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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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]

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...

[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...

[GooberToo]

Yes. Language pedants ruin almost every conversation they touch.

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.

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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[LKM]

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

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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[RiotingPacifist]

Batshit
Insane
Old
Scientologist
???

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

[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

[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...

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.

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

[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.

Ads

[rodrigovr]

Will Wave have ads? Perhaps compulsory ones?

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?

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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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)

"on crack" is hyperbole

[circletimessquare]

hyperbole on meth

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.

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.

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.

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: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)

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.

My original article

[cca93014]

The original article that I wrote:

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

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?