please...

[BitZtream]

No, SharePoint is more open, has a longer history, and is supported by more desktop apps. This fails in the same way the GMail fails compared to Outlook.

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

...then you know all these things about sharepoint how?

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure unlike Apple and Microsoft, Google does let their employees try out the competition and I am also sure that a lot of people Google employs have had a lot of experience using other technologies. Hey, remember those articles about Google hiring people from Microsoft and other tech houses? I guess they wouldn't know shit about Share port. None of them would...

Re:More info, please...

[shutdown -p now]

...then you know all these things about sharepoint how?

He doesn't, actually. Among other things, SharePoint wikis do not (and cannot) consist of Word documents. It's just your usual wiki, pretty simplistic in fact (nowhere near MediaWiki) in SP2007. Word documents live in SP document libraries. Wiki can reference them, of course, but there are no cross-referencing Word docs there.

(I do work for Microsoft)

Re:More info, please...

[shutdown -p now]

I am sure unlike Apple and Microsoft, Google does let their employees try out the competition

What do you mean by "let their employees"? How do you imagine this - "if I find out you're using Linux at home, you're fired?".

In any case, I don't know about Apple firsthand (though I'd find it surprising if things were anywhere near that there), but there are plenty of people in Microsoft who prefer browsers other than IE, run Linux at home, know Java well, use GMail for their personal mail and/or GTalk for IM, and so on. Being proud of one's work doesn't mean that you have to be blind towards everything else.

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharepoint is a way of "sort of" sharing Word >=2003 documents to "sort of" make a wiki.

Other than that (which isn't much that twiki can't do), it's basically a gigantic waste of everyone's time.

(I do work for Google)

One place I went to was using Sharepoint (at least, it was installed and running). My team couldn't fathom its usefulness, so we installed a wiki -- PmWiki, as it happens -- and used that. After a few months, wiki usage had spread across the business.

Amusingly, the CEO called me in and had a rant about "lists". Apparently this damn wiki thing didn't do "lists" like Sharepoint. So, we created an extension that did his lists, and all was good.

Another place called me in to sort out their "nightmare". Basically, their "process" funnelled everything through Sharepoint. Since Sharepoint would frequently break, the business was going to hell. With 100+ staff, this was expensive.

We worked on alternative processes for a week, and then ripped out Sharepoint. Not one complaint, and the whole place felt like an entirely different business.

I don't have much against Microsoft, though I don't use their products much, but Sharepoint is the worst of the worst, in my experience; a product of supreme awfulness.

Re:More info, please...

[Richard_at_work]

Yup, thats SharePoint all right. If you totally ignore everything else it does, that is.

(I don't work for Google)

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

I sounds like you just attached the term "open" to Outlook. I hope that was a misunderstanding as it it's definitely not the truth: sure it does some open email protocols (often in a half-assed manner, just like exchange) but try something as special as exporting your data from Outlook...

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah if you want to use IE pfft

Re:More info, please...

[q2a]

Having both Sharepoint (Microsoft) and MediaWiki (Confluence) I can reliably say that you're both correct (Google and Microsoft). What is interesting in Wave is the use of open protocols, code, and the convergence of Wiki, Jabber, and Collaborative Team applications that make big organizations use Sharepoint.

(I do work for the University of California)

Re:More info, please...

[rossifer]

He doesn't, actually.

I do, actually.

My experience was with Sharepoint in 2005 (before I started at Google). Small company (about 100 employees). Over the previous two years, the project team had created an extensive development info repository with TWiki, but the new VP Dev thought that we should switch from mixed Linux/MS to MS only. So they asked all of the developers to move everything over to a new Sharepoint deployment, under the guidance of a MS certified Sharepoint consultant (never knew exactly what certification they guy had).

This basically meant taking each page from the Wiki, creating a Word doc that said something similar (without the effortless linking of a wiki), and uploading it into the Sharepoint knowledge base. There was a very cumbersome checkout/edit/checkin process which seemed to take the worst of the issues from VSS and bless them with new life. The whole thing was awful and ended up being abandoned in favor of the old wiki within a year. We were also trying to take the core product (contract management) and move it so that it could be accessed via a Sharepoint interface. The API's were worse than the document management system, and this architectural 180 was also abandoned within a year as completely untenable.

I never did see an useful/informative definition for what Sharepoint was, so a document store that couldn't quite be a wiki and several attempts to improve the collaborative interaction, was what I experienced. It wasn't very impressive.

BTW, I'm not anti-MS, just have nothing good to say about Sharepoint. I really like .NET (even though I don't get to use it at Google). Some very cool stuff in there. The internationalization support I found particularly shiny.

Re:More info, please...

[shutdown -p now]

That is a known and recognized problem. SP2007 does support browsers other than IE, but functionality is reduced.

The good news is that in SP2010, much more attention is paid to other browsers (specifically Firefox and Safari, as two most popular one), so it will be much closer. On a side note, it also drops IE6 (I'm sure all web developers out there can sympathize with that).

Re:More info, please...

[shutdown -p now]

So they asked all of the developers to move everything over to a new Sharepoint deployment, under the guidance of a MS certified Sharepoint consultant (never knew exactly what certification they guy had).

This basically meant taking each page from the Wiki, creating a Word doc that said something similar (without the effortless linking of a wiki), and uploading it into the Sharepoint knowledge base.

This is a sad story. I have to note though that, since you say it was done in 2005, this was for SharePoint 2003, which (IIRC) didn't have any kind of wiki. SP2007 does. In any case, what you describe was obviously a very wrong thing to do. A wiki is a wiki, and SP document library is no replacement for that - it's designed more as a versioning system and collaborative workspace for Office (and other) documents. Whereas wiki isn't document-centric.

We were also trying to take the core product (contract management) and move it so that it could be accessed via a Sharepoint interface. The API's were worse than the document management system

I can sympathize with that as well. I did SP development for a short period of time (before joining MS), and the APIs are definitely horrible, both in 2003 and 2007. I can't even think of how many .NET Framework Design Guidelines they break. This will be better in 2010 though (I'm not on that team, but I've seen some of the nifty stuff those guys have done).

I never did see an useful/informative definition for what Sharepoint was, so a document store that couldn't quite be a wiki and several attempts to improve the collaborative interaction, was what I experienced. It wasn't very impressive.

The way I see it (and use it), it's a team portal framework that lets you throw up one quickly without the need to resort to hand-coding it, by putting the provided blocks together. It's a pretty decent store for documents such as specifications (where you want to see the history tracking). Its lists are a simple way to organize tabular data with grouping/filtering/sorting, where again the main point is that everyone can create his own list, and link them together as needed. It's mostly centered around those two things, and the rest is in supporting role - e.g. you can associate forum threads with documents in libraries, but the forum itself is rather basic.

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Confluence has nothing to do with MediaWiki.....

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

On a side note, it also drops IE6 (I'm sure all web developers out there can sympathize with that).

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU!!!

Re:More info, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

"More open" how? The protocol for Google Wave is already open, and it's built on top of the open protocols XMPP (and HTTP presumably), and the server software will be open source.

Let me know when they release the server

[White Flame]

They've said they're going to open-source the server so others can host their own waves. Until then, since I'd want to use this for collaborative development, and possibly for hosting my own sites, I'd rather not they own my content.

Re:Let me know when they release the server

[whoop]

You may want to keep an eye on the offical page for the Google Wave Federation Protocol.

Re:Let me know when they release the server

[stickystyle]

I'll throw in the typical FOSS response. Do it yourself ;-)

They released the spec (http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec) so anyone can, and in fact other have started making their own wave servers http://code.google.com/p/pygowave-server/.

on crack = A.D.D. = no work done = you are fired!

[Anonymous Coward]

on crack = A.D.D. = no work done = you are fired!

Tried it

[agendi]

I've participated in a wavelet writing hack-a-thon and was impressed by the scope of the collaboration that it provides. I saw it as an email, shared docs, blogs, instant messaging, photo sharing in one protocol. It certainly wasn't perfect and some parts were rather underwhelming but overall it seemed like the beginning of a new way of doing things. I was talking with one of the devs in the Sydney office and he said that they use it internally and are surprised by the way that the more they used it the more they discovered new ways to use it. I took that as a good sign that it was a technology/protocol that was at the beginning of the discovery rather than one that is released with every usage known. Would I use it commercially - not yet, but I can imagine it becoming a core tool to organising/interacting my social circle. I could easily see it being a great tool for collaborative programming and/or a new generation of remote role playing (build a dice rolling tool, a mapping tool etc.)

Re:Tried it

[darrylo]

Heh, I'm more interested in the long-term plans for offline access.

All this talk about new technologies is fine, but usability is important, too. I want to see what will happen when you're someplace without internet access.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see what will happen when you're someplace without internet access

You DIE!
After all, according to some people in the world (People on Slashdot, all these nutcases thinking webapps are the new way) internet is ubiquitous around the world!...

Re:Tried it

[abigor]

http://gears.google.com/support/

Re:Tried it

[lennier]

"I want to see what will happen when you're someplace without internet access."

Without... Internet access? That would be like... being 'off-line'? But then how would people post lolcats? They'd have to get Facebook updates via Gmail... oh wait...

I'm sorry, I can't grasp that concept at all!

Re:Tried it

[buchner.johannes]

Question is, will it be adopted. And if a company can push new things, it is Apple, Microsoft and Google. Also, how will people transition from their email?

Re:Tried it

[darrylo]

I know about Gears. I'm more interested in Google's thinking ("future visions", if you will) on how this is all supposed to work together.

Re:Tried it

[darrylo]

I'm sorry, I can't grasp that concept at all!

Perhaps it's time for an intervention? :-)

Re:Tried it

[BitZtream]

Sounds neat. Too bad its done using a bunch of sub-standard 'apps' (and I use the term loosely) that don't have half the features of any desktop equivilent. gmail is okay if you don't have to integrate with other apps. Docs sucks, period. blogs work fine already, we don't need any more retarded one entry blogs from people who think they have something to write about, same goes for photosharing.

The idea that one protocol is a good idea is rather retarded, especially considering how it isn't one protocol. All of these protocols are built on top of IP, mostly using TCP and possibly some UDP (thats 3 and we can't even talk to it in any way yet). You view the presentation layer over HTTP, server communications is done on top of XMPP, then on top of that you use several other new protocols to do all the other crap. Go Google! Bringing new meaning to reinventing the wheel. You just built a complete OSI model on top of an EXISTING COMPLETE OSI model. But we'll call it one protocol.

So tell me, why is it a great idea to invent new protocols and stack them on top of existing protocols already designed to do the job just as well? Just because a Google engineer spewed it, doesn't make it actually true or 'great', regardless of how much you look up to them.

I for one am obviously not impressed, even if a bunch of geeks at Google love it, doesn't mean its anything useful to the general public.

Re:Tried it

[Skreems]

It seems like Google is content to measure the content of the buzz they generate, but not the volume. Gmail was like catnip back when it came out... everybody wanted one. Google Maps was the shit. Then Google Talk was pretty cool, and a lot of people started to switch just because it was easy. Docs came out and some people used it, while a pretty large portion of the web ignored it entirely. Android came out and nobody really cared because ooh shiny new iPhone. Now Wave and Voice are coming out, and a select few are raving about them, while the rest of us are left scratching our heads. Every release has had someone wildly convinced that this will change EVERYthing, and every successive release has had more and more people who just Don't Get It.

Call me crazy, but it seems that to make an industry-changing product you need to solve a problem that people already know they have. Email access from anywhere pre-Gmail was a nightmare. Online maps sucked really bad until they pointed some competent Javascript at them. What problem does Wave solve? "Man, I really wish I could live-blog interactively with ten friends, while simultaneously editing a photo journal of our last bar night?" I don't buy it. The idea that computers will sit in between you and human interaction and make everything about your life better in the process, well, that idea is dying fast. The new tech is the kind that augments your life as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, then gets the hell out of your way. And Wave does not seem designed to get out of the way.

Re:Tried it

[ToasterMonkey]

The idea that computers will sit in between you and human interaction and make everything about your life better in the process, well, that idea is dying fast. The new tech is the kind that augments your life as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, then gets the hell out of your way. And Wave does not seem designed to get out of the way.

++Insightful

Re:Tried it

[Lissajous]

++Insightful

Shouldn't that be insightful++ ? I mean, ++insightful would be moderating before you read the comment - something akin to commenting before you read the arti.... oh wait, nevermind.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

Question is, will it be adopted.

No, the question is, will it be adopted fast enough to become ubiquitous.

how will people transition from their email?

Very, very, very slowly.

Re:Tried it

[mcvos]

The new tech is the kind that augments your life as quietly and unobtrusively as possible, then gets the hell out of your way. And Wave does not seem designed to get out of the way.

Compared to email, IM and wikis, it does. And the integration of those three is exactly the problem that Wave wants to solve.

Re:Tried it

[jesset77]

It breaks down barriers between a slew of popular communication and online collaboration methods that simply function better together.

Lestwise, I think it is unwise to assume a layman needs to understand their need for a thing before it becomes marketable. Nobody knew peanut butter and jelly would go good together until it was tried. Precisely what problem does Twitter or Facebook solve again? But ye, gads people sure use them.

Wave is intended to supersede other disparate communications protocols that are constantly "in our way", though we've conditioned ourselves to live with it. You never plan to "live-blog interactively with ten friends, while simultaneously editing a photo journal of our last bar night", but if you've ever been to a bar with 10+ friends who use Wave, and happen to be online discussing the matter the next day then the scenario you mention will simply unfold before you even realize it has occured. Now I don't know about you, but that is what I call "out of the way". You have things to say. You say them. They get said.. and the technology aids you to do so instead of complicating your life with:
* If I email her, she might not notice right away, but if I IM her it sounds too interuptive.
* Barry just sent me an email about it but he's not on chat right now to hear your opinion.
* I'd love to show you these pictures, but they're just too large to Email.
* I don't feel like sorting through them.
* I can't interface my photo manager with..
* Barry wouldn't get a copy since he hasn't fired up the IM.
* I was confused because you spelled that wrong. No, "that". Not that "that", the one in the paragraph above..
* I don't remember everyone's names. Tom does, but .. what .. should he rename the files and then re-upload?
* Look, this is just too damned hard. Whatever I wanted to say must not have been important enough.

Ads

[rodrigovr]

Will Wave have ads? Perhaps compulsory ones?

Re:Ads

[BasilBrush]

That's like saying will HTTP, FTP or SMTP have ads. It's fundamentally a communications protocol with some example apps built on. It can be used for ads just as it can be used for many other things. No doubt some people will use it for ads.

Re:Ads

[patro]

Probably only if you use a wave server operated by Google.

But this is acceptable, since they devote their own resources to run it. You can always run your own server if you don't like it.

Elfen Lied vs Les Luthiers

[Tei]

One man can love Elfen Lied and Les Luthiers.
Or hate both.

I imagine some dude playing with IE4 "Web desktop" mode playing ...a Web OS. He.. maybe Microsoft was visionary!, by mistake!.

I am (of course) looking forward for this. I am on the list of people that will murder the guy that is before it on the queue (PRO-TIP: be the latest one to join, that will guaranted your survival from the purge).

One thing I would love to see is "Internet: World Wide Web" integrated in a website, because Feedback make a good job with these tiny-ity "add a link" and "add a movie". But I WANT MOAR!.. I want to integrate streamed videos!.. illegal stream videos of all Japan animes!. RAWR!.

Imagine, everything cool of the internet, inside a website that is a OS. Can I say pocket dimension?

Re:Elfen Lied vs Les Luthiers

[linhares]

take your meds, son

Re:Elfen Lied vs Les Luthiers

[Anonymous Coward]

Elfen Lied kicks ass.

Re:on crack = A.D.D. = no work done = you are fire

[Anonymous Coward]

No if you have A.D.D and are on crack, you focus better.

And meanwhile...

[Fear the Clam]

There's a girlfriend wondering why he won't annnnnsweeeeer any of the phone calls, voice mails, text messages, emails, or she's sent in the last ten minutes.

Re:And meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a girlfriend wondering why he won't annnnnsweeeeer any of the phone calls, voice mails, text messages, emails, or she's sent in the last ten minutes.

You must be new here. Slashdotters don't have girlfriends.

Re:And meanwhile...

[Plug]

But he can write a bot to respond to her on Wave.

"Yes dear."
"No dear."
"Anything you like dear."

Wave Is Going To Be A Turning Point For The Net

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can imagine it becoming a core tool to organising/interacting my social circle"

Pretty much every single app that touches that touches the Net/Web is either in the process of being rethought at a fundamental level and either rewritten or started over, or combined with other apps with Wave being the underlying technology. Developers are a bit like ravenous chained up dogs going mad over a nearby piece of meat with only a small number of developers having access to the servers right now but by September the floodgates are going to be opened and there is going to be an explosion of Wave apps coming out.

If you are an existing developer of a Net/Web app you had better get ready to upgrade to Wave tech or someone else is going come out with Wave versions of your stuff and leave you as an outdated relic.

If you are someone who is has never worked on a social media, Wave is going to be the opportunity for smaller developers to get the jump on existing big names and come out with fundamentally better versions of what is out there now.

Web discussion boards
Collaberation
Document sharing
Version control
Instant messaging
Email
and on and on

Every single existing website or application that performs those tasks and others is going be getting Wave versions that are going to make existing versions look like a joke.

Re:Wave Is Going To Be A Turning Point For The Net

[Achromatic1978]

I LOL'ed. Really? What press release did you copypasta that from?

What utter horseshit.

Google Browser OS paradigm

[msheekhah]

I really hope that Google is going in the direction I think it's going... a hybrid webos/cloud computing will enable Netbooks and older hardware configurations to have all of the features one would wish from a much more expensive Windows or MacOS box. While having a high performance machine is something I think will never go away, there are people who aren't serious enough gamers or production professionals who still want to play the latest games or use high end software occaisionally... I hope that Google can create that dream. The best computer experiences shouldn't belong exclusively to those with disposable cash to spend.

From the article.

[Jartan]

One telling remark, however â" given that Wave is supposed to run in a browser and not require any kind of desktop support: âoeIâ(TM)m not sure if there are API interfaces into the application but, ironically, itâ(TM)s crying out for a proper desktop client.â

This could be interesting beyond Waves own success/failure. It sounds like we're finally going to face real wide scale usage of a full blown web based javascript app for the first time. Perhaps if it's successful we'll see someone write a stand alone version too.

Re:From the article.

[mcvos]

One telling remark, however â" given that Wave is supposed to run in a browser and not require any kind of desktop support: âoeIâ(TM)m not sure if there are API interfaces into the application but, ironically, itâ(TM)s crying out for a proper desktop client.â

This could be interesting beyond Waves own success/failure. It sounds like we're finally going to face real wide scale usage of a full blown web based javascript app for the first time. Perhaps if it's successful we'll see someone write a stand alone version too.

That quote from the article proves that the author lacks clue. It has been dealt with in the original Wave demo at Google I/O. It's a protocol. The reference implementation of the client works in a browser, but nobody is stopping anyone from writing a desktop application for it. If it's really crying out for one, someone will write it.

Yeah it seems like others

[Orion Blastar]

like Yahoo are trying to do the same things with their search engines and web sites as well. here is a list of things Yahoo provides to developers including the BrowserPlus project which sounds a lot like what Google is try to do if I am not mistaken? Why is Yahoo not covered by Slashdot but Google is, for have an open API for developers to build on?

Yahoo has had my.yahoo.com for a long time now for those who never even heard about it. I use it to keep track of content on web sites like Slashdot, etc and it looks like the Yahoo APIs are there to extend it like Google's Wave APIs.

Re:Yeah it seems like others

[whhyohwhyslashdot]

actually, you are mistaken. this is nothing like some new plugin to tie web pages to your desktop. it is different. It's hard to explain, because it uses a lot of things we are familiar with, so you think it is just another incremental bell or whistle tacked onto a web page. but the results is way more than the sum of it's parts. watch the video, it's long, but going through it you can really see the possibilities of what this could become.

Re:Yeah it seems like others

[Orion Blastar]

Well since I cannot sign up to the Wave project to it, and my access to the video is blocked, I cannot see what the fuss is all about.

I am going by screen shots which looks a lot like my.yahoo.com to me, and the Yahoo API developer system.

Mod me paranoid

[carp3_noct3m]

But between this and Google OS and everything else, google is getting dangerously capable of mass information collection for nefarious purposes (read: more than is currently possible). Ive been willing enough to forgive the search engine because of its usefulness, but I see Google as the biggest potential data mining operation in the world. Have an OS, web search, email, chat, and voice all have the central management of one company who for all we know could have been served on of those secret orders they cant even talk about that all data mussed be passed on to some crazy orwellian agency. Not saying its true, but it makes you wonder...now I'm off to finish building my patented alaskan off-the-grid living structure called an igloo.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Gears? More like Arsenal Gear.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[linhares]

But between this and Google OS and everything else, google is getting dangerously capable of mass information collection for nefarious purposes (read: more than is currently possible). Ive been willing enough to forgive the search engine because of its usefulness, but I see Google as the biggest potential data mining operation in the world. Have an OS, web search, email, chat, and voice all have the central management of one company who for all we know could have been served on of those secret orders they cant even talk about that all data mussed be passed on to some crazy orwellian agency. Not saying its true, but it makes you wonder...now I'm off to finish building my patented alaskan off-the-grid living structure called an igloo.

It's safe to be with Microsoft, after all. Thanks for helping me calm down.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[Anonymous Coward]

So... how do you feel about Microsoft, because all of those capabilities you just wrote about were being produced up in Redmond at least five years ago...

Re:Mod me paranoid

[stephanruby]

This is missing the point of Wave. It's not patented. It's open sourced. It's federated (with no central authority). There is nothing preventing a company, or an individual, from setting up their own wave server (either the one given away for free by Google, or another one developed by a third party), and not sharing one piece of data with Google.

That's what makes the proposition so compelling. Google is not trying to lock in your data. It's doing everything it can to do the opposite actually.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple - you'll be able to run Wave on your own server. It can communicate with other servers through federation, but if you're paranoid enough you could disable that.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[Anonymous Coward]

But this is already happening with all the solcial networking sites out there. What sets this apart from them is the it's *open source*, based on *open protocols*. If you want to know where your data is going you *can* find out. If you don't like where it is going you're free to modify the source and build your own compatible system from it that suits your needs. Furthermore you'll be able to run your own servers, so you actually can retain control of the physical location of the data you're sharing I you wish to do so.

Then simply add an encryption layer and you are far more secure than any current system used for sharing information including email, messengers etc.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[k8to]

Please post the link to the server code download package.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[Twinbee]

They probably want to get it 'right' first in case they're uprooted by a nodbody. Sounds fair enough to me.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[Braino420]

Please post the link to the server code download package.

Mercurial checkout. This actually just came out recently from Google Wave Federation Day earlier this week.

Taken from the "Federation Day Notes" wave:
What's in today's open source release
org.waveprotocol.wave.model
operational transformation (OT)
operations, documents
org.waveprotocol.wave.protocol
protobuf definitions for signing, hashing, internal use
org.waveprotocol.wave.examples.fedone
end-to-end prototype
wave server, wave client, federation port spec
some security and other gaps filled
XMPP mapping refinements

What's missing from today's release
not a reference impl
no persistent storage
crude indexing
no concern for performance, redundancy, scaling
simplistic client
no private replies
no client-side OT, no optimistic UI (get new state from svr )
crude ACLs
no groups
no attachments
simple expensive crypto signing
no Merkle-tree bundles


So, still no reference implementation, but considering the protocol is "a moving target", that's understandable.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[stephanruby]

Not in this case, they're labeling this version 0.2, so it's still quite alpha, and still a bit of a moving target, but you can download the code (someone else here just posted the link to it) and you can contribute to the protocol discussion (they have a google group for it). It's in Java, but I'd suggest you install it on Linux (On Windows, it doesn't work quite right yet, or at least it didn't work quite right two days ago). Also, someone mentioned during the wave federation day that someone outside of Google had written a python version of it (that one should be findable if you just google for it, in fact I suspect there are a number of third party implementations that have popped up all over the place since two days ago). Also, I should say that Google Day Federation day was videotaped, so that should be showing up soon on google video -- if it isn't already on there. Now, if anyone wants a copy of the wave (taken that day), and doesn't have a wave account yet, I can post it here (although, that too, I suspect must have already been published on the web if you just google it). Or if you have a wave account, I can certainly add you to that wave -- if you were not there that day.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[stephanruby]

In case you don't have a Mercurial client on hand, here is the link to it to browse it from the web.

Re:Mod me paranoid

[Twinbee]

Okay... yeah that's open!

Good ol' Google :)

Re:Mod me paranoid

[pinkushun]

A true paranoid schizo would've bombed out years ago at Gmail, and all the many other providers, for storing so many contacts and personal emails. In fact this is the opposite, as Wave is OSS. Check your alien implant it's probably acting up.

Linguistic intensification

[StreetStealth]

Most likely, this is an attempt at a linguistic intensification of the idiom "on steroids." There was a time when steroid use was more of a taboo and to reference it in casual conversation was marginally titillating, but perhaps "on crack" comes closer to attaining that mischievousness today.

Even though it doesn't really make sense (steroids increase muscle mass, but crack doesn't really increase anything except an extreme imbalance of neurotransmitters) it fits with our general cultural pattern of intensifying language. "Going ape," for instance, was an appropriate term for wild human behavior as apes tend to be associated with wild movements, but "going apeshit," while sounding more intense, doesn't make any semantic sense in that an ape's feces don't exactly move much at all.

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Anonymous Coward]

It moves quite a bit when thrown.

Re:Linguistic intensification

[derGoldstein]

This entire conversation about linguistics and cultural evolution of "street phrases" just goes to show that no one really knows what to say about Wave. We can't test it ourselves yet, and have no idea how useful it'll be in the real world. Even the access they're giving reviewers right now is more of a tech demo.

For realz, yo!

Re:Linguistic intensification

[the_womble]

I assume that crack has similar effects to other forms of cocaine. That means that it will make people feel energetic and wakeful - it is often taken by people doing jobs that require long hours or constant fast reaction.

Sounds to me like "on crack" is a very good analogy.

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Dragonslicer]

I would assume the phrases are meant to be used in place of the effect most people associate with the drug. The effect of steroids is usually being bigger and/or stronger, while with crack the first effect most people think of is hyperactivity and/or being faster. Something that does more different things, or does a thing at a much faster rate, would be "on crack", while something that is bigger and stronger would be "on steroids". Like a lot of metaphors, there are subtle differences in meaning, and they're rarely perfect analogues.

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe "going apeshit" is like when they throw their feces at passersby... which, let's face it... is pretty crazy-awesome.

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Anonymous Coward]

"going apeshit," while sounding more intense, doesn't make any semantic sense in that an ape's feces don't exactly move much at all.

Speak for yourself. This ape's shit moves along just fine!

Re:Linguistic intensification

[bennomatic]

I prefer "going bananas".

Re:Linguistic intensification

[FrankieBaby1986]

in that an ape's feces don't exactly move much at all.

I'd like to see you say that after an ape has just flung a steaming turd at you! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg2AezJo8aQ&feature=related

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Anonymous Coward]

"ape's feces don't exactly move much at all."

yes... they do... you've never seen an ape with the runs have you?

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Anonymous Coward]

@StreetStealth: You must have got the shit kicked out of you at school for being such an annoying person. Just reading your sig I can see that you are a pretentious twat.

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Anonymous Coward]

The delivery mechanism of rock cocaine make it unsuitable to be a "work" drug. Smoking it gets it into the blood stream very quickly, and the high is very intense, but it only lasts 10-20 minutes. These properties also make it powerfully addictive.

For that matter, sniffed refined cocaine isn't much of productivity enhancer either, though I suppose it would work very slightly better than freebasing. Seems like the best way if productivity is goal would be chewing it unrefined or putting it in a time-release formulation (which, presumably, no real drug user would ever want if they couldn't break it down). Parachuting it (gelatin capsule) might work okay, but I've never seen a cocaine user do that.

The best illicit drug for this purpose is methamphetamine, as evidenced by its widespread use. Which sucks, really. Most people use an inhaled form as with crack, but it's manufactured in various nasty ways and causes terrible damage. Meanwhile, affluent college kids are eating Adderral like candy... (sigh)

Re:Linguistic intensification

[stephanruby]

Well, you can download a crude prototype of the server if you want now. The released prototype is still alpha, but it can run outside of the Google infrastructure, so it's past the stage of the tech demo at least (where everything is just smokes and mirrors, which I understand was actually the case during Google I/O). So the transparency has at least began, so to speak.

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Anonymous Coward]

This thread makes me want to smoke more crack

Re:Linguistic intensification

[Pechkin000]

You've obviously never smoked crack, as doing a job that requires a fast reaction time is the LAST thing you will be fit to do while smoking it.

Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

What I am wondering: if Google OS is essentially "boot into your browser", then why would I need to write things in a slow JavaScript, if there is a fast Java itself? Android makes sense, but making applications (web/ajax stuff) within an application (browser)? What is wrong to get a 10M JRE from http://www.java.com/ install it and have it running now and today in high performance even in 3-4 years old laptop, rather then get latest netbook on Atom 1.6GHz and cry for bloated Firefox?.. Anyone?

OK, I do lots of Ajax programming in ExtJS style as well as GWT, as well as plain Java. GWT is great, yes, Ajax works everything foobar. But wait a minute, why I do Ajax? Right, because JRE is not everywhere and users needs to install it. But if you go with a Chrome OS, you are going to install it, right? What's wrong to just install latest JRE then?

One more thing: JavaScript isn't really that great as it is imagined. It is slow and still not really standard everywhere. Essentially, browser is a VM for JavaScript, which would be the same if you run Java bytecode on your JRE. The difference, however, that you can do nearly everything with a plain Java, while you can not really do much with JavaScript (e.g. write a multimedia player). To do so, you will still need mix it with other stuff, like Adobe Flash or Microsoft *cough* Silverlight *cough*. The only why one would prefer to use JavaScript: dynamic language. But hey... if you want your Java application to be written in JavaScript (in style "look, Ma, no Java!" because I love dynamic languages), then get Rhino engine and call your Swing stuff from there, then run on your netbook, using a webservices on your servers.

Anyone correct me, please?

Re:Browser OS?

[sodul]

you can not really do much with JavaScript (e.g. write a multimedia player)

HTML 5 is pushing the envelope enough to do most of what you need Flash and Silverlight for.

Take a look at the webkit blog to get an idea of all the things possible in HTML 5 and CSS 3.0, now:
  - CSS masks: http://webkit.org/blog/181/css-masks/
  - CSS reflections: http://webkit.org/blog/182/css-reflections/
  - CSS animations: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/
  - CSS 3D animations: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms/
  - video tag, already in use by dailymotion: http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/

I use the nightly builds of WebKit and it's been an excellent browser for me for the past few years.

So actually a multimedia player will be pretty easy to implement, child play compared to a native application doing the same thing on Linux.
Sure it won't help much to watch a DVD, but netbooks don't have dvd players anyhow. The trend is to all of your data online. Even Netflix is moving toward streaming rather than physical media, once DRM dies with the MPAA I'm sure they'll adopt HTML 5 instead of Silverlight.

Re:Browser OS?

[linhares]

The real deal with the Chrome OS, I believe, is that it will run on ARM, and we should have incredible price/performance and performance/energy machines. Perhaps even a 100-dollar el cheapo, years and years and years after it was dreamed on and "announced". Or the other way around: Coupled with NVIDIA tegra, this thing could be cheap and powerful.

Re:Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

Yes, I understand that and thanks for the links.

But I believe you're missing my point: why would one use HTML/JavaScript to access webcam or USB stick on your machine, using questionable bleeding edge markup, while 10MB Java runtime already works now and is stable for long years?

Please get me right: I am OK with HTML5 and innovations, but I still see no point to be literally limited to Ajax within a browser. For example, Java Applet works way faster than equivalent complex JavaScript GUI, that is done in SmartClient or ExtJS, just loads a bit slower (yes, a bit, because my applets are only 80-100Kb jar). Additionally, Java Swing is much easier to develop, rather then JavaScript/Ajax. If you use JNLP (Java Web Start) it will work for you even faster, because it will cache your jar and start just right away for you. Because your app is not just reflections or animations. It is much more and browsers are needs to become literally a virtual machine for HTML and JavaScript with a plain canvas. And that's what Java Swing already today is. Personally, for me would be much more sense to get running Android on a regular netbook, because I can write Java Swing apps just like this and also have them working offline (unlike Ajax app).

Video tag: yeah, that's how it looks like here http://www.w3schools.com/tags/html5_video.asp on Mac's Safari 4 for me.

Re:Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

ARM? We have plenty of OS on ARM: Android (is a Linux actually), FreeBSD, Linux, recently OpenSolaris by NEC... So still why would I need to boot into a limited browser and have an interesting security?

Re:Browser OS?

[linhares]

have an interesting security

I have no idea what you're talking about. ARM is way better than x86 architecture for smaller devices. NVIDIA Tegra, in particular, is awesome. And no, I do not work for nvidia or know anyone that does.

Re:Browser OS?

[dodobh]

Memory utilisation. Startup times. JVM suckage.

Re:Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Yes, ARM is way better, no worries. I was talking about browser-based OS security (read what Schneier says etc), not about ARM CPU. :-)

Re:Browser OS?

[WindBourne]

Silverlight and flash are closed attempts to take over HTML (and both control not only the future, but what platforms are useful). Javascript is a simple scripting language to CONTROL HTML. With HTML5 coming, javascript will finally have a real tool to work with. In addition, since it is an out and out open language spec, then the platform becomes unimportant. Anybody can create the language.
As to being slow, it depends on implementation. Java compared to C/C++ is slow if used 100% for an OS, BUT, for much of what it does, it is plenty fast. Javascript will be calling more funcationality of HTML 5, and doing less work. More importantly, the implementations will be heading towards compiling javascript.

Re:Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

C'mon, saying "JVM suckage" is kind of a silly troll and quite lame statement, especially if this "suckage" is a number one component in an Android OS.

Java is faster than C++ these days at some points and for example Jake (a port of Quake-2 to Java) is running just faster. And speaking about memory, so far same app with JVM/Swing takes less memory than similar Ajax stuff in a regular Firefox (not speaking about Safari that eats memory like a Caterpillar dump truck eats fuel).

Ah, and speaking about games, Java is way better platform for this then JavaScript and HTML5.

Re:Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

Java isn't that slow anymore. It is slower than C++ of course, but not that much as 5-7 years ago. I just wondering why would Google not make Android more sophisticated and beat at some point e.g. OSX, but they do just "boot into browser" stuff. I would question security, question extensibility, games, advanced usage etc. It also reminds me a times, when Apple wanted to do nearly the same with iPhone: apps supposed to be only Ajax. But they quickly realized it is a bullshit idea.

Re:Browser OS?

[kamatsu]

Android actually doesn't use any of Sun's normal Java features such as Swing, and doesn't use the JVM.

Re:Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

Yes, they do everything different. And it is still very questionable if it is OK, because they do something very similar to Symbian's story about memory management and C++ major changes. Yet no one knows if Symbian's way is better or not. It is just as same (at final result to end user) so far. Besides, you can use Java ME on Android with no problems: http://microemu.blogspot.com/2008/11/running-java-me-applications-on-android.html ...which is still better choice then HTML based apps.

Re:Browser OS?

[kamatsu]

If you've ever actually run a j2me app on android, you would retract your claims. HTML based apps are far better.

Re:Browser OS?

[hotfireball]

If you've ever actually run a j2me app on android, you would retract your claims. HTML based apps are far better.

HTML based app are far better? LOL

For your information, Java != Sun Java. There are lots of implementations of Java compilers, VMs etc: from very small VM's, like 220Kb only (e.g. http://jamvm.sourceforge.net/) to quite serious implementations (e.g. http://www.cacaovm.org/). And does not matters what VM Android is using in particular (they use Dalvik VM underneath their framework, so what?).

Whilst J2ME looks less powerful than what Google came up with on Android, however, there are tons of applications already done, up and running. Folks from Assembla does great job: http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/j2ab

Also for a record, JavaFX is running on Android: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sopao9Y7-GQ -- be our guest beating JavaFX features with that your "far better HTML". :-)

One more thing...

[hotfireball]

How I would work with Chrome OS offline?..

Re:One more thing...

[killthepoor187]

http://gears.google.com/

Re:One more thing...

[hotfireball]

Yes, I know that. I even wrote very similar stuff, using http://twistedmatrix.com/ framework for Python and it was much more lightweight. :-) Still, this is not really a true offline, but an emulation of one, by substituting your external server with a local server (means, you still have client-server), then sync, once connection to external server is established.

In other words, Gears is a hack. And Chrome OS must run it as well. And must run it hidden from a user's eyes, since user supposed to see only a full-screen browser.

To make a Chrome OS yourself: embed Gecko engine into Java Swing component on very limited small Linux (there is some libraries to do so), run it fullscreen on X11 root and that's it. :-)

Re:One more thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

System requirements

• Linux (details)
• Firefox 1.5+
• 32-bit OS (64-bit not supported)

Re:One more thing...

[kamatsu]

So? V8 doesn't support 64 bit either, nor Chrome.

This thing is going to run on atoms and arms, please don't think that these sorts of machines are going to need 64 bit processing.

Video

[Twinbee]

And here's the obligatory hour long video to show the potential of the thing:
http://wave.google.com/

Some new and interesting concepts if you have the time to spare.

Re:Video

[complete loony]

If you don't have the time to spare, there's an abridged version.

Non-browser GUI version?

[Twinbee]

It would be nice if... you know... Google Wave existed outside the browser, and in a proper Windows/Linux GUI interface for faster widgets, less memory consumption etc.

Internet/comm things don't HAVE to be done in the browser all the time.

Re:Non-browser GUI version?

[Norsefire]

It's an open protocol, you can make whatever GUI you want. In the video they were using a terminal client.

Re:Non-browser GUI version?

[iluvcapra]

The demo video at http://wave.google.com/ actually shows a command-line client, around the hour mark.

Re:Non-browser GUI version?

[Anonymous Coward]

omg, i want that command-line client. srsly, I don't care for any of this Web 2.0 AJAX interface stuff and the CLI version would be so much better. any idea where to download it?

Indeed

[caitsith01]

I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.

Based on Google's track record, users should otherwise assume that anything and everything they let this system touch will be stored indefinitely even if deleted, indexed, and trawled for marketing and other purposes.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Wah! My privacy is being invaded by voluntarily using this program!

Re:Indeed

[iluvcapra]

I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.

Their guarantees would be worthless, the only solution is to never send your waves to Google. If Google backs out of documenting their federation protocol, that will be the end of the format.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that kind of the point of it being open source? They state this as something import

Re:Indeed

[caitsith01]

Wah! My privacy is being invaded by voluntarily using this program!

I have no problem with it, oh anonymous troll, if Google makes it totally clear exactly what kind of Faustian deal is being done when you use their software.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Google has already said that, if you are running your own server and you are only talking internally (staying on that server), messages will never leave that server and nobody else, including Google, will see those messages. Of course, if you're "waving" with someone from a different company, then that other company's servers will see your messages as well, but that's to be expected.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed

Re:Indeed

[stephanruby]

I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.

Host your own google wave server. They've released under the Apache license. And if you want the guarantee that no one ever hacks into it, cut it off from the internet, build yourself your own panic room, and store your desktop computer and your wave server into it.

This is just like email, or an intranet application. There is nothing that says that it has to connect to google, or even connect to the outside world. It can work internally just as well.

Re:Indeed

[Lhea]

I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.

Host your own google wave server. They've released under the Apache license. And if you want the guarantee that no one ever hacks into it, cut it off from the internet, build yourself your own panic room, and store your desktop computer and your wave server into it.

I want my very own panic room. Too bad, I am not savvy enough to build it.

The open protocol is a BIG win

[IGnatius T Foobar]

The biggest deal here, which so far is quite understated, is that the protocol is open. It's based on XMPP (aka Jabber), including the server-to-server protocol. This means no one will be locked into a single site -- not even Google's, although I'm sure Google is counting on a lot of people using their site, and I'm sure they'll find other ways to leverage it to make some money as well. They're good at doing that -- and unintrusively, too.

If this thing catches on, it's going to turn the whole Internet on its head -- in a good way. It's the end of being locked in to walled gardens like Exchange and Facebook -- although either of those products would be able to tie into the global Wave federation if they wanted to.

I'm looking forward to seeing lots of different software and sites that speak Wave protocol. For that matter, I'm looking forward to writing one someday.

Re:The open protocol is a BIG win

[melikamp]

Yes yes, I am glad someone brought this up. This thing could be huge if it catches on, it could be the email, IM, and wiki replacement all folded in one. But they will have to address issues which come with the territory. I would not abandon email or vanilla XMPP for something that prevents me from establishing contacts with strangers, and that means dealing with the good old spam. My second concern is the privacy, which basically comes down to implementing end-to-end encryption, i.e. messages should be unreadable without private keys (that would make storing data on Google's servers fine by me). And finally, I would never abandon email for something that prevents me from exporting. They just have to make it so that all my waves can be exported and maintained as a single indexed database which I myself can archive and back up. Ideally, with only a few clicks I should be able to create a local wave server which is in sync with my wave "inbox", which I can browse using a vanilla wave client while offline.

Re:The open protocol is a BIG win

[badkarmadayaccount]

XML has an encryption standard. Just FYI, my $0.02.

Re:The open protocol is a BIG win

[melikamp]

As far as I understand, the built-in (TLS?) encryption is not end to end. In particular, the server can read everything. The functionality I want is provided by otr. It is really sad that this is not a part of every communication standard.

Too Bad

[tpstigers]

I was going to link to this post from another forum that's been discussing Wave. Then I read the comments. It took me five minutes to find one that wasn't juvenile. Is this what Slashdot has come to?

Re:Too Bad

[linhares]

You must be new here--this is a website where boring drudges come for being modded "funny". Just don't browse at 0 and the child molesters can't get to you. Only the funny guys, like me.

Wait, I think...

[tecnico.hitos]

...it might mean you can use it completely free, but it may come bundled with malware.

Sounds a lot like what...

[Anonymous Coward]

Douglas Adams wished for.....

Do Not Want

[Dynamoo]

I've looked at the stories and the explanation about Google Wave.. and my attitude is definitely "Do Not Want". It really doesn't seem to meet a real need as far as I can tell.. oh yeah, it's pretty clever. But what's the elevator pitch? How is this going to improve my life?

Re:Do Not Want

[nacturation]

I've looked at the stories and the explanation about Google Wave.. and my attitude is definitely "Do Not Want".

Thanks for the info. Could you please come back every time something new is presented and let us know whether you want that one too?

Wether wave is good or bad,

[killthepoor187]

I like what google has been doing. I sometimes don't think that their goal is even to make super successful technologies sometimes as it is to push the internet forward by showing what can be done with it. It would make sense too, they don't get money from giving away free email and office software, they make money from getting more people onto the web. The more developed the web is, the more pull there is for people to get on it and see their ads. Even if it fails, just by the nature of it being ambitious should get others to emulate it, hopefully with some great new ideas of their own.

Everyone?

[mrmagos]

In the second image:
"Everyone on /. has a Wave account. Well, anyone that matters on Slashdot has a Wave account."

:(

"on crack" is hyperbole

[circletimessquare]

hyperbole on meth

this situation was created by Microsoft

[extraqwert]

It is because Microsoft Windows is so broken, one would want to run everything inside Firefox. This is the reverse of a "sandbox". The word "sandbox" usually means that whatever you run inside the web browser is potentially harmful and should not be allowed to affect the operating system. But we want the opposite. I think we want to isolate ourself from the sickness of our operating system, and do everything in Firefox.

Re:this situation was created by Microsoft

[bonch]

You actually believe that slow, clunky JavaScript apps are somehow less "broken" than Windows? JavaScript apps don't even have a standard GUI. We've reverted to the MS-DOS days where every app has to roll its own stuff.

Most of you are missing the salient point...

[jddeluxe]

...this is a very integral part of Google plan for World Domination and to stick the final fork in M$.
Strategy: Make minimal investments that disrupt technology and kill competitor's revenue streams.

The real point here is to lay the stage to get the masses to accept Google's concept of turning the browser into the OS and with HTML5 (Google's vision thereof, it will be irrelevant what the W3C players can or cannot agree to...) capable of delivering compelling applications many competitors (read: their primary revenue streams become toast). Google is open-sourcing the back-end server technology - with a few well placed caveats - and here is what will happen as the future unfolds:

1.) Somebody - could be Google, could be a current player, most likely will be a kid in a dorm room doing bong hits while I type this - will harness the technology to create the next-gen social networking application that will supplant MySpace/Facebook/LinkedIn/etc. Being ever so much more compelling, the 100s of millions of people globally who waste endless hours on the current social networking sites will migrate to the new platform and be the core target audience for further browser delivered applications.
2.) Somebody - most likely Google, might be another player - will harness the technology and kill all other group collaboration software applications, killing high $$$ revenue streams to competitors.
3.) Once core base of consumers become used to the idea of browser as applications delivery systems and HTML% paradigm matures, some major gaming software vendor will realize that a subscription based service to deliver their software eliminates all middlemen and takes marketing/distribution costs to near 0 level, they will embrace and all competitors will be forced to follow suit.
4.) Multiple other parties will come up with unique, compelling ideas to harness Wave technology/HTML5 in ways that do not even occur to me at the moment.
5.) e.) All of the Above will drive ever increasing numbers of individuals/companies/corporate entities to use the default Google cloud paid hosting services/applications/frameworks/applications/tools for e>) All of the Above.
While the current sandbox dev platform is still buggy/immature, if you have a bit of vision and 20+ years of experience, it's not that hard to see where it's all headed...

Re:Most of you are missing the salient point...

[linhares]

You've emphasized the "nasty" parts of the plan, at least in what concerns microsoft, salesforce, and other major software vendors. I could imagine that this new infrastructure may mess them up a little, or maybe a lot. But the "non-nasty" part is that it will enable a whole new level of collaboration between people, enhancing productivity, and since Google will probably host this for free (at least for gmail users), that means that poorer countries can benefit too, from Mexico, to Brundi, to Chad, to Iceland, to Mississipi.

It's the mods who're on crack

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this a troll?! Seriously, Basil Brush may be a stuffed fox, but he's absolutely spot-on correct in this post, the above post is not a troll. Take that from someone who has actually bothered to read the Wave API docs and protocol spec (me).

Slashdot's moderation system has really gone down the pan since they got rid of proper meta-moderation.

Re:It's the mods who're on crack

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that he won't even read your post because he wants to make some petty, fatuous "point" about ignoring anonymous cowards.

I have tried it, and wrote a robot and a gadget

[MarkWatson]

The documentation is good, so it is easy to get started. I view Wave as "something for the future" but I think that it is worth 3 or 4 hours a week coding to it. It was a thrill when my robot replied to a wave that I had invited it to join (like a human). For writing robots, I look forward to a local runtime and debugging setup. Overall, I think that Wave looks promising and I am mentally re-evaluating several web application projects that I have done in the last ten years, thinking of how I might re-implement them on Wave.

Mods, where are you??

[fishermonger]

Oh, i forgot it's 1AM in the US

Lol. Java failed for a reason

[SmallFurryCreature]

There is this common misconception that javascript is slow. Yeah right. LOOK at the chrome demonstrations. The sad fact is that Javascript suffers from a couple of faults that are hard to rememdy (but google might be force changes).

It is hard to upgrade. Since every browser has to implement, you have to rely on every browsers implementation of it. If say Chome introduced javascript++ it would only run in Chrome. That is the reason googles api has a TON of IE specific fixes. So that dcvelopers can code for a good browser and have their library convert it for MS software.

It is hard to extend. More classical languages rely on a ton of libraries, for javascript these libraries have to be supplied with the program, this means extra data to be send along. The various javascript libraries use all kinds of tricks to keep themselves small and even be shared but still, this development is fairly recent and for years it means that every kb of javascript code had to be downloaded over dialup.

The DOM is a beast and while manipulating it can be done efficiently for years IE was the lead browser and boths its javascript engine and DOM model were completly horrible.

Your ideas of javascript are the same as those that let java to be rejected. In tbe beginning we had ton of HUGE java applets that gobbled up MB's of memory for their virtual machine all to display some animated horizontal break. Or a mirror effect beneath images. Fantastic! But back in the day computers had barely enough memory for the browser let alone some virtual machine coded by someone working from a book.

Javascript done right with a modern browser (anything not from MS) is en entirely different beast. LEARN to use it properly (it is NOT a classical language like C or Java but far more advanced) and it flies.

No, it will never be as fast as an optimized native C program but that is like saying bash scripts ain't as fast or powerful as a full language. Doesn't stop them from having their own very useful role.

Javascript is the language for working in a browser. All others, JAVA, Flash, SilverLight have tried to replace it but have failed to really replace it.

Really, use some javascript not written by some guy who knows a classical language and thinks he can do javascript without learning it.

Re:Lol. Java failed for a reason

[hotfireball]

(but google might be force changes

This does not sounds not evil...

If say Chome introduced javascript++ it would only run in Chrome.

This sounds like stuff won't work on top of other browsers (you have to either install Chrome or use Chrome OS, i.e. limit yourself to browser only). Now, in this case Chrome is going to be literally a VM for JavaScript and a canvas for its rendering. That's what Java and Swing is doing for years already. So why not to use already done Java and Swing that has standards, is reliable and rock solid? And Android runs it just fine. Why do we need Chrome OS then?..

More classical languages rely on a ton of libraries

Sorry, what? What you mean by that? "for" or "while" loop in C++ relies on "a ton of libraries"? Or you mean implementation of foobar functionality? As long as you will be able to do things in JavaScript as you can do in plan Java, you will have as same amount of libraries...

Javascript is the language for working in a browser. All others, JAVA, Flash, SilverLight have tried to replace it but have failed to really replace it.

OK, Java Web Start is not within your browser, it is from your browser. So what? But I compare GUI that I've done in Swing and equivalent complexity UI, like e.g. Zimbra. Then I see which one takes more memory, performs faster/slower, loads/reloads better etc. And plain Java so far wins big time, although Zimbra is just that amazing. Besides, JavaScript language does not really works: it requires lots of quirks and hacks to work similar everywhere.

Really, use some javascript not written by some guy who knows a classical language and thinks he can do javascript without learning it.

Can you show any example, please? So far, SmartClient and/or ExtJS are slower and more bulkier than Java Swing over Java Web Start while using. E.g. Firefox will turn to a gray rectangle, while you resize it, once you have lots of controls like this. And the reason is that HTML does not has a paradigm that is regular to desktop GUI. For exact control position, you need to calculate its width in pixels and position it hard. Lots of interesting things must happen, when you resize your browser. To fix this: change the way browsers works, change paradigm and support standards. That's exactly what Java is doing and what .NET is trying to do...

I also don't see any practical use of Chrome OS: if I buy a netbook, I want have something more advanced that just to be able to boot into browser. Besides, there is already something similar: http://www.splashtop.com/ and what everybody goes is just accesses BIOS, turns that thing off (SplashTop Linux usually shipped on a built-in flash memory on a board) and installs XP or whatever else on a real hard drive...

Re:Lol. Java failed for a reason

[Blakey Rat]

Amen.

Javascript is an amazing language. If there's anything holding back development of rich Internet applications, it's not Javascript, but DOM... DOM is an amazingly poorly-conceived and clunky standard. DOM's gotten faster, but it still lacks... well, the vast majority of stuff needed for desktop-like applications. (CSS is also a load of crap, but I won't get into that right now.)

Remember, DOM != Javascript. If you wrote a browser that supported [script type="text/python"], Python would be just as constrained by the DOM-beast as Javascript is now.

People seem to generally conflate these two entirely different technologies, experience crappy DOM performance and functionality, and assume it's Javascript's fault. Not so!

Re:Lol. Java failed for a reason

[Calvin Deck]

Please replace Java with Applets in the above comment.

Google uses GWT to implement Wave, which is a Java to Javascript compiler.

This means that they can implement the complete wave client in the Java language,
but it is running in each browser as an optimized Javascript client for that browser.

Wave Protocol Discussion

[dch24]

One thing about the Wave Protocol is that all the wavelets (the data) is stored on the server that "owns" the wave. You may log in using your office wave server, but if you join a wave started on a google.com server, they own the wave.

If you wanted to "fork" the wave, you could copy all the data onto your office server. Also, if I read correctly, there is no way to "revoke" a wave, or delete content for that matter.

If a DMCA takedown occurs, the entire wave could "disappear" from the parent server, and cached copies would still exist on clients who could then fork and continue. It's a lot like email -- once you hit send, there is no going back.

One possible business solution involves generating a wave that's "for internal use only" and then forking a public release. When forking (this is definitely not google's terminology), you can copy over all the discussion or just the final product.

Although PKI (such a GPG keys) would make privacy and revocation lists a little easier, that is not a part of wave. It wouldn't be too hard to add on to it, but javascript doesn't do crypto, as far as I know.

Re:Wave Protocol Discussion

[stephanruby]

Although PKI (such a GPG keys) would make privacy and revocation lists a little easier, that is not a part of wave. It wouldn't be too hard to add on to it, but javascript doesn't do crypto, as far as I know.

Javascript could do crypto and google wave does *some* limited crypto for authenticating users (although, I didn't quite understand what they said, so I'll have to review the Federation Day wave, or the Federation Day video -- assuming it's out now). They're not doing crypto for the deltas that are transmitted over the wire (since that would add 2 to 5 milliseconds for each delta -- I think they said). Encrypting the deltas would probably work in a Corporate environment, where you could guarantee that everyone had a recent computer, but Google is aiming for the lowest common denominator here (that said, there is nothing that would be preventing you from forking their implementation, or suggesting that to include it in the wave protocol (just join the protocol discussion google group for that), or even forking their protocol slightly -- you'd just have to use a different name for it -- they seem to be quite open to forks happening actually). And I said, they were doing crypto to authenticate users, but that's not quite right either. They're only doing crypto to authenticate *some* relationships between users (and they talked about merkle-trees, they showed a pretty chart on the board, I think that's the part were I either zoned out or got up to go to the bathroom -- I forget which), but either way, they seemed quite happy with their solution apparently. May be, someone can chime in here, and correct anything that I said incorrectly.

One possible business solution involves generating a wave that's "for internal use only" and then forking a public release. When forking (this is definitely not google's terminology), you can copy over all the discussion or just the final product.

This is one thing that they're definitely working on. I'm not sure how they are going to solve the underlying issue, but they said this was becoming a big issue for them as the wave is already used quite a lot internally at Google, and now that they're giving accounts to outsiders -- they're afraid of accidentally releasing sensitive proprietary information out into the wild.

Also, if I read correctly, there is no way to "revoke" a wave, or delete content for that matter.

Also, if I understood correctly, try to look to the code, not the documentation. They said the documentation was in sync during the Google Federation Day, which was two days ago, but I got the sense that the docs will usually lag behind the code (and lag behind the discussion of the protocol on the public google group).

Re:Wave Protocol Discussion

[jesset77]

A competent client should not introduce too much delay due to crypto, and if that's such a problem then simply batch the deltas a bit less frequently. For real, if the other end of the conversation is delayed for up to 1-2 seconds, will that kill the interactivity? I recall getting many impressive bits of chat done on 300 baud modems back in the day, and I would gladly go back to that latency level if it were needed in the name of crypto and real security. After all, anything is better than the present state of the art by way of line-based or post-based updates.

The other thing to consider is that realtime text is already encrypted quite comfortably in protocols such as SSH, where latency would delay your interaction with a perfectly reflective command line shell instead of an air-headed co-worker who is probably too busy guzzling venti latte to even notice you've typed, let alone respond within minutes.

That being said, FFS offer end to end security.. and then the next big point is unintentional data disclosure. It sounds like they will fix that to cover their own asses, so mark that as a win.

Re:Wave Protocol Discussion

[dch24]

Well, of course javascript is Turing Complete; it just doesn't run fast enough (yet) and it's definitely not a secure platform. In other words, there's a reason that no browser offers encryption extensions to allow javascript to communicate securely -- it just doesn't make sense.

Thanks for the tip about watching the code instead of the docs. I actually am a participant in the google groups, though I know that's not the final word on the subject.

Going Back to the Future?

[LKM]

"My underlying point is that Moore's law won't help this because Moore's law assumes we're moving in a single direction: forward."

Which is obviously not true, hence Intel's new ads: "Twice as slow as our last processor!"

Look, it's always been that way: Hardware got faster, software got slower. It'll always be that way. It has to be that way, without adding abstractions we couldn't build today's complex software as easily.

Even when we have short-term changes in that (netbooks made processors slower), it's only temporary. My 300$ netbook isn't fast, but it's still faster than my notebook from two generations ago.

utter shite

[smoker2]

WTF is a "giant web page" ?

Does this mean you get to scroll forever, or do I need to go and buy a 42 inch monitor ?

Slow on IE7?

[Bert64]

The reviewer complains that it's slow on a machine a few years old running IE7... What does he expect? IE7 has one of the slowest javascript engines of any browser... It already lagged way behind everything else *before* the other browsers started implementing their new JIT based javascript engines, and now the speed difference is just ridiculous.

Ben Rometsch' blog

[beef3k]

And if you actually want to read Ben Rometsch blog post you can find that here

My original article

[cca93014]

The original article that I wrote:

http://www.solidstategroup.com/page/2804/company/tech-blog/posts/google-wave-first-impressions

Re:My original article

[davidavdav]

Well, send them an invoice!

Bah!

[cca93014]

I wrote that original post. Fucking BNet have basically taken all my content, hotlinked my image and are not even attributing the work with a link. Great.

Re:Bah!

[Cus]

One response:
Change your image to say 'this article stolen from....'
Second response: Goatse image?

Omnipresent

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who gets worried by Google's tendency to engulf every piece of information they can acquire on the internets?
Searches, email, blogs, videos, everything - and not only do they know everything about everyone, they are also the primary source of information for many people.

Google Wave may look cool, but it's also one step closer to dumb terminals where Google will control all your information.

The real question is

[WindBourne]

how soon before MS copies it (or out right steals it) and the declares it to be their work?

Is it possible to download wave?

[TheSunborn]

Is it possible to use Google wave for all users now? wave.google.com just have a "notify me when it's done" button. Is there any way to download it now, or is it only for for a few select developers yet?

 

Sound like a neat toy.

[fluffernutter]

Hey it sounds neat, but if it doesn't run in an environment I control, on a system that I build, it's useless to me.

Obvious once you know it.

[rixster_uk]

That was a very insightful read. Although it was "obvious" from their public intentions and statements, it does help to read something like your post to identify exactly where they are going. I'm developing a game for the Android platform and the amount of support and stuff needed from google to just get it done is phenomenal ... and now I know the intention above it all makes sense.. Google will make $$$ from sales of the game .. so make it as easy as possible for people to write stuff - more cash for me is more cash for them.... I hope you don't get into trouble with your marketing department for your post though. I think it's very positive for the company as a whole.

Yes, but future competitor is the real issue

[WindBourne]

You are taking out MS and I think that you will succeed. MS has done more to destroy real innovation, so I will not be sorry to see them taken out to the point where they can not continue to do this. THOUGH, I do wonder how you will control their hardware. They marginalized game boxes via Xbox. That is a growing one for them. Is google going to use the new OS to compete head on against that? (and may the force be strong with Google for taking out such an evil company :) ).

My real question is, what about China and all the companies it spawns? The chinese gov. does everything it can to learn about companies (mostly American, but any western one works) inner workings, then they build barriers to them. THey have backed Baidu to compete against all western search engines, but mostly you guys. I saw that wonderful article in which they insisted that you folks had to remove "Im feeling Lucky" button shortly after Baidu decided to steal the idea (claims of too much porno, and yet, Baidu had more). China, with its illegal and immoral backing of MULTIPLE companies, is long term a MUCH MUCH bigger threat to Google. How is Google going to take that on? The ONLY way that I can see, is if Google aqcuires new world-wide patents, but they do not appear to be doing that. Or does Google not have this in their sight?

TaleWeaver

[TaleWeaver]

The influence of a Google beta announcement can be enormous. When Google announced its 1 GIG gmail storage limit in April 2004 most of the free email providers quickly followed suit and have been playing catchup ever since. Wave may be the "killer app" for Google's Chrome OS. I believe that Apple owes its popular success (most users do not understand or care about the technical issues) simply to making a computer and interface that don't look like a computer. Google now has an application that does not look like an application. Instead users will be free to make it as spartan, ornate, simple, complex, large, small etc. as their fickle hearts desire. It's the sizzle that sells the steak not the nutritional analysis.

that's why we need portable file formats

[Rob Y.]

>Desktop apps have their purpose, web apps do as well. Find what suits YOUR needs and use the best choice

You're right, of course. Except that the current state of things is that most desktop apps and web apps use completely different file formats to accomplish the same thing. That's where ODF could come in and really enbable best of breed stuff in both arenas. A common format allows you to innovate in the apps without losing the ability to share your data with other people.

It'll never be perfect, but it'd be nice if the various vendors were even trying. And some of them are (to some extent). Microsoft, of course, is trying - trying to prevent interoperability from ever happening. It's customers that need to demand better. Barring that (and taking past law-breaking into account), governments are the next best hope.

They do have such a thing

[asdfndsagse]

If you locally host it, and there are no Google members in the communication, then it never goes to Google's servers.Somewhere in the last 10 minutes

Re:Hosting is Key

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no different from using hotmail. If you don't want microsoft to access your emails for marketing purposes, don't use hotmail...

Open hosting is key here. If I can host my own waves, the code is open, and other people (from anywhere) can be seamlessly brought into my waves, then the issue becomes a non-issue.

Re:on crack = A.D.D. = no work done = you are fire

[Anonymous Coward]

I have ADD and I've been using crack/freebase for over two years. It's true, it does focus your attention.

Even it that focus is scouring the floor for hours to find that stone that may or may not have fallen down there.

Something like it in Java

[Paul Fernhout]

The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop (I've worked on) is intended to be something like this, but in Java and more decentralized.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

NEPOMUK is another such social semantic desktop system.
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/

Re:Something like it in Java

[khanyisa]

How is it more decentralized? Google wave is designed so that you can run your own servers and they all communicate over a federated XMPP network. The protocols are open extensions to XMPP, and their server code will be released as open source...

Re:Something like it in Java

[Paul Fernhout]

That's a good question. The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop system is more decentralized because you generally store a repository locally, even if you may share a copy of it somehow with others via a server. So, while a central server could be useful for sharing, if that server is down, you still have the data, and can share it in other ways (even copying repositories on USB keys). So, it is more like git or mercurial in that sense. Still, at some point, yes you could talk about theory, as in, if you ran a local server, and it updated another server, than a server based solution might seem the same as a decentralized one. But in practice, one may see a big difference of by default having all the data locally. (There is also an option to not keep a local copy of the data, too, just for completeness, so it doesn't force using only one approach.) There are also some possibilities that are harder to explain, where basically you can have multiple repositories in different locations open at once and do combined things with them.

By the way, "will be released as open source" is not the same as free and open source. :-)

Xanadu

[Sla$hPot]

Looks a lot like the almost 50 year old project Xanadu :D
With cross platform event subscriptions ad libitum?

http://www.xanadu.net/
http://transliterature.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

Very true!

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this going to improve my life?

Not at all. Unless you work with other people. Or for them. Or vice versa. But really, I've always seen that as a kind of weakness.