9 replies to this topic

[Ilya R.]

If you follow Twitter a lot (Andy) or are just connected with the interwebs a lot, you probably know that Google Wave has been announced a few days ago at the Google I/O Developers Conference.

After spending a long hour and 20 minutes watching the developer preview for it, I must say that I'm pretty amazed at the possibilities of the service.

The concept of Google Wave is "what email would look like if it was invented today". And they've done a damn good job at that.

Wave is a service, hosted by Google or any other server, that allows interactive conversations. Each one of these conversations is called a "Wave" and the wave contains participants that the wave creator added. A wave can be a simple message like an email, or a totally interactive document with pictures, spreadsheets, attachments, etc...

One of the main features of wave is its blur between email-type conversations and instant messaging. If a wave participant is online and you'd like to respond to a wave, the other participant will get notified of the change and can join the wave and start up a conversation. The rest of the wave replies will be instant messaged between the online participants. If other participants are not online, they will see the replies when they come back. They can even "replay" the progress of a wave, message by message, change by change.

Another feature of wave is its potential for collaboration. Say in the case of BTHSnews, one of the club members created an article and put it up as a new wave. The article creator could add some editors to the wave and they then could come into the wave and make changes to the article. The article creator will be notified of the changes, and could see exactly what was done to the article, and who did it. If the creator likes the article, he could accept the changes and save it, or export it as a new wave that could be for others to check out and comment on.

Coming back to Wave's blur between email and IM, if a bunch of participants are online at the same time and editing that same article, the changes will be updated in real time on everyone viewing the wave. And by real time, I'm not kidding. You can literally see the wave being updated keystroke by keystroke with a colored name tag next to who's changing what.

If a person is added to a wave later on, they can replay all the changes to the wave's content, including the collaborative changes made above. So it's like an interactive conversation that you can explore every single aspect of, past and present.

Wave also offers things like image sharing. The sharing aspect of Wave is so powerful, all you do is drag and drop some files such as photos into the wave window, and they instantly show up to everyone viewing the wave. Photo thumbnails are even shown before the image finishes uploading. And remember it's in dead-on real time so everyone can comment on the photos in the style of an IM chat room or a live forum thread.

Wave also has an API with which many extensions can be created for Wave, in the style of Firefox extensions. These extensions could be anything from games to blogging bots. In the demo, the Wave engineers demonstrated a blogger bot which published a wave to a person's blog. And the best part is, it's not just the content that got published to that blog. The entire wave and all of its features got integrated into that blog post. So when somebody visits the blog website, they could use it just like a wave, with replies and real-time communication and chats and so on. And the changes made on the blog site will show up in the Wave client, and vice versa.

Another extension would be a Twitter bot. That extension is a pretty amazing piece of work. You start a new wave, and add the Twitter bot as a participant (yea, some extensions are just participants in the wave that detect changes and use them). When you start the wave with a message, that message gets published to twitter. And if a reply comes into twitter, it will get detected by the Twitter bot and will be posted as a reply in the wave. Pretty awesome huh?

Polly is an extension that manages polls and updates them (in real-time). That's right, a wave can be a poll. You create a poll wave, add some participants, and let Polly do the rest of the work. As participants reply to the poll, Polly makes graphs and charts to graphically represent the results. In real time.

Another extension is Spelly, the spell check extension that uses the power of context to figure out what you are actually typing. As demonstrated, you can type "Icland is an icland" and it will correct that to "Iceland is an island".

An extension that really demonstrates the power of Wave and extension integration is the chess gadget. It allows 2 wave participants to play a game of chess with each other. And remember that playback feature with which you can see all the entire progress of the wave, change by change? It applies to the chess gadget as well, so you can replay every move in the game.

The last thing presented in the demo was the translation bot "Rosy". It utilizes the power of the internet as well as Wave's real-time features. What Rosy does as a bot participant in the wave is it translates what the other participants are typing from their language to your language in real time. So you will see the original message as well as the translation coming in on your screen at the same time, as they're typing it. Rosy has the ability to speak around 40 languages so you could have a chat with pretty much anyone in the world.

While reading all that, remember that everyone in the wave sees the same thing. All of this is updated in actual real time across all the participants' computers. And every participant can contribute to any part of the wave. They can replay the entire wave from the beginning or just leave a reply. Wave also allows you to select a part of a wave message and reply to that part, so people know exactly what you are replying to.

So that's it for the future of the web. I only covered about half of what Wave can do in this post so there's really a lot more awesome stuff to it. Check out the website at http://wave.google.com/ to see some pictures of it or watch that 1.5 hour video if you really want to. It's pretty cool.

[Charles]

It seems pretty cool except I don't know how much I will actually use most of the features. We will see how email evolves after this.

[azntechguy]

Well, for sure, it would change the face and dynamics of e-mailing as we know it forever if it does catch on.

Being a slow adopter who's been sending messages since the dial-in BBS days, I probably won't use it (unless I'm effectively coerced by most of the people I know into using it, like Facebook, for example). Traditional e-mail is fine with me.

[Ilya R.]

I don't think that people will be using this as they use email now.

People will probably start using this as a chat room app in things such as meetings.

[ClEMeNt]

It sounds nice... but are there security measures/privacy control in place? Can you control who can come in or who can't?Make a private room that no one can enter besides you and the invitee?

[Ilya R.]

Yes. There's also private messaging and the ability to turn off those live word-by-word transmissions too.

[NickC]

I still don't understand twitter til this day -.-

[blackmanor1000]

It sounds pretty innovative and cool but maybe too much stuff for people who maybe just want to chat with their friends as they would on something like AIM. Maybe this'd be good for businesses or a even a group project but I don't think I'd use it.

[©Milton]

Google is starting to own everything on the web. D:

Wave sounds like it has a lot of features, I probably wouldn't use half of it though...

Is it a downloaded program, or something hosted online?

Regular e-mail is fine, but this looks like has a lot of stuff you'd probably need multiple programs for.

Signed up for the e-mail thing to be notified when it's available, I'll try it out.

[ClEMeNt]

©Milton, on 12 September 2009 - 11:29 AM, said:

Google is starting to own everything on the web. D:

Wave sounds like it has a lot of features, I probably wouldn't use half of it though...

Is it a downloaded program, or something hosted online?

Regular e-mail is fine, but this looks like has a lot of stuff you'd probably need multiple programs for.

Signed up for the e-mail thing to be notified when it's available, I'll try it out.

You're late, Milton.
I don't like it. It sounds like a program that is almost like Aim...