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Initial Reviews of Google Wave; Neat, But Noisy
bonch writes "Reviews of Google Wave are out, and opinions are that it has potential as a development platform but is noisy to use for real-time communication. Robert Scoble calls it overhyped, claiming it's useful for little more than personal IM or small-scale project collaboration. He complains about the noisiness of tracking dozens of people chatting him at once in real-time and calls trying to use it a 'productivity killer' compared to simpler mediums like email and Twitter."
...now trat's really saying something
Problem solved.
After watching the demo, a lot of people were commenting that the major problem is that it runs counter to how the brain operates...we aren't designed to heavily multitask. Email provides a linear conversation at least. Still, it's interesting and I think that it does have uses. Perhaps the user feedback will cause it to evolve into something more manageable for a regular brain. I think the potential to assist with remote project collaboration is great.
A lot will depending on how people use it, not what it is. There will need to be settings to help people set limits on the barrage of information.
Those that simply have to stay connected to others at all times in order to feel validated and important will love Google Wave. Right there in front of you is evidence that people are connected to you! In real time! Better than texting! It's so amazingly interactive! It's like... like... a telephone!
This wave is a productivity deathstar.
Scoble is the last one to ask about how overhyped something is or not. He's King Hype. Why the hell is he still relevant, anyway?
You can set your status to "not available to chat" and treat it just like email.
Don't look at the blinking and it can't bother you.
... not email users.
I can see the benefit of email like features in a chat client but not the reverse.
Then again, I haven't actually tried it.
From what I read, it displays data as you're typing it out, rather than after you "post"
I could see a lot of problems around this. Even with IM you have a few seconds to look over something before you hit "submit", whereas you can't really "retract" something once somebody else has read it. Yes, you could backspace and retype, but if they've already read "Bob the boss is a big Jerk" then you're out-of-luck.
Robert Scoble calls it overhyped, claiming it's useful for little more than personal IM or small-scale project collaboration. He complains about the noisiness of tracking dozens of people chatting him at once in real-time and calls trying to use it a 'productivity killer' compared to simpler mediums like email and Twitter.
I think he's missing the point. You don't need to use Google Wave in "real time": you can treat it just like e-mail or twitter if you want. Open the wave, ignore anyone else who's editing it, make the changes or reply you want to, and leave it to come back to it later.
You can use Wave for anything from any level of communication synchronicity from e-mail, through IRC, to teleconference, on a completely continuous sliding scale. No other Internet communications medium we've seen before has that kind of flexibility.
I also think that a lot of the negative reactions are because it's a paradigm-shifting technology. People don't like change; they don't like adapting to new and unfamiliar ways of working. When e-mail first started becoming widespread, many people found it impossible to understand and deal with; now it's an intrinsic and familiar part of every working environment.
Pirate Party UK
...because trying to actively collaborate with 100 people, even face to face, is noisy and futile. The fact this is his resulting opinion, in my opinion, doesn't validate his view in the least. No one has ever claimed using Wave will make humans suddenly super human; able to do things no other humans could previously do.
Lets be realistic about the types of things people collaborate on and how its currently done today. Try doing that with 100 people or even face to face and its pretty message. And with mediums such as IM or email, its far more likely many will walk away with differing understandings of the effort. Even worse, after the fact, people will be challenged to recall why certain conclusions were reached or decisions were made. None of those are nearly as likely to be problems with waves.
Also, what people are currently testing and using is simply a proof of concept of a series of robots and applications. These, in of themselves, are not Wave proper. In other words, as people gain more experience, the types of activities, applications, and robots which contribute and provide increased value will only grow over time. The applications which people perceived as "Wave" today is absolutely not the "Wave" people will see tomorrow.
So the real summary is, he fails to understand what is being used. Likewise, a lack of imagination is obvious, as is realistic expectation. I'm sorry but I can't seriously consider his review on any level. He only comes off as small minded and unrealistic.
Coming full circle back to expectations, only a handful of people are able to focus on more than single thread of conversation and predominantly they are women. Like any significantly new technology, it takes time to fully absorb and leverage all that the new technology has to offer. In this case, its very likely people will be forced to retrain their brains to better follow multiple, concurrent conversations to fully benefit from the technology. Everyone can do it, but it doesn't come natural to most; especially if you're not female.
Simply put, Google has provided an absolutely awesome, sky is the limit, technology. If multiple killer applications are not in place which leverage Wave within a year or two, I'd declare this a failure of developers and imagination rather than a failure of Google and/or Wave.
In this case, I'd say the reviewer has failed everyone.
I think it is going to be very useful for collaboration projects and some specific conversations. Of course, some people will stay staring at the screen the entire day, but that already happens with facebook, twitter, etc. The point is.. you don't HAVE to. I like the way you can track the conversation even if you got there at a later time. My guess there will be a first moment of wow-ness and them it will fall back to be used normally, like everything that is new.
Google let me in, I wanna play like all the rest of the guinea pigs!!!!
I was lead to believe using Google Wave would be like having Jesus bust a nut on your face.
This failure can be described very simply. From an information theory perspective, an ideal thinking being should complete a task more efficiently if he or she can stay synchronized with collaborators more often. In theory, google wave's technology is superior to email and check in/check out document collaboration tools. Real time chatting would in theory prevent wasted time and mistakes and allow all the collaborators to stay synchronized, analogous to a bank of CPUs running in parallel.
The problem is that the human mind's fundamental structure has not changed significantly in thousands of years, because evolution is a slow process and adding new features takes aeons. So this tech appears to be a failure.
I played with Google Wave for a (very) short time, and it definitely has some strong potential to be a key social networking tool in the future. It's kind of like Facebook mixed with IRC, IM and email...which, in other words, makes it a JUGGERNAUT of a platform to have.
I think it was overhyped, but so was the iPhone before its launch...
Keep in mind that these complaints are from the same guy who followed tens of thousands of people on Twitter and complained when Facebook wasn't allowing him to add more than 5,000 friends on Facebook. If he joined an e-mail mailing list with 35,000 subscribers, he would probably complain that mailing lists as a whole are too noisy and write them off as useless. Now that he's dealing with something that requires more attention to actual individual people, he finds it harder to deal with. Well, duh.
Sure it's noisy on the public waves, but they're public. Everyone is using it all at once... hundreds of people at a time. That's not going to be the main way people use Google Wave. Right now more people are using the public waves because they want to interact with other Wave users, and all their friends aren't on Wave yet.
The "tech world" is awash with excitement for today's scheduled release of a hundred thousand invitations to preview Wave, Google's innovative new website, communication protocol, interactive environment, multiplayer online role-playing game, bulletin board, wiki, dessert wax and floor topping. Experts, all heavily consulted by the media while Parliament is in recess, say it will revolutionise how we do business, organise parties, manage projects, make friends, waste our employer's time at work, pick up girls we swear we didn't realise were under sixteen and cheat on our homework.
I've been testing the Google Wave Developer Preview. The implications for journalists alone are stunning:
In conclusion, Google Wave is clearly an absolute boon to the noble institution of the Fourth Estate in its mission to protect the public good, further the dynamism of social discourse and watch the watchmen. And this is why we at News International consider Google a threat and menace to the news media and the institution of journalism that must be reined in by government edict without delay. God bless you all, and please PayPal us 20p for having read this article, you parasitical pixel-stained technopeasant. And now, Tories and tits.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Or is there another Richard Scoble? It's funny how he turns up like magic on stories about MS's rivals introducing a new service, and always seems to have some dismissive opinion on it. Anyone would think there's a connection there. Why not get a quote from someone at Gartner too, informing us that "analysts" believe the public are better served by the fairy dust that MS sell, not this new fangled rubbish from an upstart.
Go away idiot.
Anyone who see Wave as a social time waster like twitter do not understand it. It is about collaboration, It is about writing a document with concurrency tracking, I can read notes online when people is writing it and fix it at the moment, I can be offline and read later what people have added since I left. It is not a web chat room.
It also ignores the productivity gains that we've gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
This guy is crazy, calling Twitter as something that give you productivity gains, well only if your job is marketting
There was an article here a day or two ago with one of the lead developers of Wave. He mentioned the subject of "robots" that monitor the conversation stream. I'll admit to failing to RTFA in both cases, but it seems like Wave is intended as a low level foundation to build upon. The analogy that comes to mind is the data bus in the computer. If you try to use a computer by monitoring the 0s and 1s flying between the CPU and the RAM or the disk subsystem you won't get anywhere fast. On the other hand, if you leave that low level hardware interaction to the drivers and use a software application, the computer becomes useful.
It seems to me, and again I didn't RTFA, that Wave will only be useful when people start writing decent robots and applications to sit on top of it. I imagine it working something like SNMP. The application only traps what is relevant for what it is monitoring, even though there are a lot of conversations going on. Likewise, in terms of collaboration or project management, there might be applications that tag certain types of communication and only pay attention to similar types of communication. Status updates would be monitored by the calendaring robot and only displayed by the calendar application. IM like communication streams might be aggregated into an Inbox like feature so that people can "mute" the conversation stream and go back to it later. I'd imagine that there will be a great demand for threading and search capabilities on those sorts of streams.
Right now it seems like people are looking at Wave from the perspective of an individual user. Does one user need to talk to twelve different people at once? Hell no. On the other hand, your average organization has dozens if not more conversation streams taking place between departments and individuals at any given point during the work day. Different departments might not know what each other are up to in a timely enough manner to be relevant. With something like Wave tying together the various information streams (email, calendaring, wiki, etc), connections can be made between individuals that might otherwise be missed.
Then again, I didn't read either article and for all I know Wave might just be a Twitter clone with a worthless API that can't be leveraged for anything other than talking about Britney Spears.
It's interesting how many of the objections to the review don't address anything technical (which they haven't seen anyway) about Wave (other than to insist that despite what anyone says "it's way cool, it's Google, it's cool by default, four legs good, two legs bad"), but instead concentrate on ad hominem attacks on the author.
I see this as macro-managing all your communication avenues blogging/tweet/e-mail/etc.
From the article...
DO TRY THE API if you are a developer. From what Iâ(TM)m seeing thatâ(TM)s where the real value in Google Wave will come, but we havenâ(TM)t seen enough apps yet so end users wonâ(TM)t find much here to play with yet.
I do agree with one thing it will cost productivity but not for any of the reasons he mentioned... it will be PHBs demanding that answer right away with out the proper research since they can see you riding the Wave.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
Here's an application whose time will come: real time multi-track audio editing with multiple collaborators. I know it sounds totally crazy, but I think this could be way cool with the right robot maintaining the song and branches for you.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
In the 1950s, Prof. Parkinson observer in one of the chapters of his book stated that Bureaucracy starts at around 20 people - specifically in government Cabinets. When the number of people collaborating exceeds that number, the actual useful members of the group will splinter of and form their own cabinet, leading to the old cabinet to grow dramatically into irrelevance.
Still as true today as it was in 1950...
I swear that that book should be required reading for anyone entering into management - and government specifically.
Is there an alt.erotica.fap.fap.fap google wave yet? If so, invite please!
Google always comes up with good ideas and has the hardware and the sheer number of users to make it into a somewhat useful beta product, but the user interface and the finish almost always is so bad that the software actually sucks. Any tiny company without such a large userbase would go under with such products, nobody would care. Google's just too large too really fail, that's all. I think there's a lesson in that.
I could see this becoming popular for small OSS projects. These can often have an IRC channel or 5, A website, Possibly a google group, a forum, a bug tracker, a gitorious site, a wiki, email, IM, and i'm sure other things.
If this Google Wave thing gets good robots and cuts the crap in half it will be incredibly useful to small OSS projects. Not only will it be less of a pain but it will make the project more efficient and better in general. I've seen plenty of situations where half of the info sources are out of date.
Some good tools would be importing data in a nice manner from a variety of sites. If it can just import a wiki then we will see people change much faster. Other things would be tools for programmers generally, ability to post code in a nice way, with the dif highlighted. Or perhaps something to make a todo list.
That said it is all in the implementation. If they make it easy to add toys I can see it being used quick. It also needs to be open, private wikis spread since people can make their own. It doesn't matter if it still goes through google so long as users have a way to implement it in their OWN way on their own site, so it has to be customizable. Making an OSS client for this would help, they are replacing types of communication that can be accessed from lots of places. I also think integrating feeds of different types would help, maybe be able to email into the wave or read through email. Access through a phone ap. Basically for it to go well they need to integrate and eat all the forms of communication they are competing with. They'll be hard pressed to make this work unless the are competitive individually with each type of communication.
There are a lot of little things that need to go right and I doubt it will happen first try. But I believe this type of integrated, combined interaction is the future of small group communication. And I haven't tried it myself.
I always thought it would be nice if people in IMs could see what I'm typing, to feel more like a real conversation.
Now that I think about it, it would be very disrupting to have several people with their messages appearing slowly all at once... which is not unlike a real conversation.
You know, if people are able to see what others are typing, it may lead to strange "waves" in which people may not hit submit even once.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
It seems that most of what Google Wave has to offer is already available in other venues... but if they can converge on truly real-time collaboration that uses chat together with a shared desktop / application, Google might be on to something. Don't forget the Google Voice project, the consolidation of these two platforms (conference calling with call recording and Google Wave discussions + real-time application sharing) could be a real GoToMyPC killer-app.
Microsoft has come pretty close with Shared View but it's tricky to get installed and it isn't cross platform. Not to mention, MS doesn't offer any telephony support (although Skype does work pretty well).
Obviously, there are commercial alternatives (GoTo Meeting, WebEx, etc.) and even some almost-there open source tools (DimDim) but they are either expensive or feature-limited. If it stays as-is, it's going to have a tough time growing much beyond a Twitter clone.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Could this be just because it is new and spiffy that everyone is just saying what comes comes into their head so they have something to post?
This is largely what happens with any new forum, chatroom or blog you set up to communicate with a small user groups amongst friends or within an organisation.
Over time people loose interest in "HI U GUYS OMG LOL DIS IS WIERD" and start using it when they *need* to communicate something of actual importance.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
If you really need Google Wave professionally, you really need to simplify your communications.
Ok, I'm a nobody... but personally, I think this is going to be a revolution in communication and to say it's overhyped is plain stupid.
Essentially, the technology is very complicated, but the premise is something we can all follow and appreciate. We all need to communicate in realtime sometimes, we all need to communicate at our own pace sometimes, and we all need to collaborate sometimes; until now that required a minimum of 3 separate tools and mindsets.
Google hasn't created anything really new with wave, we have all done the things wave allows us to do before... but we have never done them with the same tool. And we have never done them with a tool that allowed us to seamlessly transition from one paradigm to another without thought.
I KNOW that this is the future of on line communication, if not Wave then something like it. I absolutely LOVE the fact that Google recognized the importance of what they were doing and created Wave as a standard that could be implemented by competitors... creating a technology rather than an application.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Look, Robert has never built _anything_ and he's such a wanker for 2 twinkies and a reach around he'll say he loves your product So why does anyone care what this fat dork says? Tell ya what robert, DONT USE IT -- stay on freind feed -- P L E A S E
See, who needs google wave! I use slashdot to take my grammar nazism and pedantry to the next level!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
OK, for chatting with friends, can't see it catching on. Which is a pity because that massively limits it's userbase which in turn means way fewer non-geeks using it, and so less opportunities for it to be a de-facto communication tool where it might work.
Where's that? One volounteer group I work with has a lot of non-working individuals in it. They're not used to being copied in any mail that vaguely might include them in the set of 'people who give a shit about this'. They get home, see a huge pile of mass-group emails and pretty much delete the lot of them.
The ad-hoc Wiki nature of a Wave interests me. For an event we're organising, we could create a wave and people could chip in to each relevant part of it. as new people come on board, include them on the wave. The chairman role gets reduced to trying to maintain a reasonable structure to where everything goes.
Now, the big question. Anyone got an invite? ;)
As someone I was talking to suggested, with a couple plugins Wave seems like it would be a pretty good remote site D&D client.
From the sounds of it, Google Wave is the core IP protocol used by the Borg to keep their minds all in sync.
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video
0:00 - 05:00 Intro can be skipped In my opinion.
6:00 - 27:00 - Rolling up e-mail/chatting/blogging/photosharing in one app (yes it's an ugly interface but can be redesigned).
27:30 - 30:00 Meeting Notes/Collaboration.
30:00 - 36:00 Document Integration, Document Publishing (so that end user does not see all the edits), similar to source controlling in programming.
36:00 - 40:00 people editing a document simultaneously - right to left language support.
40:00 - 44:00 Organizing and finding things in Wave. Making a wave of your waves.
44:00 - 47:00 Language Model spell checking (using the context of your text to determine correct spelling suggestions).
49:00 - Discovering new ways of productivity/collaborating (shows Google staff learning best ways of utilizing its own creation).
1:01:00 - 1:04:00 - Wave in the work environment - using it to categorize work flow/process/bug tracking.
1:05:00 - 1:12:00 - Federation of Wave (Google does not have to be in control of your data. You can set up your own Wave Services, customized to your needs).
1:13:00 - On the fly in-line branched translation during your collaboration.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
One of the amazing things about Wave is that it brings the amazing new technology of character by character chat! Oh, except that's how 'talk' used to work decades ago, before the phrase IM was invented!
There is no "we" when it comes to brain design. We all have different brains with different capabilities.
People with your brain type can't multitask? Too bad. I do agree you should be able to set whatever limits you want, no problem in having more options but please don't make claims about how you think other peoples brains work.
Some jobs require teamwork to get the job done. It makes sense to have 12 people talking about something when you are all working on the same problem or all building the same thing. The fact that he thinks it would decrease productivity shows that he doesn't work in the sort of industry where teamwork is encouraged. If you work with 12 people there are instances where you will need realtime communication with all 12. Rather than have a series of meetings and brainstorming sessions you can stay at your desk or even work from home with apps like this. I don't see how it would decrease productivity unless its used as a toy.
The only use I can see for Twitter is creating a fake public persona. For example, I think today my public persona is going to be on the beach in Maui designing a doomsday weapon to help it take over the world, all while drinking Mai Tais and petting the kangaroos. There are no kangaroos in Maui, you say? Funny, my Twitter persona would beg to differ.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So I'm lucky enough to get to try out Wave. It's cool - and I agree that maybe for the general public it won't have much use.
But I would say that the statement that it is "not as productive as Twitter or email" is a pretty ridiculous and uninformed statement.
Now if the author would've said something like "I would rather have a videoconference/meeting to discuss a new idea instead of using Wave". OK, that's a valid point. A meeting is fast and has quick turnaround times.
But the real idea behind Wave is, you know, those emails like this:
> I think bla bla 1
Good point John, didn't think about bla bla 1
>> What do you think of bla bla 2? Will it work?
> I think we should use bla bla 2 in addition to bla bla 1
You are both correct, John and Jenny. We should definitely look into bla bla 2
Wave makes looking at an email message like that a lot cleaner, a lot simpler, a lot easier, and a lot more productive.
Now how you would compare the above use-case to using Twitter... is beyond me. And as for the above email format being more productive than Wave, well then, maybe you should stop using email and go back to writing snail mail.
If on the other hand you would rather have a meeting or videoconference to have a discussion as above, well then... you're right, that is more productive. But it's not always an option, and Wave fills in that gap nicely.
So when is Spam going to come to Wave?
Is it going to be called spave?
If there were a method to limit or defeat Spam, this would be a major selling point of switching from email to wave.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
As others have pointed out in one way or another, the flexibility is what makes Wave so useful. Because who we haven't heard from are people that are using Wave in a semi-large office or project/group situation. Then I think its true productivity value will shine. To people not using it for work, it's really just IRC with a kick in the ass.
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
Your sig describes probably the world's second shortest chess game, but there is an even shorter game:
1. f3 e5
2. g4 Qh4++ shit!
(For the net-censors out there: "shit!" comes from the old Arabic "shah-mat!" which means "the king is dead!". Yeah, that's it.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
My sig was actually played at a competition level. :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
We put a wave in your web so you can surf while you surf.
Chatting him?
Perhaps with some online collaboration, the summary may have been improved.
Gah.
Well, I am one of those that has access to the Google Wave development sandbox,
and I think its certainly NOT overhyped.
Sure, its not yet a finished product, many things are missing (those are quite a few, btw), but for those things that are present (bugs aside) it has been FAR more efficient to communicate than over, say, email or IM (when chatting with more than one or two persons).
After using Wave with a couple of friends for discussing several topics, such as:
* when and where should we go to watch this movie? or..
* Lets just put up ideas for android applications and analyze and comment on them
I must say it is *really* useful, and I think it would scale well for larger groups.
After using it on a daily basis, when I go back to mail and mailing groups you feel like it gets chaotic really fast.
You can only append stuff to the document. You cannot edit it, you cannot insert, you cannot inline reply (you can fold/unfold the comment, and when someone replies to you it becomes like an embedded thread, later on you'll be able to export the wave as a document without those inline replies)
Oh, and sharing "rich text" or just files or pictures is >>>> email
I think email is *much* more noisy.
for chatting I still prefer IM, though, for everything else, wave.
just my 0.2
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
The last is my own start towards one, building on years of other work in an RDF-like direction, but maybe there is no point in competing with Google?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have nothing against him, but he's sharing his impressions with us one the same day that he got access. His insights are not profound.
He's either attacking straw men or telling us that twitter is an aid to productivity. Twitter.
Try this for a decent and recent writeup.
The straw men: all those dozens of people typing at me all at once! Who are these dozens of people and why would I be watching their typing? Although it's been disabled in the developer sandbox, there is a check box that turns this feature off.
I don't guess that Mr. Scoble has written any wave extensions. One very nice thing about wave is that it's pretty easy to do so; some simple python programming and you can make a robot to do something useful. Here is my robot that draws sparklines. Praise Google for publishing a powerful API (now they need better documentation).
Here is where wave can be immediately useful: the mess that an email thread becomes when more than two people are participating, some of them top-posting, quoting the entire thread in every reply, and so on, becomes a coherent document that can be simplified and neatened as it grows. And the entire history is conveniently available.
My understanding is that Google Wave is basically the equivalent of trying to work on a document while ten people stand around you, shouting suggestions, trying to steal the keyboard from you, and bickering with you and each other about whose turn it is to type and whose suggestions are good and which suggestions suck.
Is anyone surprised that this is NOT PRODUCTIVE AT ALL?
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Noise may be an issue of an army of geeks starts playing with their new toy. But if two or three people collaborate on a project using Wave, it probably won't be any more of a distraction than simultaneous edits in Google Docs.
There is one reason why Gmail killed my email client application: Conversation view. All related messages stay together and you never have the embarrassing problem of replying before reading all of the responses. It also makes for a cleaner inbox that actually reflects how many things you've got on your plate right now. I don't know why offline email clients can get it right (Postbox is trying, but it still isn't as good as Gmail).
The only thing that breaks it is if you have one of those annoying correspondents who insists on just hitting "reply" to any random message from you, and writing about something unrelated without changing the subject line. Or the people who do change the subject line, even though the subject hasn't changed.
I also prefer subject lines to be a one-line summary of the topic, not a "title." Something like: "Please get me that TPS report by next Friday (10/9)" rather than "TPS report." But that's just personal taste.
Assisting with remote project collaboration is exactly right. That's what I'm planning to do with it.
I was hoping that Google Wave would be more like a super-wiki than a multi-media chat room. Wiki's allow anyone to contribute their knowledge in a structured, peer-reviewed way that (generally) promotes structure (including proper spelling and grammar) and, if not consensus, at least a fair representation of predominant viewpoints. I get the feeling that wiki contributions are fully formed thought structures. I like wikis.
Chat rooms encourage fast-typing and snappy comebacks. I don't think that careful consideration is the point of chat. So although I see the real-time collaborative potential, I am not a fan. What I like about email is that I can answer it in my own time, the sender doesn't usually expect an immediate reply.
Maybe I don't get it. But then again I don't really get twitter either.
Be heard || Be herd
Mostly by Robert Scoble.
It didn't seem like Robert Scoble was actually trying to DO anything. If you are trying to follow a bunch of idle conversations, what's the point? I'm pretty sure google wave wasn't supposed to be a "cocktail party on the web." Seems like it would be great to DO things from organize a group outing of friends all the way to collaboratively produce documentation for anything. With regard to "noise" if it doesn't have it already, It should soon have groups and filters and/or priorities to allow you to see thing you want and hide things you don't. If you insist on "chatting" with the whole frickin' world don't bitch about the signal to noise ratio.
And the protocol!?!? It sounds awesome too. You have to watch the last 20 mins of the video because I'm not smart enough to describe it nearly as well as they did.
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
I know this isn't the place for it, but I actually received my Gmail invite from Slashdot. So I figured I'd try again with Wave. You can use a special email I've set up for receiving a Wave invite:
:)
wave [at] greengar [dot] com
Thanks!
Oh I think it will. Right now, our household uses IRC as a sort of general message board/chat thing. It might not replace IM entirely, but ... it's got some potential I think. You can do the same stuff with it, after all.
....'. And then I can update the original with suggestions of time/venue. And everyone involved can be a party to the dialogue.
But if nothing else, it's just a 'bit better email'. The example I can see it 'working' for, is that I can send out a first gen email with 'who's interested in going and doing
The thing that will make it catch on I think, is that you _can_ just use Wave as a drop in replacement for an existing mail/IM system, and use it exactly the same way, until you're comfortable with some of the other features.
Plural of medium is "media" (unless you're talking about seances).
Sort of like multiplayer Notepad or live-action email. :D
It is distracting, disturbing yet oddly cool watching someone type in their thoughts or ideas real-time, backspacing over errors or rewording entire sentences while replying to something you've said. All the little mental processes you don't see when having a conversation, argument or trying to reach consensus on a work issue.
It is like Twitter, IMs, email, and Usenet all rolled into one. Everything happens real-time, like chatting, but you can still go to it later on, see any new stuff that's been posted, and if you're new to a particular wave, you can catch up even if you jump in into the middle. You also have the advantage of adding video, voice and images via the different gadgets created by Google and independent developers.
I think it's more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
I'm surprised how many people here see Wave as a Twitter or Facebook. (This is Slashdot, right?) I see Wave primarily as a tool for collaborative development. Want to build a gamma ray spectrometer? Get a few like minded people together and create a Wave to organize the project. When I'm mulling over a project I already organize my thoughts in a tree structure just like Wave does. Though it's usually just in a text file with indentation to highlight the various branches of thought. I'd love to be able to do that with a Wave where I could have a group of people do this and also add multi-media, collapse ideas and add summaries, or view the history of the development process. That I can see other people's changes as they make them is just eye-candy to me.
Devon
Man can't manage people, blames tool. - News at 11
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One fewer move: 1. f3 e4 2. g4 Qh4++ shit!
Snowclone is the new clich
That's marketing talk!
My problem is school teachers are constantly sending me stuff to do over holiday breaks and updates to what is happening in the class or at school. I am a part of my schools broadcasting unit and so emails are used quite heavily. so will you be able to send a 'wave' to say Shikari@wave.com? or something like that, so people who dont have wave can still send me something. because without that interoperability I wont wave as much. So by adding regular email support with wave will get people to ditch regular email websites and clients and just stick with Wave.
Wise people talk because they have something to say, Ignorant people talk because they have to say something.
can't believe anyone plays so stupidly at competition level...
If one is responding to specific points, then they should always obviously delete any bits you aren't responding to
When I respond to specific points in some people's messages, they accuse me of "picking apart" their messages.
In Soviet Russia, Overhyped calls it Robert Scoble.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Google Wave is not going to revolutionize consumer technologies like email, IM, wikis, or Twitter. It is a developer technology.
I've tried many times to understand the hype around Wave, but failed to see it for many of the same reasons Scoble mentioned and more. The level of multitasking and collaboration is beyond the capabilities of most people to manage and would be worse if you factor in the sociopaths present on every part of the Internet.
Geeks get excited about Wave but didn't correctly identify their source of excitement. Wave will transform the way developers write Web apps, much the way Ruby on Rails did. It will allow the creation of a new generation of web applications with an unprecedented amount of social interactivity.
For all the people that don't have the time for the 80 minute version:
An introduction to Google Wave
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
it was kinda interesting when he got a video crew together to make a semi-live coverage of CES, but since then its been mostly air (and not the adobe kind)...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm