Slashdot Mirror
Google Wave Out of Beta
googlePLEXS writes "Google Wave is open to all users at wave.google.com, as a Google Labs product — no invitation needed. Google Apps administrators will also have the option to add Wave as a Labs feature for their domains, helping groups of people communicate and work together more productively." If you haven't played with it, it's worth your time just to try to think beyond the bounds of IRC/Email. It's not going to change your work flow, but I still think it's worth a bit of your time to see it.
Now more people than ever before can not use Wave.
Probably the fastest a Google product has ever gotten out of beta. :)
It's definitely worth a look though!
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Dupe? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/19/1721203/Google-Wave-Now-Open-To-All
Dilbert RSS feed
It's been out of beta for over a month as the DATED press release states!
Now everyone can try to figure out what the hell it's for.
No email integration == no future for wave.
I think that this implies that Wave has moved INTO beta, as in being feature complete, but full o bugs. previously it was a barely working alpha that lacked major functionality.
Google Wave releasing on time.
Sorry, I have an addiction.
Google Wave has been open since May 19th going by the date in the press release linked in the summary.
You'll notice that Google hasn't finished the federation stuff and what they currently have loses all data on restart.
I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Palm trees and 8
So, it's further along the development cycle than Gmail?
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Real-time collaboration.
Reply to That ||
It's like IRC, except the "channels" are all by private invitations (there's no public wave list), you get the messages even when offline, and it's way more media rich, and the servers are federated*
It's like email, except you can write in real time and collaborate in writing documents.
There's probably some more similitudes - but it's not quite the same as anything else. The thing is, is it useful?
*so like in email, you can use different Wave providers and talk to each other.
Dilbert RSS feed
Every time I've tried to use it, the conversation dies off quickly and new ones go right back to Email. As a last ditch effort I even added a small paragraph at the top of a Wave that explained how to use it, and still the very first reply to it was sent over Email.
It's just not intuitive or compelling enough to replace anything with.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an envelope full of DVDs.
Palm trees and 8
Besides the Grocery List, Map Gadget and the Yes/No/Maybe gaget extensions, I don't see Google Wave making much of a dent in the social networking arena if that's their ultimate plan. This seems more of a collaboration tool for work, new ideas, coding, entrepreneurial type stuff. It has potential, but it's not developed around being friendly for someone to use personally on a daily basis. I like it, but it's something 'else' I have to log into to use it.
If Google were to integrate it into Gmail, then I'd be more apt to force myself into using it. But then again, I feel I have all the communication tools I need in Gmail: gtalk, e-mail and Buzz, not to mention my cell phone, txt messaging, ect. This whole drive by Big Company to come up with the next medium for real-time social interaction is exhausting; I don't want 10,000 ways to talk to my family and friends, I just want one that works.
last week my wife made a schedule for potluck plans, in a wave.
bulleted list of items, detailed dates and times, some friendly ribbing about doing the dishes, and a lot of things involving many other people.
she included me in the wave, but no one else at first.
some side bar sort of things got added, I sent some funny pics, we added a little "will you attend" applet, deleted the whole dishes thread, added the potluck menu items, and went back and corrected my spelling.
she looked over that, made a few more changes while I was watching this time, then added several other people to the wave.
they then looked at it... MORE side bar conversations happened,the potluck items started including pictures and diet information, and we got a rundown of who was coming.
an hour before the potluck, one person changed his rsvp, and several more people wanted to come, we added them to the wave, they saw the entire thread of events, and picked up complementary things from the store on the way over. we threw in a map. and used a sketching tool to draw on it.
I love wave.
the coolest thing about this is how seemless that all was. My mother in law, and several non-techy neighbors were able to puzzle out the entire thing and add to it with very little problem.
on a completely unrelated series of waves, I'm having political debates, discussing singularity related web-finds and running a hell of a mage game.
But what you wind up with is something that looks like an interactive chat session - you can put together ideas that way but there's no structure to the end result
Isn't that where extensions would come in? I'd prefer that Wave itself not define what an end product would be and impose that on me.
Reply to That ||
Or pigeons with envelopes full of DVDs on their legs in a fully loaded 1968 Chevy Caprice?
the Apple Newton is the Apple iPhone, 10 years too early:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
in other words, Google Wave is where we are headed, yes. but its too early. it has to be the most painful of technology-related efforts: your passion is correct, your efforts are noble... but no one adapts it only because there is no critical mass of people to use the tech to its righteous, intended effect, just yet
or more exactly, Google Wave is like AJAX. everyone knows AJAX as the ascendent internet development model that pretty much came to public conscience with Google Maps: "you mean i don't have to click and submit a form and reload the page entirely every time? wow!"
but did you know XmlHttpRequest (the X in AJAX) was originally a Microsoft Exchange Plug-in for IE 5.0 in 1999?
and that Microsoft dominance in browsers at the time (and its noncompliance) made use of the technology feasible, and therefore other browsers adapted it? too many people believe standards drive technological development. when the truth is, everything starts out as nonstandard, the standards only lag behind, making uniform the popular feature sets of the time. standards do NOT drive innovation. if you want to do exciting groundbreaking tech: fuck the standards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History_and_support
do you think Microsoft knew where their minor sideshow Exchange Server ActiveX tech was headed? Microsoft constantly lags in the innovation department: silverlight competing with flash, zune, their tablet technology upstaged by iPad, their moribund smartphone OS competing with blackberry, android, apple, etc.
and yet Microsoft actually had a truly groundbreaking world changing piece of tech on their hands... and they pretty much relegated it to Microsoft Exchange Server plumbing. hilarious
this will be the development arc of Google Wave:
1. eventually forgotten after the initial publicity blitz
2. then someone rediscovers it in obscurity, repurposes it, and reintroduces it
3. 5-10 years from now, Google Wave
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Let me try:
It's a real-time communication system that combines the good parts of IRC, Mail, Wikis and IM.
Except that the summary links to the same press release from May 19th as the article the GP posted. And the press release states nothing about coming out of beta.
This is a side effect of relying on readers to do the firehose filtering.
Stuff like this gets through instead of being flagged as stale, just because it's not utter spam like the vast majority of firehose submissions. It's probably a small price to pay.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If a company used this, they'd effectively be sharing all of their trade secrets with Google. Why would anyone do that?
wave blocked at work.
As are all chat formats.
What I need is something like a chat client that uses emails as a basis for the chat.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Fun.
Actually... There are public waves. You can search for waves with a "Public" attribute on them, that anyone can follow.
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
I don't know how to use it, and it's not from a lack of trying I can assure you.
I read all the tutorials and watched all the videos.
Some things in Wave are just weird/annoying,
For instance, threading.
Why are the replies on the same level as the post being replied to? EXCEPT when you reply to a post in the middle of a chain of replies, then suddenly it indents.
This is totally different from every forum on the internet.
Then there are in-post replies. Why aren't these collapsed by default? They break up a block of text into unreadable fragments upon load, and you have to explicitly use a command to collapse them all make the post readable.
What aren't there "write controls" to prevent people from editing something. I know there is a playback feature.
But honestly I don't see the harm in letting a moderator control what is a "public area" and what is not.
Maybe I'm not getting it - this whole new paradigm. But I doubt I'm the only one.
It would be nice if Google provide a detailed step-by-step video as to how to use it.
And by that I mean details like, when to use the reply "button" at the bottom of a chain, and when to use the reply button on the toolbar at the top, should be included.
They will literally have to explain the whole paradigm or most of us won't get it.
The problem with this product is nobody beyond developers really knows what it is supposed to do?
I started using Wave in the Beta. At first my level of excitement was very high as I figured out ways that technology could be useful.
Unfortunately that excitement waned as I discovered I had very few people to share it with as invites were scarce and not many people I wanted to communicate with regularly had one.
Now the product is free and open but it has missed its opportunity to integrate itself into my routine. I think that Google might have lost a lot of community Evangelists on this one.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
The latency will kill you. About 50% of my group's uses for emails could be solved with IM, because they're quick pings... all they require is an ACK/NACK (email > IM for non-repudiation purposes). Of the remaining 50%, 2/3s requires a latency of about one business day (ie, approval with comments, mass-updates, clarifiations, etc).
In short, email based on postal would grind our business to a halt. That's not even mentioning the grep-ability of email vs. dead-tree and the fact that 1TB of PDFs has less space concerns than a roomfull of paper boxes.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
So. I'm moving into a group house with some friends. They started using Wave to organize possibilities, comment on them, and vote on them.
But the person who tended to dump possibilities into the wave always just dumped the Craigslist URLs. Pretty hard for me to decide between one long string of random alphanumerics and another. So I started cutting and pasting the actual listings in. Collaborative editing! Awesome!
Well, awesome up until the point where it'd start saying "This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence" and make me reload it, without my changes. Not so awesome. Frustrating, in fact. The kind of frustration that quickly made me want to throw something.
And don't get me started on that horrible, horrible little custom scrollbar...
egypt urnash minimal art.
It's true that the Google Wave UI is pretty confusing. But I've been wanting to design an email replacement protocol that sits on XMPP for a while now and was happy to see that happen. That it also attempts to solve other problems, like capturing threading in a sensible way, allowing data to be presented in multiple forms and allowing robots to participate in these conversations, really sums up and simplifies a lot of issues in communication in general.
-- Real Stupidity is the Artificial Intelligence of the 21st century
The only chance I would use Google Wave is if there was a way to connect it to Facebook and Twitter. Otherwise I'll be creating waves by myself. And a one man's wave always looks ridiculous.