Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Wave Preview Opens Up On Sept 30th

Posted by timothy on from the well-that-is-what-they'd-say-isn't-it? dept.

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."

14 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Stability issues? by Norsefire · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. What is it? by harmonise · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
    1. Re:What is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's the future man, the future!

    2. Re:What is it? by Norsefire · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    3. Re:What is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:What is it? by xzaph · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

    5. Re:What is it? by Fastolfe · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

    6. Re:What is it? by tyroney · · Score: 5, Informative

      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)

    7. Re:What is it? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Funny

      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?

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    8. Re:What is it? by Stiletto · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:What is it? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!
    10. Re:What is it? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 4, Informative

      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!
  3. But... by sakdoctor · · Score: 4, Funny

    Can it be used to control a botnet?

  4. Re:I hope they don't keep those error messages by Norsefire · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!