Slashdot Mirror
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.
Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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!
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.
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.
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.)
I just can't be bothered.
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?
Website Hosting
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.
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 ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
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.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
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.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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.
Read Pynchon.
It's an open protocol, you can make whatever GUI you want. In the video they were using a terminal client.
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The demo video at http://wave.google.com/ actually shows a command-line client, around the hour mark.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
hyperbole on meth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
"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.