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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.
Dupe? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/19/1721203/Google-Wave-Now-Open-To-All
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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.
Google Chrome came out of beta in just 3 months
The Wave is a federated protocol. You could easily write an email gateway.
But Google themselves should do it, I agree.
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I can already send data through the US Postal Service, so what exactly makes email worth my time?
It's their ship to launch. If they don't do it proper, no one else will care.
I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Real-time collaboration.
Reply to That ||
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.
You miss the point: Wave should include email functionality so that people have a "one stop shop" not waves should be forwarded to email to read.
No email integration == no future for wave.
Why would wave integrate with email? Or, rather, in what way do you think it should?
IRC doesn't integrate with email. AIM doesn't integrate with email. HTTP doesn't integrate with email. BitTorrent doesn't integrate with email.
Wave is a new protocol. It isn't really supposed to replace email. It's supposed to be a different way to communicate and collaborate. Somewhere between Microsoft Word and WebEx.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an envelope full of DVDs.
Palm trees and 8
I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Real-time collaboration.
Wave isn't intended to have you compose a message and send it off. And then somebody else reads the message later and replies to you. It isn't intended for a thread-like conversation.
The idea is to have multiple people contributing to a discussion more-or-less simultaneously.
Kind of like if you were to cross email with AIM, Microsoft Word, and WebEx.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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.
I would think that you are better off skipping a lot of things.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
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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
If you can't see a reason for using it, you either don't understand how it works, or don't have a use for it. Both are valid reasons.
I use it a lot at work myself, and absolutely love it. For example, instead of sending an email to 5 people, each of them replying with different bits of information that I then have to collate myself, we use a wave.
Instead of sending the boss email updates on critical on-going tasks, I keep them in a wave the boss has access to and update that as I go along.
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
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.
Just like there are advantages to email over postal mail (speed, ability to easily send to multiple people, etc), there are advantages to Wave over email (the ability to see what the others are saying as they type, gadgets and robots that can be embedded into the Wave, etc).
People seem to be dismissing it before actually checking it out just because what they have seems good enough. That kind of thinking is not really good for technology.
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
My entire team was asked to look at it, I took neutral opinions from all the members. It gave us less functionality than our existing collaborative documents system and Adobe Connect Pro and appeared to be less streamlined and we had security concerns. In my opinion, as the CTO of a small (30 people) technology company, it has no utility for us or our partners. I hope it works for others out there, and we'll look at it again if there's a compelling reason given to us.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.(source)
Need I go on? Lets face it, SMTP was a decent protocol, and has lasted a long time, but its age is showing, and its really time to move past something so antiquated and problem-ridden (spam? spoofing? reply-all fun? lack of encryption-by-default?).
There may indeed be good criticisms of the protocol, but the majority of the posts here seem to boil down to "I dont understand it, therefore it must have no uses". Is it just because it was Google that released it that it must be evil?