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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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!