Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today

&#62; If both people are online at the same time, a wave acts just like an instant message -- except that you see each character as it is typed, just like in subethaedit.<p>Ah, back to the good ol' days of<p><pre><code> You are a fucking asshole^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmistaken</code></pre>

I'm doubtful. Looks like something that a few people will think is really cool and 99.9% of the population will ignore.

O'Reilly just blew up my buzzword-o-meter with "Federated Wave Clouds" and "a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud."<p>So instead of sending messages <i>to</i> someone we just send it "in the cloud" and our federated waves generate a response?<p>Maybe O'Reilly intentionally reinforces vague and confusing terminology in order to publish more books explaining what should have been stated using simple terms in the first place.<p>Let's give it a try: Google Wave adds structure and web functionality (think embedable widgets) to conversations in a more meaningful and semantic way than normal text-only threaded email and IM. A Wave server uses an XMPP extension to allow peer-to-peer communications thereby removing reliance on sole providers for communications infrastructure.

I realize its just a demo but that UI looks horribly crowded to me. Regardless of how useful it is, I think staring at that all day would give me a headache and send me back to my "old" email.

My initial impression is that it looks like an online version of Outlook/OWA, albeit with more/different features. It's very, very busy with stuff flying all over the place.<p>They're hitting on a big problem though; centralizing online conversations, regardless of medium, into a single location. Something like this can plug right into your Facebook friends, or company address book, etc... Very neat idea.<p>Too much marketing lingo though. Please, stop inventing words, like "waves" and what-not; they rarely stick (Who still tells someone they're about to "beam" money to them over PayPal? Who knows what a "lens" is on Squidoo?). I can't even get my Mom to comprehend what "twittering" is yet, never mind a wave. It's too confusing for many people.

For the people that watched the keynote: Kinda funny how they praised JavaScript for an hour and latter, on the AppEngine note they tell us to write Java and let them handle all the conversion to filthy JavaScript :&#62;

Yay, we reinvented Usenet, more cluttered though.

I've figured out what actually supports the internet: the cloud is actually a large piece of hype that escaped sometime in 2001 and now is running its own operating system and sending out press releases.<p>Seriously, that article was a little too breathless for me. I certainly hope that it is really that cool because that would be awesome. But I've read a lot of hyped articles over the last few years.<p>Is it too much to ask for a reviewer of a new product to be on a bit of a critical hat? After all, this is a large company coming up with something new that <i>they are going to own</i>. We've got Google Gears, HTML 5, Google Maps, Google Mashups, etc. Would you like Google fries with your Google shake?<p>It looks great. I hope it is great. I worry about things like identity management and levels of friends with such tools -- not sure if they've solved that. I'm also not sure how other parties besides Google are supposed to own the data, which might be important for some folks.<p>It's cool, no doubt. But it's not the Apollo moon landing. It's more like Outlook on steroids.

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.

Not ready to get excited, right now.

<i>suggests that the amount and quality of participation goes up radically when comments can be interleaved at a paragraph level. </i><p>The way emails grow with repeated and old information and forwards is something I really dislike about email and like the sound of wave.<p>However, unfortunately wave is destined to fail. Exchange 2010 with Outlook 2010 claims: "Improve user productivity with the ultimate inbox experience." - <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/apr09/04-15Exchange2010PR.mspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/apr09/04-15Exc...</a><p>Since Exchange/Outlook will have "the ultimate" inbox experience, Google Wave can neither equal it nor improve upon it.

Thanks Google! This totally validates our collaborative browsing 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.