Slashdot Mirror
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."
If it's basically a "mashup" of a bunch of random Internet and marketing buzzwords, you must have forgotten to mention Twitter.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!