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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.

10 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Let me know when they release the server by White+Flame · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Great! by John+Hasler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > 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?

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  3. Re:More info, please... by teknopurge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  4. Re:Great! by RichardDeVries · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  5. Mod me paranoid by carp3_noct3m · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  6. Linguistic intensification by StreetStealth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Linguistic intensification by the_womble · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  7. Re:Non-browser GUI version? by Norsefire · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  8. Re:Great! by fabs64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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?

  9. Re:Great! by Allicorn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

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