Google Wave

[Luffield]

Coming later this year, something between e-mail, online documents, IM and... OK, just read about it here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-wave-what-might-email-l.html

Sounds very interesting!

[rkirk]

This is a pretty big, pretty cool idea. The paradigm itself is interesting and could be revolutionary if it really takes off.

I'm not really interested all that much in Google's implementation of it, though, I'm more interested in the protocol. Google is kind of an Open Source company, and this could be really, really big if code's going to be open source. They say the majority of the codebase will be open... and that worries me. (Majority != All), so it's still a question of whether what Google decides to release will be all that useful to developers.

[pt123]

it would amazing for project based work,

it would have been extremely useful on uni group projects

[Sashin]

This looks amazing, but I'm afraid that there's the good chance this may not be fully compatible with linux straight away. I'm not sure how multiplatform html5 is...

[Jay_Bee]

HTML 5 is supported by Firefox 3.5 and Chromium, I don't know about other browsers but it will definitely work on Linux (there's even Google gears for linux, needed for the images drag'n'drop).
I'm very excited about this project, it blends a lot of different but similar concepts in a very unique way, I can't wait to try it out.
I was impressed with the developed extensions and extension support, I'm very happy that they are open sourcing it.

[Ms_Angel_D]

Seems very much like spicebird (http://www.spicebird.com/) to me.

[Sashin]

You must have just seen the picture not the video.

Spicebird doesn't even tread water compared to this.

Wehn I said linux compatibility I meant like how it was compatible with windows explorer and iPhoto. Do you think this will be compatible with nautilus and the linux desktop in the same way?

[Mazza558]

When Chromium for Linux is completed, you'll be able to have Wave as a desktop application.

Also, this sounds like the coolest thing ever.

[Saint Angeles]

im watching the 2 hour preview right now. i suggest for everybody here to click on the "let me know when its ready" button on the right of this page (http://wave.google.com/). then request a linux version or discuss why you think they should make it linux compatible.

i think that google needs to hear many many requests for a linux version for them to think about doing it.

[pwnst*r]

that looks great

[wersdaluv]

This is very interesting. I'm looking forward to it's future.

By the way, the future really is open source. Even Google knows. hehe

[Xbehave]

meh old features, new gui & more marketing.
Its amazing how many times people can be impressed by email.

[Saint Angeles]

meh old features, new gui & more marketing.
Its amazing how many times people can be impressed by email.
ok so you didn't watch the video.

theres a huge difference between this and email. they explain it in the video you didn't watch.

[Script Warlock]

wew, a big wave from google....:KS

[Mr. Picklesworth]

I'm more excited about the HTML 5 part. Microsoft (hm... maybe Apple?) is probably pretty pissed off about the whole thing :P

[BaLtO]

Maybe Microsoft more.
Safari is based on Webkit.
If I'm not wrong, it's working on Safari based on the demo video.

The problematic is IE ...

[iKevin09]

Sounds very interesting...

[Barrucadu]

I watched this video earlier today on another forum. It certainly looks very interesting - at the very least it'll make rolling your own blog / forum software easier and far more functional.
When this is released I plan to add some functionality to my website and blog.

[dirtylobster]

I'm looking forward to this!!

[geoken]

i think that google needs to hear many many requests for a linux version for them to think about doing it.


?????

The video starts with them restating over and over again that 'this is running in the browser'. The only non-browser aspect is the drag and drop which they mentioned is a function of google gears (which is available for linux) and also something that they've suggested for the HTML5 spec.

[Paqman]

Looks interesting, i've registered on the site. Loving the Firefly reference, too!

[Xbehave]

ok so you didn't watch the video.

theres a huge difference between this and email. they explain it in the video you didn't watch.Actually i watched a bit of the video, the thing is over an hour long in all! Not much new tbh, name 1 thing you can do that isn't doable by email / just updating your blog!

[TBOL3]

I think the point is not that you can do things you couldn't with email, it's that your doing things in a more natural way.

Personally, I really like the idea, it seems like a good combination of social networking sites, and email, plus they're making it an open platform (I really wonder what they're doing to make it possible for one wave server to talk to a completely different provider of google wave).

Anyway, here's a few things that work much better this way, than email:

1. Changing your messages, I have sent out inaccurate information, and had to send out another email to correct it, and not everyone gets the correction.

2. Discussion by parts of emails, sure you can do this with emails, but it get's clunky, and usually people just add their comments at the end.

3. Seeing content being added in real time, very good.

4. Yes, updating your blog is one.

5. I started to fall asleep at about this point, but it seems like it could connect well with other social media sites.

6. Viewing the history of your email, making it also a good google docs type of app.

Edit 7: I can't believe I forgot this, it is one of my favourite things. Once in a while (every few weeks or so), one of my friends gets off of the list we use to email each other. But they can't really tell us that, because they don't know. It isn't too big of a problem when we all live in close proximity to each other, and talk with each other on a regular basis, but as we move apart, it becomes harder and harder to manage it. With this, if for some reason someone gets missing, it's much easier to add them, and they can still view the progression of the wave.

But with all of this good stuff, there is one thing that will turn me away, I want to be able to archive my email, so I want to be able to download, and archive everything.

[Michael.Godawski]

I very like what I see. :p

[delfick]

I love the look of it :)

The question becomes would it be really as 'real-time' in real life as it is in the video?

[pwnst*r]

so many google haters, it's laughable

[Tibuda]

(I really wonder what they're doing to make it possible for one wave server to talk to a completely different provider of google wave).

XMPP/Jabber/GTalk can connect to different providers. The same for e-mail protocols.

[ddarsow]

Truly impressive. I signed up for notifications and am looking forward to this. It is certainly another one of those "why didn't I think of that?" things.

[Mazza558]

so many google haters, it's laughable

Actually, most people in the thread seem pretty impressed by this. After all, it is open source :p

[Mateo]

I really love this, and think it's revolutionary...

but i really don't like that all waves are editable by default. It just seems crazy to me that all documents are collaborative. I don't like the idea that someone can come along and change something that i've written. Don't get me wrong, collaboration has it's place, like meeting notes, but by default a wave should be a message board / email like experience, right? Sure, I know that you are notified when something has been edited, but that just means that I now have to guard my waves. for eternity because someone can come along and make me say "i hate jews" or whatever else.

[Mazza558]

I wonder if Google are waiting for the release of Firefox 3.5? After all, that supports HTML5 whereas the current version doesn't. And this'll prevent people trying it out and finding out that "your browser doesn't not support HTML5" and giving up.

[super.rad]

I really love this, and think it's revolutionary...

but i really don't like that all waves are editable by default. It just seems crazy to me that all documents are collaborative. I don't like the idea that someone can come along and change something that i've written. Don't get me wrong, collaboration has it's place, like meeting notes, but by default a wave should be a message board / email like experience, right? Sure, I know that you are notified when something has been edited, but that just means that I now have to guard my waves. for eternity because someone can come along and make me say "i hate jews" or whatever else.

Only the people that you add to the wave can edit them, unless you were using the tool to upload it to a blog, I'm not sure if anyone can edit them then.

[gnomeuser]

I want Wave to have my illegitimate love child. I think Rosy is my favorite little goodie, it makes good on a feature I have wanted for years since I have make friends who aren't confident with English and Rosy would greatly improve communication

Aside that it fixes the problems I have with forums and email, I am a big fan of the automatic embedding and other little bots. The context aware spellchecker also really amazes me.

I am hoping there will be a little tiny beta slot for me.

[Mateo]

Only the people that you add to the wave can edit them, unless you were using the tool to upload it to a blog, I'm not sure if anyone can edit them then.

i'm pretty sure that anyone on a wave can edit any of the content.

[Mateo]

I want Wave to have my illegitimate love child. I think Rosy is my favorite little goodie, it makes good on a feature I have wanted for years since I have make friends who aren't confident with English and Rosy would greatly improve communication

yep, that's my favorite extension as well, simply amazing. i wonder if it uses google translator as its dictionary.

[gnomeuser]

yep, that's my favorite extension as well, simply amazing. i wonder if it uses google translator as its dictionary.

That would be my guess, but we will see later this year when it gets launched officially. I know that a complete walkthrough of Rosy was part of the under the hood session so I would bet it won't take long for someone to provide an in depth blog detailing it.

*edit*

It turns out that it is smarter than a word by word translation or merely running full sentences through translate.google.com. It seems to translate word by word then as each word is complete it evaluates the highest probability for correctness for the whole sentence and retroactively edits the translation. That is at least my guess looking at the other presentations which show how the spell checker works.

[Mateo]

Another thing that is a little bit worrisome... the reason why you can add replies inside of the wave is because the wave itself is a hosted... unlike email where each recipient has a copy on their own server (or hard drive, if using pop3). This allows for a lot of the cool features of Wave... but at the same time, what happens if that host server goes offline. Do you just lose that history? It's gone?

Hopefully there is some sort of backup mechanism to guard against this sort of thing.

[gnomeuser]

Another thing that is a little bit worrisome... the reason why you can add replies inside of the wave is because the wave itself is a hosted... unlike email where each recipient has a copy on their own server (or hard drive, if using pop3). This allows for a lot of the cool features of Wave... but at the same time, what happens if that host server goes offline. Do you just lose that history? It's gone?

Hopefully there is some sort of backup mechanism to guard against this sort of thing.

The underlying mechanism is a standard database as I udnerstand, one could use standard means of backing that up. Not a big deal.

[CrazyArcher]

i'm pretty sure that anyone on a wave can edit any of the content.

No, it's not true. That would be ridiculous. Only those who are added to the wave can see it and edit content. As for the blogs, it's visible in a read-only mode to outsiders.

Anyway, it's still in very early pre-beta (or even pre-alpha?) stage, it was just a preview. They still have a bunch of stuff to iron out, and they'll do it. It would be a useful tool. I recall myself planning a trip abroad a few months ago with all the posting links in IM windows thing... Wave would've made it so much smoother.

[geoken]

I wouldn't be worried about all the permission based stuff (ie. who can read/edit/whatever a wave). The permission based stuff is likely the easiest stuff to change or modify down the road as testing continues.

[Kareeser]

This is some cool stuff.

I especially love how their spellchecker kicks firefox's butt down the street and around the corner.

Finally, I won't have to put up with people misspelling "there" and "their".

===

Wave worked great with their bug tracker... I can't WAIT to use this with Launchpad... it would make filing bug reports MUCH easier...

Hell, you could integrate UF into it too.

[gnomeuser]

Hell, you could integrate UF into it too.

I do not believe you think big enough, with Wave, you can do everything the forums can do and more. Why integrate it when one could replace forum software with Wave and shape a UI that fits better with the forum type model of work. A forum thread has a lot in common with a Wave but using Wave also expands on you capability to do interesting things.

I believe that when Wave is launched later this year, someone will have a Wave based forum type setting ready.

[Kareeser]

The only setback I can see is that Wave is designed to work with specific people on your list. A forum is more of a public arena...

[Sublime Porte]

The only setback I can see is that Wave is designed to work with specific people on your list. A forum is more of a public arena...

Wave is based on XMPP, and since XMPP can allow for multi-user collaboration in which none of the users have each other as contacts, I don't see any reason why Wave couldn't, since it seems to contain all that XMPP does and a whole lot more.

[monsterstack]

I do not believe you think big enough, with Wave, you can do everything the forums can do and more. Why integrate it when one could replace forum software with Wave and shape a UI that fits better with the forum type model of work. A forum thread has a lot in common with a Wave but using Wave also expands on you capability to do interesting things.

I believe that when Wave is launched later this year, someone will have a Wave based forum type setting ready.

That sounds absolutely brilliant. Just think how quickly people can collaborate. The possibilities are pretty powerful food for thought. I imagine programme development and documentation projects could benefit massively from this. The forums would benefit so much from something like this.

[Saint Angeles]

?????

The video starts with them restating over and over again that 'this is running in the browser'. The only non-browser aspect is the drag and drop which they mentioned is a function of google gears (which is available for linux) and also something that they've suggested for the HTML5 spec.
well there seems to be a wave client... a piece of software that installs on the computer.

its just that if we ever expect anybody to release linux apps, we need to be more vocal about it.

[monsterstack]

well there seems to be a wave client... a piece of software that installs on the computer.

its just that if we ever expect anybody to release linux apps, we need to be more vocal about it.

It's an open source programme, and the protocols are open-source as well. In the video, they explain how openness is vital to the internet's success. They want this application to be as open and as freely implementable as email or the TCP/IP stacks. They're essentially pushing for it to become a fundamental feature of the internet itself. A lofty goal, you might think. Still, it means we'll get Linux implementations whether anyone likes it or not.

[inspriation26]

I saw how it was used in a video in Google I/0. It sounds really fun. I really would love to try it out and maybe do some java coding for the protocol. I'm not all that great but I'm ok at it.

[gnomeuser]

That sounds absolutely brilliant. Just think how quickly people can collaborate. The possibilities are pretty powerful food for thought. I imagine programme development and documentation projects could benefit massively from this. The forums would benefit so much from something like this.

In a sense I think that Forums are the natural first step, it's already hosted communication, we can attach images, do private conversations, link videos.

Wave enhances all of that with good spell checking, translations, embedding and less linear format (with playback). Additionally it makes it easy for someone to snippet out mockups, comments etc. for a blog posting (something I personally would love).

I think it's a natural first step for a real world application of Wave. It's very evolutionary for the functionality forums already have. This is where I predict Wave being used first at least.

[monsterstack]

In a sense I think that Forums are the natural first step, it's already hosted communication, we can attach images, do private conversations, link videos.

Wave enhances all of that with good spell checking, translations, embedding and less linear format (with playback). Additionally it makes it easy for someone to snippet out mockups, comments etc. for a blog posting (something I personally would love).

I think it's a natural first step for a real world application of Wave. It's very evolutionary for the functionality forums already have. This is where I predict Wave being used first at least.

Mmm. I can't wait to get to use it in practice. The extensions look pretty amazing, really. Users tagging stuff, setting chunks of text as bug reports, linking relevant material. I think it'll take us a step closer to Tim Berners-Lee's semantic web.

I loved the terminal interface they showed nearer the end of the video, too. :D


The only setback I can see is that Wave is designed to work with specific people on your list. A forum is more of a public arena...

Yes, but I imagine people will find a way to get around that. How about separate address books for separate places? An address book for here, an address book for there. If you know users from multiple sites, I imagine it would be easy to somehow reconcile them. At least, they appeared to be doing something similar in the demo video when they showed the different implementations interacting with each other seamlessly. All that is required is some way of dealing with users' aliases.

[Sublime Porte]

Yes, but I imagine people will find a way to get around that. How about separate address books for separate places?

As mentioned above, there's really no need for that. XMPP which Wave is based on has no problem handling multi-user collaboration where users are not contacts of one another. So there's nothing to get around, Wave should already have this ability built in.

Seems as if people are creating their own limitations for Wave just based on a video they saw, which certainly didn't expose all of it's capabilities.

[CrazyArcher]

They're essentially pushing for it to become a fundamental feature of the internet itself. A lofty goal, you might think.

They've already achieved an even loftier goal - becoming synonimous to "search".

[gnomeuser]

Mmm. I can't wait to get to use it in practice. The extensions look pretty amazing, really. Users tagging stuff, setting chunks of text as bug reports, linking relevant material.

The ability to have a bot to tie text into bugs would certainly make the development cycle testing subforums e.g. much less painful :)

[Erunno]

well there seems to be a wave client... a piece of software that installs on the computer.

its just that if we ever expect anybody to release linux apps, we need to be more vocal about it.

I'm pretty sure that by "client" the Google guy (Lars Rasmussen?) is referring to the web interface.

[monsterstack]

One of the things that flew right over my head whilst watching the video was that I have arranged my online stuff to work in a largely similar fashion. I use Thunderbird for pretty much everything. I keep a throwaway email address with which I use to sign comments on blogs and forums and things. I then use the forum or blog software to sign up for just about every notification thing going, and have it all beamed into Thunderbird with gmail's IMAP features separating the information into categories and threaded discussion and stuff. It's one of the reasons I'm sometimes so quick to respond on threads around here :) It can take a while to set everything up so it works smoothly, but once you have, then you can use Thunderbird to bring you news, emails, discussions you're a part of, and anything else you can think of, and it keeps you permanently up-to-date with the rest of the world. How useful is all this? Well I haven't had to use this forum's "Search" feature at all, and I've never had to trawl through Firefox's browse history to find my bits and pieces. How many users can honestly say the same?

The thing about Wave is that it will give me the same functionality but without me having to do all that legwork before-hand, and it removes the need to follow the links to the site in question to post new messages, and tonnes of other benefits too. Hoping they hurry up and get a working release out the door soon.

[fluteflute]

I'm pretty sure that by "client" the Google guy (Lars Rasmussen?) is referring to the web interface.
The client can be anything - there is a wave 'protocol'. The Google web interface is the main/first 'client' - Google demonstrated a command line client at the launch.

[Mateo]

No, it's not true. That would be ridiculous. Only those who are added to the wave can see it and edit content. As for the blogs, it's visible in a read-only mode to outsiders.

Anyway, it's still in very early pre-beta (or even pre-alpha?) stage, it was just a preview. They still have a bunch of stuff to iron out, and they'll do it. It would be a useful tool. I recall myself planning a trip abroad a few months ago with all the posting links in IM windows thing... Wave would've made it so much smoother.

that's what i meant, anyone added to a wave can edit the content... i'm not sure i like this. it's good in a collaborative message, but Wave is also to be used like email. in which case i don't want people to edit messages.

[Mateo]

I really like the documentation idea. As the video showed with collaboration, you can start a wave that is meant to document something (like, for example, installing ATI drivers) and then every can jump on board and make changes and clean it up, much like a wiki, and then when it is completed you can copy the state into a fresh wave, much like they showed in the video. Of course this is similar to the way wikis work, with the one main advantage is that by being "email like" it gives people more of a reason to participate because they keep being reminded of it.

[geoken]

well there seems to be a wave client... a piece of software that installs on the computer.


No there doesn't. You can clearly see it running in chrome or safari (with a bit of FF 3.5). They clearly state 'all this is running in the browser' on more than one occasion.

[revoltism]

I have a user and there is no installation. One bad thing though is that it don't work on IE which makes it impossible for me to run it on my work computer. I am not allowed to download and install things there.