Google Wave Preview Opens Up On Sept 30th

snitch writes with this snippet from InfoQ about the current state of Google Wave: "With the Google Wave Preview scheduled for public availability on September 30th, Wave API Tech Lead Douwe Osinga has posted on the Wave Google Group about what the team has been working on along with some future directions. Up until now, with the limited availability of testing accounts there have been complaints on the Google Group from users that wanted to get their hands on this new technology but didn't have access to the sandbox. As Douwe explains, the team has been busy all this time with stability issues and more."

Comments

Stability issues?

[Norsefire]

There are some bugs I don't want them to fix.

Re:Stability issues?

[blackraven14250]

Are you trying to commit suicide by turbulence?

I'm looking forwards to this

[orta]

I'd like to try writing some of these robots, and I'm fascinated what other larger companies are going to do with it. Facebook integration would be great, but I'm more interested in seeing how the google apps on the whole work with it.

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[Enderandrew]

This is what I want, which is no small request.

* phpbb or some other fully-functional, fantastic open source forum software that allows people to post and respond like a typical forum.
* Wordpress integration (you can already integrate Wordpress into phpbb) or some approximation there of, so you can post articles/stories on a front portal, written by the staff of a site. Articles would have a link to a forum thread to discuss the article.
* Gallery integration (again already possible) for photos.

The problem is that no one packages this together neatly with a nice consistent theme, great integration, and the right blend of plugins to keep spam-bots off your site.

Now throw Wave into the mix.

A Wave requires that you invite people into the way to see it, or edit it. However a Wave robot tied into a good forum/CMS platform really interests me. Authors on a website can invite a robot into a Wave, which posts the results into their Wordpress/phpbb hybrid. The website staff/authors can instantly and easily edit/collaborate the article itself. The article isn't posted on the site until you invite the Robot, which allows you to work on drafts, or have a workflow process of an editor to sign off on the article.

The CMS/forum is there for end users to read the finished article, and respond with the permissions the CMS/forum gives them. But Wave provides a better means for authors to put content on the site to begin with.

phpbb/Wordpress/Gallery2/Wave would be a fantastic framework for a community portal. I wish I were a php-guru to put it together.

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[gmuslera]

Depend how deep the integration goes. A bit of does-it-all package is i.e. TikiWiki, where you have integrated (as in same user base, same general theme, all in the same environment and with ties between all parts) pretty good wiki, forums, image/file galleries and probably too much for your taste other features into the mix. In fact, wont be surprised in next year or even this one comes out a module for it with integration with Wave.

But a forum post (or this very comment) could be seen as a wiki page or an entry in the site news, all at the same time? A conversation could be morphed into the same kind of things? Maybe wave could be used as a somewhat "live" wiki, integrating maybe deeply all ways to see information about a subject, or even one of its extensions could be something that works that way to manage content in a site.

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[AresTheImpaler]

other than the great forum, you should try drupal. the forum module in drupal isn't as bad as it used to be, but imo it's not as good as say phpbb. Said that, there's a forum you can integrate easily with drupal, I believe that's the vanilla forum. I'm not sure tho. (there;s a nice gallery module to integrate gallery 2 into drupal)

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[phyrz]

Yeah Drupal does exactly what the GP describes, just it needs a bit of elbow grease to get it to work nicely.

A big discussion lately in the communnity has revolved around 'features', which would bind together collections of modules, and module configuration into an easy to deploy package.

I think this will ultimately make Drupal much more accessible to newbies.

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[cenc]

There are plugins/extensions/hacks to allow everything you listed to work exactly as you described already. Just Google it.

I have had a unified variation of Joomla/phpbb/wiki/gallery all running as independent systems for a couple of years now. It is a fairly minor leap to add any of it to anything.

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to troll, but i will:

phpbb, wordpress and gallery are horribly bug ridden pieces of crap done in PHP. There's nothing wrong with PHP, it's the people coding OSS with it, they have no f*cking idea what they are doing and would never get hired in real companies doing real software. And there's also the people hosting and administering it, they have even less idea about anything and security.

So i hope there will never be such a thing as that crap you wish somebody would make.

thanks

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[LingNoi]

Daily WTFs aren't specific to PHP or open source. You obviously lack the experience to recognise this.

Re:I'm looking forwards to this

[drinkypoo]

I hesitate to recommend Drupal right now because I'm pissed off about a lack of documentation in votingapi and others (not even comments! a great tragedy) but you could get that with core, captcha, spam, spamspan, views, one of the many image gallery modules, and probably just a couple of others. I would probably wait for the next release though (I know I've been saying that for a long time) because of the database refactoring project.

What is it?

[harmonise]

Can someone tell me what Google Wave is? The video on the page is over an hour long which is a lot to sit through to just to find out what this slashdot article is about.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the future man, the future!

Re:What is it?

[auric_dude]

You must be new here.

Re:What is it?

[Norsefire]

It's sort of like email only instead of errors it gives Firefly references.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Wave allows people to collaborate offline or in real-time on documents. The waves appear in a list like e-mails. Waves can be hosted on and synchronized between various servers. The history of changes of a document can be played back.

The system also allows for small web apps to be embedded in waves and shared between participants in the wave.

I'd really watch the demo video though.

Re:What is it?

[xzaph]

Can someone tell me what Google Wave is? The video on the page is over an hour long which is a lot to sit through to just to find out what this slashdot article is about.

Try this overview page: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Re:What is it?

[Fastolfe]

Here's an abridged video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itc4253kjhw

Essentially it's a cross between collaborative documents (e.g. Google Docs), a container for JavaScript gadgets, e-mail, and IM (changes, even in gadget state, occur in real-time). Participants in a wave can be human, or robots hosted elsewhere (e.g. Google App Engine).

Re:What is it?

[Francis]

Google Wave is a bit hard to describe, but it's completely worth your hour to watch the video.

It's a new communication/collaborative medium. It combines functionality from email, instant messaging, blogs, forums and wikis into a single idea.

I think it's quite clever. I actually think it has a chance of being part of the future of communication. Like Faxes were in the 80s, and email was in the 90's, Wave might actually come of age to this generation.

Re:What is it?

[Enderandrew]

Take email, instant messaging, wiki functionality, and roll it into one, but only better.

Even better, this is an open protocol with code already released that would let you host your own Wave server.

It used to be back in the caveman era that email wasn't a standard protocol, so seperate email systems couldn't talk with each other. I've been wanting one open protocol for IM for ages, so that anyone on any network can talk easily. But again, this is just so much better.

The video is really long, but I found the demo to be worth the time it took to watch. I'm somewhat shocked someone didn't just cut it up into a 5-10 min video on YouTube though.

Re:What is it?

[tyroney]

I'll try to give a real answer:

The goal was to replace email. The result is a cross between email, threaded discussion, wiki, and instant messaging. (no, really. Live concurrent collaborative editing, along with a rewind feature so you can review the chronology in a more logical fashion) One can make gadgets that show up in a wave and allow you to interact in ways besides just typing, and there are also bots that interact with waves much like a normal user. Instead of adding some spell check the way you might normally think of it, they have a spell check bot that uses the wave collaborative editing features to highlight and potentially change your spelling. (which means someone else in the conversation could finish up doing the editing the spell check highlighted in a sentence earlier in your paragraph)

It works somewhat like email, as in once things settle down whoever can run their own wave server. And it could be integrated with, say, a blog where the comment section of a post would be a wave. (and have all that functionality, and stuff)

Re:What is it?

[Naurgrim]

Good question.

I got my sandbox account this morning and am trying to figure out what it is and what it is good for.

My initial drunken impression is that it is a free form, real-time, google apps mash-up sort of thing, with bots written by smart people.

Still messing with it...

Re:What is it?

[Stiletto]

If it's basically a "mashup" of a bunch of random Internet and marketing buzzwords, you must have forgotten to mention Twitter.

Re:What is it?

[Enderandrew]

If it was anyone other than Google, I'd be skeptical of the hype. But this isn't buzz-words. This is a (mostly) working protocol and platform to honestly really change the way we work and communicate.

Watch the video. Drink the Kool-aid.

What I'm really curious about is whether or not Facebook will fully embrace Wave, which is an open protocol. They can use it without giving Google a dime, but it still would be Facebook (partially owned by Microsoft) helping to adopt and steer a Google protocol.

Yet, if Facebook ignores Wave, I think Wave could be the "killer-app" that helps drive the next social network to tne mumber one spot.

Re:What is it?

[watergeus]

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

See for more http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.htmlGoogle Wave

Re:What is it?

[ColdWetDog]

It's sort of like email only instead of errors it gives Firefly references.

So it's like a 21st Century equivalent of Lotus Notes?

Re:What is it?

[rehtonAesoohC]

Google Wave is basically what started the Google Grid.

Well, that's before the Terminators came when Skynet took over.

And of course... AFTER Starfleet was established. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself.

Re:What is it?

[Stiletto]

I'd be skeptical of the hype. But this isn't buzz-words. This is a (mostly) working protocol and platform to honestly really change the way we work and communicate.

I can probably name over twenty-five distinct products released in the last decade that marketers touted using the EXACT same phrase to the letter, and so far, none of them have replaced the telephone and E-mail to any substantial degree.

/Maybe IM... MAYBE.

Re:What is it?

[lewko]

Google Wave is a bit hard to describe, but it's completely worth your hour to watch the video.

Not a good bit of advocacy. Can you imagine any other sales pitch starting that way?

Hi, I have this great product. It's a little hard to explain, but why don't you just come to this free seminar...

I'd really like an "Elevator Pitch" for this technology.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Strength through discipline. Strength through community. Strength through action!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(TV_special)

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not have much confidence in Facebook opening anything, especially after they said they would add XMPP support for Facebook chat and still have yet to do so.

Re:What is it?

[Francis]

Haha :) I'm not a salesguy, I don't work for Google, and I come from a technical background. I'm not trying to sell you anything.

When I asked about google wave, my colleague said about the exact same thing to me. It's an interesting idea, and for a lot of technical people, just the reassurance that something is interesting enough to investigate is all you need :)

Re:What is it?

[cbraescu1]

It's today's Lotus Notes, with all the quirks and "hard to explain but you have to use it" bruhaha.

Re:What is it?

[genner]

It's sort of like email only instead of errors it gives Firefly references.

So it's like a 21st Century equivalent of Lotus Notes?

Exactly.

Re:What is it?

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

To be fair, I've also heard the Internet, the World Wide Web and e-mail touted using the EXACT same phrase to the letter.

Re:What is it?

[MindStalker]

Google is releasing the specs so that others can create their own servers.
I can not name a single product that Google has really pushed (many many they have released they haven't pushed) that hasn't changed the way we work.
Google Search, Google Maps.
Things they copies from others but have done well in,
Google email, Google calendar, Google docs.
I can't think of a single product of theirs that they promoted that has bombed (yes plenty of lab products they haven't promoted have bombed).

Re:What is it?

[styrotech]

I can probably name over twenty-five distinct products released in the last decade that marketers touted using the EXACT same phrase to the letter, and so far, none of them have replaced the telephone and E-mail to any substantial degree.

Yeah but the hype is not coming from marketers so much as from people who have watched the live demo, and played with the bits and pieces that have been released so far and can see the potential.

If Wave was just a Google product and wasn't a set of open/federated protocols, then it probably wouldn't have much chance of actually changing anything. After all the telephone and email aren't products, they are ways of interoperably connecting different systems to each other world wide so that anyone can communicate with anyone else.

I don't know about you, but in my experience telephone and email usage is getting replaced by other things. email replaced a lot of phone calls and and nearly all fax usage, and now email is getting replaced by other things like task specific web apps (eg wikis, ticket trackers, project management apps etc etc) even without those apps being focused on communication. Most of this is limited to usage within an organisation.

Wave has the potential to transform the communication aspect of these kinds of web apps. I don't see it's potential as replacing email or IM or wikis etc, but as unifying them all and allowing a new generation of really collaborative and interoperable web apps to be built on top of it that can work easily within or between organisations.

I'm not going to claim it absolutely really will replace anything (I'm too cynical for that), but watching the demo was the first time I've got excited by a new communication technology in a long time (hell, I don't even like IM and think Twitter is moronic). I'm normally very jaded about this kind of thing, and I also thought it was just a bunch of hype at first.

Re:What is it?

[Runaway1956]

"(e.g. Google App Engine)"

I read that as "Google ____ Empire" Had to look again, to see "Google App Empire". Says to myself, "Self, WTF is wrong with you?" I got it right on the third read.

To many people posting about evil google, I guess. LMAO

Re:What is it?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Difficult to do.

What I gathered from the ten-minute abbreviated video is:

It's a document that can be edited live by many people on multiple servers. ("Live" means "character by character".) It can be extended in interesting ways. Each edit is kept by the server, and can be rolled back.

This allows it to be used for an absurd number of things -- the demo showed a photo album, a blog, a live chat, email, a bug tracker, a really nice spellchecker and translator, support for mobile devices, etc etc. (When I say "email", I mean "meant to replace email.")

It's difficult to create an elevator pitch because, while the idea itself is deceptively simple, the implications are not. For example, what's the "elevator pitch" for the Internet, or even (perhaps especially) the World Wide Web? "You can connect to a server and view any document, which can link to any other document, you can submit information back to the server, and it can be scripted."

O...k... but does this actually encompass everything the Internet has done, or why you should care? No, you'd need a seminar for that. Even e-commerce -- hell, even dynamic pages -- aren't necessarily obvious -- HTTP, for example, was clearly designed for static things, or at least manually-updated things. Certainly the idea of actually building an application with the Web browser and a Web server as a platform seems laughably implausible -- and some people still laugh, to this day.

So, the primitive for Google Wave is a document that can be simultaneously edited by a number of people, with scriptability and version control. The implications, I don't fully grok yet, but they look damned impressive.

Re:What is it?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I've been wanting one open protocol for IM for ages, so that anyone on any network can talk easily.

It's called Jabber, and Google Talk already uses it.

The problem isn't creating that standard, open protocol. The problem is getting Yahoo, AIM, and MSN to use it -- or worse, getting the general public to abandon those networks and sign up for Gmail instead.

I'm somewhat shocked someone didn't just cut it up into a 5-10 min video on YouTube though.

Someone did.

Re:What is it?

[MtViewGuy]

Google Wave sounds like an interesting idea but the need for an always on broadband connection to make it work could be a problem in parts of the world where such connections aren't so readily available.

Re:What is it?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Google Wave sounds like an interesting idea but the need for an always on broadband connection to make it work could be a problem...

Umm, what need? From the demos it works just fine for people who are sporadically online, much like e-mail in fact.

Re:What is it?

[Daengbo]

Unless you're Brazilian, I think Orkut can be considered a failure.

Re:What is it?

[Daengbo]

I think I would go into orgasmic spasms if Yahoo!, MSN, and AIM switched to Jabber. Wouldn't it be nice to talk to anyone no matter the service that person was registered on? If Skype would adopt SIP, then the revolution would be complete.

Conversely, imagine if you had to register for Hotmail just to send e-mail to someone else who was a Hotmail user. Would e-mail ever have become as big as it has?

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all over that like... Something on something.

Re:What is it?

[stephanruby]

Google Wave works fine off-line (with google gears or html5-compliant browsers). Once all the browsers are html5-compliant, there won't even be a need to use Google Gears as a workaround.

Re:What is it?

[stephanruby]

Google Wave is like subethaedit and etherpad, whereas subethaedit and etherpad are just applications that can't even talk to each other, Google is banking on the idea that these kinds of applications will one day become ubiquitous, and at the very least, it's trying to set itself up as the new leader of the pack in that area.

Now Google Wave is not going to replace email (thought, it may help decrease the actual number of emails in some situations). And Google Wave may not even be the final winner in this area (it's still way too early to tell in my opinion). But you've got to admit, Google Wave is much more lightweight, open, and cheaper, in that area than anything that Microsoft might have come up with -- thus far.

Re:What is it?

[dbIII]

Sounds like an odd mashup but if it kills all desire for MS Exchange (the older odd mashup) I'm all for it.

Re:What is it?

[bemymonkey]

A combination of real-time editable collaborative IM, E-Mail and forums - and a whole lot of other awesome stuff.

Personally, I can't wait.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple farking journalism guys - State in simple terms what the story is about, THEN start your raving.

Re:What is it?

[bemymonkey]

True, but the presentation video made me think otherwise - with this feature set, I'd say a lot of things are possible... including widespread adoption a la E-Mail or at least, say, ICQ. The only thing I'm missing so far is a standalone app (although apps like Pidgin will probably be adding support pretty quickly)...

Re:What is it?

[Deanalator]

google maps completely changed looking up directions online
gmail completely changed the free email landscape

I'm keeping a healthy amount of skepticism myself, but from what I have seen this has some solid potential.

If they do it right, they could make the entire wave system cryptographically sound, and completely eliminate spam, forgery, and cleartext communication. This is google though, so I am expecting a nice UI, extremely useful features, and a big fat security fail.

Re:What is it?

[ian_po]

Wave is the future, but does anybody know the transition plan to move the entire planet from email/IM to wave? Whats the migration path? Is wave backward compatible with email or IM?

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

"if it was anyone other than Google, I'd be skeptical of the hype. "

Really? What, beyond paid search, has led you to believe you shouldn't be skeptical?

Re:What is it?

[Twinbee]

Once someone creates a native GUI app for it, there won't even be a need to use a browser as a workaround.

Re:What is it?

[Inda]

If it is not backward compatible with email or IM then someone will have to write a bot to handle that side of things.

I see the bot-writing thing as Google's, or any other vendor's, main earner.

Re:What is it?

[nine-times]

So, the primitive for Google Wave is a document that can be simultaneously edited by a number of people, with scriptability and version control. The implications, I don't fully grok yet, but they look damned impressive.

I don't think any of us grok what the Internet will become yet, and this is just a sign of that. If you'd asked me to name one Internet technology that was likely to stick around in its current form for a long time, it's likely that I would have said "email". Google Wave challenges that for me.

It makes me wonder, because... I hadn't thought much about it before, but there's something about email, for example, that forces a sort of linearity of conversation. That is, its structure is fairly limiting, even when you put threads into the process. And everything is an attachment instead of being part of the communication. I know, that sounds like a strange critique, but what I mean is, think about all the semantic information you can put into HTML and all the information we want in HTML but don't necessarily put in. Emails, even when HTML-based and fully formatted, usually have very little of that.

So really all I'm trying to suggest is that the great thing about the Internet is that it allows us to leave media behind. When we distribute music on a CD, for example, there are limits. You generally need to meet all the specs that make it a CD, which limits what you can put on it. Distribution over the Internet gives us much more freedom, but what I hadn't considered until the past couple years was how much the particular standard we follow or file format we use also imposes the same limits. You can only put into your web page what HTML supports, and you can only put into emails what the clients will support.

What has me excited about Google Wave is not so much this exact approach, but that people are trying to figure out how we could change the entire paradigm of our current interaction with the Internet, changing the distinctions between IM, email, and documents. Maybe there are some other ways of looking at these things and other ways of working that we just haven't thought about before.

Re:What is it?

[Enderandrew]

Very true, but Orkut will likely have the best Wave integration here very soon.

Re:What is it?

[SanityInAnarchy]

If Skype would adopt SIP, then the revolution would be complete.

Well, the difference is, Jabber is actually superior in many ways to the protocols used by Yahoo, MSN, and AIM.

Skype is far superior to SIP -- Skype can tunnel through firewalls, whereas SIP, last I checked, was worse than FTP, needing dozens of ports forwarded to be useful.

Conversely, imagine if you had to register for Hotmail just to send e-mail to someone else who was a Hotmail user. Would e-mail ever have become as big as it has?

It actually used to be that way, back before ISPs "got it" about the Internet.

The problem is, these days, people "solve" the IM problem by using multi-clients and multiple accounts -- for extreme laziness, they'll just use Meebo, for example. For those who want Jabber, there are ways to bridge Jabber to these other protocols -- but you still need an account.

It seems unlikely the services themselves will do much to help. I believe Yahoo and/or AIM actually opened up their protocol, but they still won't use Jabber. MSN likes the ability to censor things -- for example, certain patterns of URLs (something like download.php, but not, oddly, download.asp) -- and censorship is always easier with a closed system.

Furthermore, I imagine the business decisions are at least partly motivated by the possibility of spam (spim?) -- I think they're under the illusion that this is somehow easier to police when it's not an open protocol. (Oddly, I never get spam on gtalk...)

So, my point was, as cool as Wave is, it would be depressingly predictable for everyone except Google to ignore it, and/or develop their own competing, broken standards. OpenID is a huge success story lately, yet we still have to code special cases for broken providers.

Re:What is it?

[MtViewGuy]

However, Google Wave has many aspects which does require online access--especially the collaborative features. In short, despite a lot of offline features Wave is designed for situations where you can get "always on" broadband access fairly easily, whether through a cable, DSL or fiber connection or through a Wi-Fi connection.

Re:What is it?

[SanityInAnarchy]

If you'd asked me to name one Internet technology that was likely to stick around in its current form for a long time, it's likely that I would have said "email". Google Wave challenges that for me.

Yeah, after using Gmail, I would've certainly predicted that something would come along and challenge email. I would've guessed that email would still exist, in its current form, mostly because of inertia.

I'd probably have picked ssh. The Unix commandline isn't going away for a long time.

there's something about email, for example, that forces a sort of linearity of conversation. That is, its structure is fairly limiting, even when you put threads into the process.

I haven't really found that -- especially among technical people, where you can refer back to an archived post in a mailing list, for example.

And everything is an attachment instead of being part of the communication.

Contrast to IM, where everything is a link instead of being part of the communication.

Which reminds me: One thing that's going to absolutely suck about Google Wave is those people who insist on using animated emoticons. Seriously, it seems like half the people I talk to on MSN do this -- for example, they type brb, and it becomes a big animated BRB that turns into a stick figure and runs away. Cute the first time, but just distracting after that.

Do I really want to give these ADD-afflicted people the ability to send me fully interactive, inane little widgets?

what I hadn't considered until the past couple years was how much the particular standard we follow or file format we use also imposes the same limits. You can only put into your web page what HTML supports, and you can only put into emails what the clients will support.

Perhaps, but there is power in these limits.

For example, Google Wave imposes the limit that you can only add relatively low-bandwidth (or at least low-frequency), reversible changes -- you probably couldn't play an FPS in it. In return, you get all these cool little tools to browse through the history.

HTML imposes some limits of its own -- sure, there are ways to get around them, but when a web page behaves the way you expect, there's power there. Examples are bookmarking, back/forward, open in a new tab, and Greasemonkey scripts -- these are the kinds of things that are only possible on a common, restricted platform. People developing native apps often find themselves having to add this kind of functionality back in.

What has me excited about Google Wave is not so much this exact approach, but that people are trying to figure out how we could change the entire paradigm of our current interaction with the Internet, changing the distinctions between IM, email, and documents.

I don't think that's new. I think what's new is that they've presented something that actually could do just that.

I have to think a bit more about the actual implications, though. For example, what types of documents make sense, and what types don't? Is it possible that people would use this for collaboratively developing code? I know I like to be able to take text back to the commandline and grep through it, and use real version control like Git, but maybe I'm old-fashioned.

Re:What is it?

[AmiMoJo]

It's also both incredibly cool and incredibly scary. I love Google Docs and gMail, but I'm well aware that Google have access to lots of private info because of them.

In the same way that it is illegal for telephone companies to listen in on your calls there needs to be a law that makes it illegal for online service providers to do the same in anything but a fairly anonymous and entirely automatic way (for the serving of ads which keep said services free, for example).

Re:What is it?

[St.Creed]

It's a communication protocol that integrates the best aspects from email, wiki, twitter, and instant messaging, in order to provide you with a communications platform that offers stability, versioning, rollback, multiple concurrent edits on "documents" (although the concept of document is getting a bit vague in Google wave) etc.

Or more philosophical: IM, twitter, wiki, editing documents and email are all forms of communication. Google Wave integrates all of these things in one communcations platform that supersedes all of the previous ones. The old apps you can still do on the new platform, except you can do it much better now and integrate them all together in big communication streams that also provide versioning, rollback, concurrent editing etc.

To see how it works though, you'll still have to watch the video.

Re:What is it?

[St.Creed]

Like instant messaging?

Well, tell everyone who doesn't have it yet to get broadband. They're going to need it.

Time to invest in dark fiber :)

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll never be used to it's potential, or barely for what it's intended.

Just think of it as Google's FaceBook and never touch it.

Re:What is it?

[rantingkitten]

Well, that sounds astoundingly useless. In a decade of being in "the real world" of work and corporate brouhaha, not once have I ever said "Working on this document sure would be easier if I had a bunch of other people trying to hog the keyboard at the same time and bickering with each other about whose revisions are better and whose turn it is to change something."

Re:What is it?

[D Ninja]

The Google Wave Abridged YouTube Video (10 minutes). In short, Google Wave is the way online communication should have been done.

Re:What is it?

[wossName]

Do they have post holers?

Re:What is it?

[jbr439]

I can probably name over twenty-five distinct products released in the last decade that marketers touted using the EXACT same phrase [change the way we work and communicate] to the letter, and so far, none of them have replaced the telephone and E-mail to any substantial degree.

You obviously are not taking into account Jabberwocky. It's going to change the way business is done.

Re:What is it?

[mjwx]

Google Wave allows people to collaborate offline or in real-time on documents. The waves appear in a list like e-mails. Waves can be hosted on and synchronized between various servers. The history of changes of a document can be played back.

To simplify things for our Microsoft audience,

Google Wave is like Exchange, Sharepoint and Live Communication Server rolled into one and better (a lot better then sharepoint).

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 minutes. Got patience?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCMTsv1bSnE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itc4253kjhw

Re:What is it?

[bbtom]

I have had a Wave Sandbox account for a few weeks. I don't know why. Something to do with going along to two Google developer events in London.

I don't buy that it's going to replace e-mail. The great thing about e-mail is that it is already massively distributed and established. There are e-mail clients already existing for every platform. Pretty much the first application that gets written for any operating system these days is an e-mail client or a web browser. E-mails are sent in an extremely easy-to-understand, widely implemented format - plain text. There are already hundreds of e-mail servers, and if you are using a mature Linux distro like Debian or whatever, e-mail isn't that complex to set up.

Wave requires much more technology: you've got to host XMPP, you've got to host whatever interface magic you are doing to serve up the Wave experience to the end user (which means another HTTP service, at least until Wave clients start being available for Windows, Mac and $YOUR_PLATFORM), you've got to host all the media that gets dumped into the Wave. Beneath all of that, you've got to understand a fair bit about XMPP, and you've got to understand a fair amount of the complexities of XML, HTML, JS and so on. And, well, is the extra complexity and extra cost (in resources) of Wave really worth it? I'm not sure it is.

As a technology, Wave is awesome. Drag and drop files into your browser and watch them appear magically on another computer. The tech demo is really impressive. I'm impressed by Wave as a demo of just what is possible using the browser and a stack of open standards and open source technologies. I'm just not convinced that it's really been thought through. It won't replace e-mail or IM: it's too complex compared to them. As for collaboration, compare it with wikis or EtherPad - both are also a lot simpler. The Wave UI is mind-bogglingly complicated. There's no way my parents are going to be riding the Wave.

Wave seems to be predicated on there being something wrong with e-mail. I don't think there is. The only problems with e-mail are social, not technological. The primary problem with e-mail is that people don't follow RFC 1855 - people sending stupid rumours and chain letters, spam and spammy notifications, HTML crapola, and not being able to figure out how to quote correctly. Oh, and paranoid corporations who feel the need to shove 20K of legal crap at the bottom of the e-mail telling me that it's confidential (I never signed anything), that if I got it in error I should delete it (no, fuck off), not to print it out (I'll do what I want with my e-mail and my laser printer) and that it's been through their virus scanner (okay, how does that affect me?).

Summary: Wave is a cool tech demo, but I don't buy that it's a replacement for e-mail.

Re:What is it?

[walshy007]

Skype is far superior to SIP -- Skype can tunnel through firewalls, whereas SIP, last I checked, was worse than FTP, needing dozens of ports forwarded to be useful.

Depends on how old the implementation is, newer ones (and the sip implementation of the N95) can go through firewalls just fine.

Re:What is it?

[walshy007]

call me silly but can someone explain to me how using this is better than using git, IM (shudder) and email?

I just fail to see how making everything dependent on an always on an internet connection and browser is 'beneficial'. Modifying documents properly should take time and thought, and review from others on a team project before changes being accepted into mainline doc.

Re:What is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you say he's new? He asked a simple question without doing any reading of TFA. Sounds like an expreienced /.er to me.

Re:What is it?

[tolan-b]

It would have to be a native GUI app that supports HTML, for the widgets. Wait a minute there is one... a browser!

Re:What is it?

[tolan-b]

Wave has a stronger concept of identity, it should be much easier to close down spammers quickly.

Re:What is it?

[TheCRAIGGERS]

A good point, and all I can think of is that Wave isn't meant for all types of communications. A cop-out, I know, but nobody is suggesting using this to write code in a bazaar environment.

There are at least as many types of projects that instant feedback and collaboration are a boon, however. For instance, I see this easily replacing IM and email for "light" conversations between friends and family.

Re:What is it?

[SanityInAnarchy]

can go through firewalls just fine.

Ok, to be clear: Say I've got a SIP phone, and you've got a SIP phone, and we're both behind NAT firewalls.

How do we connect to each other? How do we even address each other?

Because Skype solves this rather elegantly, and peer-to-peer, with UDP hole punching -- thus, Skype's own servers only establish connections, they don't have to pay the bandwidth for the actual calls.

I haven't looked at SIP in a long time, but I definitely didn't see any tricks like that. Has that changed? And if so, how does it work?

Re:What is it?

[walshy007]

It uses STUN which is a lot more recent invention than SIP, (STUN is Simple Traversal of UDP through Nat protocol). Most modern sip implementations use STUN.

Here is how I use sip on my n95 to another n95

Register and setup sip account on phone for ekiga (can be whoever but used ekiga since it's free etc) friend with second phone do the same

call them by their blah@ekiga.net number, and it magically works!, very simple

Re:What is it?

[SanityInAnarchy]

It works!

Cool, thanks! Now I can get all righteously indignant at the ubiquity of Skype.

Bugs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it be less glitchy by then?

Re:Bugs...

[Norsefire]

What are you talking about? There aren't any bu"Everything's shiny, Cap'n. Not to fret!" Unfortunately, you'll need to refresh.

But...

[sakdoctor]

Can it be used to control a botnet?

Re:But...

[Enderandrew]

Yes, you could write a Wave robot to send commands to your botnet.

Yes, there is an app for that.

Slashdot wave

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like slashdot could be turned into a wave (or multiple waves) and we wouldn't need the website anymore.

Re:Slashdot wave

[Daengbo]

I don't want to think of the pictures that would get embedded. Bonus! No need to click that TubGirl link any more!

MediaWiki anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people like MediaWiki, the wiki software used by Wikipedia, just fine.

I hope they don't keep those error messages

[Augusto]

These messages can be scary in different context. Specially in airplanes.
http://sellmic.com/blog/2009/08/13/terror-messages-cute-error-messages-that-scare-you-based-on-context/

I guess they're trying to outdo delta's website.

Re:I hope they don't keep those error messages

[Norsefire]

Actually they're making a Firefly (the movie, Serenity, actually) reference.

Mal: This is the captain. We have a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence and then - explode.

Jayne: We're gonna explode? I don't wanna explode!

Re:I hope they don't keep those error messages

[nine-times]

Awesome. It's nice to know that, even though its run was short, the geeks of the world will bravely carry on the Firefly torch.

Re:I hope they don't keep those error messages

[emjay88]

If you look closely in the developer preview (from IO) An error message pops up (about 13:48) down the bottom reading something like: "Ah, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

GOOGLE bugs!

[crystalcole07]

Google is improving throughout time but they need to fix those bugs that continues to flock the system.

Re:GOOGLE bugs!

[Runaway1956]

Google engineer muttering to himself, "Hmmm, how did we get a crystalcole07 in here? I thought we had the worst bugs fixed in this code....... hmmmm..... there, that should fix it.... OK, next problem...."

Like a Word doc with "Track Changes" on...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Call me a cynic, but the Wave format reminds me of a Word doc with "Track Changes" turned on. My first thoughts were that the most used features of Wave might be "ignore contributions" and "de-contextualize contributions and list as a change history instead". Otherwise, they could be as hard to read as a coherent thread as...Slashdot.

Re:Like a Word doc with "Track Changes" on...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a conversation, Wave's main communication mechanism is basic threaded conversations. Well, not quite basic as it has special features for branching off a semi-private thread and inviting people into threads.

Re:Like a Word doc with "Track Changes" on...

[Cheney]

Cynic.

Re:Like a Word doc with "Track Changes" on...

[stephanruby]

In that sense, it's more like a wiki.

When you're invited to an existing wave, nothing in the existing text appears highlighted. You only get to see the highlighted diffs in different colors if you hit the rewind/replay button and flip through the previous versions. I think that's probably what you saw. Also, when people are contributing to the wave at the exact same time, only their cursor (with different colors and with their names on it) appear ahead of the text they're typing. It doesn't actually highlight the entire contribution like it does in Word tracking, or like it does on etherpad.

That being said, if you've previously read a wave, and come back to it later on after someone made some changes, it shows you all the changed text in yellow. But here, it assumes you're not interested in who made the changes, but just in the fact that some changes were made (that's why it only uses only one color in that scenario). But frankly, the yellow doesn't really bother me, it seems to disappear pretty quickly (either when you reload the wave, press the 'mark read' button, or when you start editing the wave).

Re:Like a Word doc with "Track Changes" on...

[Inda]

Forget Google's web implementation. It will be nice, clean and usable but I'd think most people would use a proper client with bells and whistles. Much like hardcore email users do today.

If they wanted to get "+5 cheeky"...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They could adopt the slogan "The wave starts now"...

Re:If they wanted to get "+5 cheeky"...

[Ant P.]

"Catch the Wave"? ...or not. Sounds like an infection...

Wow

[thelandp]

I am amazed and inspired. To think, some people go on boat trips with their work colleagues. Awesome!

Re:Wow

[boarder8925]

So... they're on a boat?

Online desktop move

[cenc]

So, is this suppose to be Googles first attempt at sort of online ajax desktop?

GoogleWave .vs. HIPPA

[ElitistWhiner]

Easily GoogleWave makes healthcare documentation, sharing and maintenance incredibly integrated in a manner that traditional manual (computerized) record keeping cannot

Um...

[sonicmerlin]

Am I the only one who has no idea what Google Wave does?

Re:Um...

[orta]

There are a lot of explanations in these threads... If you dont get it after reading them go and consult the video.

Adobe Connect?

[resistfascism]

At the risk of sounding bewilderingly behind the times, I was surprised to see no mention of Adobe Connect, and a comparison of what Wave has over Adobe Connect (a.k.a. Macromedia Breeze).

First of all, I am currently serving in the U.S. Army, so I can make this anecdotal claim with a fair amount of certainty: Adobe Connect is a big deal for the Army and is quickly becoming as indispensable as e-mail for a means of collaboration. If a briefing involves a distributed audience, then it is probably going to be a PowerPoint presentation shared via Adobe Connect.

So, what does Wave have to offer that Adobe Connect does not? One thing is certainly the ability to edit documents in real time. But how far behind is Adobe Connect from that? Not far at all, I imagine. I've never tried this, but here is what I think folks could do, in Adobe Connect terminology: a user with host (who wants to modify the document in question) status edits a shared file and then re-uploads it to the Adobe Connect Server. The client application already has a chat widget, so that covers instant messaging.

Want a bot that can participate? There are scripting tools out there - the kind that can automate typing and clicking, and windows script host scripts that can automatically generate office documents from other data sources.

I can see one big objection to my good-idea-fairy inspired commentary, and that is Adobe Connect seems better geared towards one way communication; it works well for scenarios where one person at a time disseminates prepared information, and everyone else listens to what the current speaker has to contribute.

What I am writing to let my fellow slashdotters know, as it seems this might not be common knowledge, is that there is (in the U.S. Army, and particularly the Army in Iraq) an entrenched product that comes close to what Google is offering. Something that my fellow slashdotters already know, but that bears repeating at this juncture is that product entrenchment goes a long way to staying entrenched, and a product that is entrenched in the U.S. military has a good foothold in the climb to becoming a standard.

Re:Adobe Connect?

[TheSunborn]

I have newer used "Adobe Connect"* but a major difference is that Google wave is a protocol.

This mean that anyone can make their own wave server**, and you can make your own graphics interface to the wave, so you don't need to use whatever google make. (I think that this will be importent, because in the end someone will make a much better "non browser" gui to wave).

*So this analysis is based on 2 minutes wiki reading

**Your own wave server can still talk to all the other wave servers. This is importent because it mean that Wave is(Or atleast can be) total independent of any google hardware/software. So there is no fear of being locked to a singel vendor who will not implement what you need.

Re:Adobe Connect?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Adobe Connect is a big deal for the Army and is quickly becoming as indispensable as e-mail for a means of collaboration.

Is it replacing e-mail? Part of the point is that Wave merges the capabilities of e-mail with those of IM and group chat and collaboration tools all into one protocol and program. Further, Wave is free, can be used from the Web without a plug-in, and is an open protocol so that it can freely interoperate with any other Wave tools/clients anyone makes for any platform. By contrast Adobe Connect cost $40/month and limited to 15 users per chat. It requires Adobe Flash and can't interoperate with any other clients because it is closed and owned by Adobe. This means, for example, there will not be an Adobe Connect client for the iPhone in the foreseeable future, but there will almost certainly be a Google Wave client in short order.

I don't think Adobe Connect is the same thing, even though in conjunction with e-mail and powerpoint it can be used for a subset of the same tasks. Not that that will necessarily matter to the US Army. The decision making process there, for procurement and standardization is fundamentally broken. It's good to know what the army is doing and what other parts of the government are doing, if for no other reason so that we can complain about how much money they're wasting on proprietary software licensing when the army is big enough to commission the creation of OSS tools which provide more value and long term flexibility.

Re:Adobe Connect?

[St.Creed]

and a product that is entrenched in the U.S. military has a good foothold in the climb to becoming a standard.

True, but a foothold is only a foothold. If the rest of the world doesn't like your standard because it has found something better, it won't help them much. And from what you're writing, Adobe Connect looks like a better Powerpoint while Google wave looks like a much better communications platform. If it gets off the ground, Adobe will probably make Adobe Connect compatible with it.

Re:Adobe Connect?

[DragonWriter]

So, what does Wave have to offer that Adobe Connect does not?

A well-documented, open federation protocol.

One thing is certainly the ability to edit documents in real time.

That too.

Re:Adobe Connect?

[badkarmadayaccount]

I don't think there is much point in making a native app for Wave. It's easier to embed the protocol in the browser, it's not like the browser doesn't implement everything else you could possibly need on the client side.

Wow...Google /.ed

[hesaigo999ca]

You gotta hand it to /....to say they were able to /. the wave.google.com site, is pretty amazing.
So what do we have here, in the google ache, its the wave.google.com site Here

Gotta love google, and gotta love /.!!! : )