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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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!

But...

[sakdoctor]

Can it be used to control a botnet?

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.

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.

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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

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!

Online desktop move

[cenc]

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

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!