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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."
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.
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
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).
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.
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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)
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Once someone creates a native GUI app for it, there won't even be a need to use a browser as a workaround.
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