google wave, killer app
Jun. 2nd, 2009 22:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
piranhai was too busy to pay attention when google unveiled its latest product/vision, but today i caught up with it. and i am thrilled.
google wave is a new tool, platform, and protocol to facilitate online communication and collaboration.
a wave is a shared document in which communication can happen in the form of text, images, video, sound, games, polls, and whatever else you can imagine. communication is both synchronous (live -- you see it as the other people who're sharing the wave are adding it) and asynchronous (if you get back online after an absence, you can see the current state of the wave, as well as play back what happened while you were gone, and add your own items). any participant can add things in any place in the wave. other people can get included in the wave (or parts of it) later on. aside from shared-by-all communications, private ones can also be inserted which only specific people can see.
i could go on and on, i am so excited about this. it's a major step towards what i've been wanting from my online life forever; it's email and IM and IRC and newsgroups and social networking and blogs and wikis and forums all rolled into one, with astounding concurrency for those who like it live, as well as asynchronous tools to make it easy to pick out important bits and pieces later.
and it's gonna be open source, and there are APIs already, and anyone is welcome to write extensions. hello dreamwidth! what are we gonna do with this? it's right up our alley.
watch the demo. it's an hour and 20 minutes long, but it won't be a waste of your time if you're at all interested in such things.
google wave is a new tool, platform, and protocol to facilitate online communication and collaboration.
a wave is a shared document in which communication can happen in the form of text, images, video, sound, games, polls, and whatever else you can imagine. communication is both synchronous (live -- you see it as the other people who're sharing the wave are adding it) and asynchronous (if you get back online after an absence, you can see the current state of the wave, as well as play back what happened while you were gone, and add your own items). any participant can add things in any place in the wave. other people can get included in the wave (or parts of it) later on. aside from shared-by-all communications, private ones can also be inserted which only specific people can see.
i could go on and on, i am so excited about this. it's a major step towards what i've been wanting from my online life forever; it's email and IM and IRC and newsgroups and social networking and blogs and wikis and forums all rolled into one, with astounding concurrency for those who like it live, as well as asynchronous tools to make it easy to pick out important bits and pieces later.
and it's gonna be open source, and there are APIs already, and anyone is welcome to write extensions. hello dreamwidth! what are we gonna do with this? it's right up our alley.
watch the demo. it's an hour and 20 minutes long, but it won't be a waste of your time if you're at all interested in such things.
no subject
on 2009-06-04 00:01 (UTC)I suspect that there are a going to be a lot of painful human usability issues between now and widespread adoption. Email and IM and IRC and news and blogs and wikis and forums all have their own solutions for issues like spam and censorship and privacy and anonymous usage and scrubbing your database, so I think that there are significant challenges in expecting all of those actors to eat off the same plate.
re: google wave, killer app
on 2009-06-04 01:27 (UTC)Oh yes! please??
Re: google wave, killer app
on 2009-06-04 02:15 (UTC)I think it's possible (wouldn't bet on it) that some of the usability issues may actually be better than one would think, because you potentially have all the tools developed in different communication/presentation media to deal with the various issues. And as far as I can tell, this is all a toolkit where the different parts can be implemented/integrated or not depending on the developer of a particular page or site. So some people will lean heavily on the collaborative editing/page/wiki side, others will lean on the threaded-conversation side, blah blah blah. And since much of it is open source, 100 flowers can bloom, just as long as they all use Google's kernel...
What's also not entirely clear to me is the extent to which different users will be able to have different views of stuff. The idea of killfiles in a collaboratively edited document makes my head hurt, for example.
no subject
on 2009-06-04 06:28 (UTC)(Personally I don't watch videos longer than 10 - 15 minutes; that much information I can only absorb in a text format or at very minimum in TV resolution, I'm not going to spend an hour watching a 3 inch screen with sound so bad I can barely pick out the words. So I know I'm going to be spending the next few years hunting out the last corners of the web that exist in plain text, but hey.)
no subject
on 2009-06-04 06:37 (UTC)