Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of communication.<p>* Push vs. Pull. Does the recipient have to ask to get incoming messages.<p>* Off the cuff vs. Official. How quickly is the communication written, how much thought goes into formal language &#38; proofreading.<p>* Personal vs. Notification (this is a big problem for communication). Regular mail has fallen to this, 99% of mail is automated messages, both wanted and unwanted. Email is going the same direction. Phone never has moved very far that direction.<p>* Filtered vs. Raw. Computer filtered, or human filtered. Spam, autocategorization, etc.<p>And then it adds document problems to it:<p>* Collaborative vs. Sign off. Am I co-writing the document with somebody or is it a write-revise-signoff cycle?<p>* Controlled vs. AdHoc. How formal does the collaboration need to be. Does it make sense for us to both be editing things, or is internal consistency too important to allow concurrent edits?<p>Basically, just saying "screw email, it's a chat! With Widgets!" totally ignores what people use communication services for, and the varying levels of formality, proofreading, speed, style, and automation.<p>A quick rundown of communication protocols that exist:<p>Email: Delayed, Push for the most part, Filtered, lots of notifications<p>IM: Instant, Push, Raw, few notifications<p>Blog: Delayed, Pull, Filtered (RSS reader, you decide what to read), few notifications.<p>Waves: Instant, Push (?), Raw, notifications... maybe?<p>Basically, it fits in the IM category for the most part. Why would this replace my email to the boss containing a page of pros vs. cons on a new technology that we were going to adopt? Would this replace the automated quarterly emails from HR showing me my 401k balance (and does it do the job any better?).<p>Summary:<p>Very technologically cool, but I have no idea how it fits well into the framework of communication types, and adds anything that's not covered adequately with current communication methods.<p>A thought I have had was that twitter flourished because it was a different set of attributes from anything else that existed (along with other things of course).

1. For this to take off, other providers would have to implement the Wave API/protocol. Other providers like Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. Just as today everybody is running SMTP servers.<p>2. What does open-sourcing mean? Is Google open-sourcing their server-side code? Probably not, since it's tied to the Google architecture anyways. Implementing these APIs/protocols would be a significant expence for the other providers. Also, open-source or not, this would still be a Google-technology (controled by Google), and large corporations don't like to invest in other's technology.<p>3. Presumably Google would allow Gmail users to upgrade with a click, so they'd have a good amount of seed users. But still, most of my contacts are not @gmail.com, so the experience would be limited.<p>4. This probably includes email as a special case, eg. your Wave provider is still running SMTP servers and receiving email messages coming to your address (Wave address = email address) and placing them in your Wave inbox, and sending out emails per SMTP if the other side is not Wave enabled. This means painless upgrades in terms of "compatibility" for the user.<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, I've only skimmed the docs!

The web is getting <i>really exciting</i> again! I mean, it always has been, but these open protocols, open platforms, and general openness has really got me smiling :)<p>So many possibilities!

It is an open protocol: <a href="http://www.waveprotocol.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.waveprotocol.org/</a>

Google Code Page: <a href="http://code.google.com/apis/wave" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/apis/wave</a>

This could be revolutionary, however email is the way it is because that's just how we've communicated as a species for eons, all the way from letters to tablets to cave paintings. You think carefully about your message, create something representing it, and share it. It seems like Wave is essentially condensing that process into one step, more like a conversation. I'm not sure everyone will welcome that.

So, the new thing they did is that they combined Chat and Wiki and then threw some API for mashing up. Made it pretty and Ajaxy. Well, mmm, Ok. I guess many people will like it.<p>I still prefer plain-text emails, though.

That is the direction AOL always wanted to go with their browser/client.<p>The key difference being the openness of wave.

I was never a big user of IM or any real time communications (not even phone) so I don't think I would use it much for that.<p>But I do like that they experiment with new forms of collaborative document editing. This has always been a big pain. I have thought about it quite a lot myself.<p>The really difficult thing about collaborative document editing is versioning. The more I think about it the more open questions accumulate.<p>I have my doubts that a tool that wants to be so many things at the same time can be a good enough collaborative document editing tool. For instance, how do I separate the content that is edited from the communcation _about_ that content? Maybe that becomes obvious when we can actually try it.

<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350262" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350262</a>

<a href="http://wavesandbox.com/" rel="nofollow">http://wavesandbox.com/</a> is where people are getting developer accounts from the Google I/O Conference. You may directly navigate to it and add yourself to a waitlist too, if you're not registered at the Google I/O Conference.<p>Direct link: <a href="https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/" rel="nofollow">https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/</a>

I guess I'm not hip or social enough to get it. It's like a glorified e-mail/IM client with avatars and social networking stuff, and a bunch of other things super glued to it? Seems like it might be too ambitious. Maybe there's a good idea in there somewhere but, looking at the tools/sites I use now, I can't imagine why I would want to use this instead. I certainly don't want to waste my time duplicating my efforts on more than one site/service/whatever. Looks like there might be a decent barrier of entry too just figuring out how all these parts work with each other and how you can modify them to work the way you want them to.

Silicon Valley Google Wave Discussion lunch tomorrow (5/31)<p>Come, Bring a Friend and let's discuss Google Wave over lunch.<p>Please use the following link: <a href="http://www.socializr.com/event/976099347" rel="nofollow">http://www.socializr.com/event/976099347</a> to RSVP.<p>Feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested.

How would this effect mailing lists?

this is what facebook should've gone for. specially them, due to the social network that they have.<p>the other contender would be linkedin due to the professional atitude they have towards social networking.

Am I the only one wondering how Google Wave is going to combat spam?

A solution in search of a problem.

There are almost nothing new about this project - the big idea is "lets put all out services together" under new buzzword with the same proven strategy - "we will host and monetize your data" and "we published an APIs, you wll code it out".<p>The same principle is about technology - put it all together XMPP + XML documents (for easy data extraction and indexing) (google docs) + version control (git) + wiki-style editing (wikipedia) + maps, of course + profiles (facebook) + feeds (twitter).<p>And it will probably work, because it is targeted for mobile devices (android) as clients which means instant and short messaging by definition.

Woah, that could be some pretty disruptive technology.

So something ambitious is going to be built ontop of complete junk and by forcing the HTTP protocol to handle shit it wasn't meant for. Wonderful. Fucking wonderful.<p>Can we get a time machine and go back to the 80s and start all over again and build up a proper platform <i>before</i> the WWW becomes popular??

We agree with Google. This is the same idea behind our newly launched startup, <a href="http://www.browseology.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.browseology.com</a><p>If you don't want to wait for Google Wave to see updates from everyone in real time, check it out.