Google Wave - Real-Time Communication

[Lenny]

Gmail in real-time: Google does the Wave | Webware - CNET

Google Wave is a new technology from Google which they announced at the Google I/O Conference on Thursday. I'm on my revision break, so I'll copy and paste (hopefully I'll have time later to leave my thoughts. You can probably guess what they are if I told you I've signed up for it):

They came up with Google Wave, which organizes Internet discussions in the trendy stream of consciousness fashion. It's a little bit Twitter, a little bit Friendfeed, and a little bit Facebook all in one service, allowing you to send direct messages to online contacts with real-time replies, share photos or documents, and add or delete members of the conversation as needed.

In that sense, it's not a completely public discussion, nor a completely private one. A user creates a "wave" by typing a message or uploading photos and adding contacts to the wave as they see fit. Other contacts can be added later, and those people can add other contacts to the wave unless the original wave starter forbids new entrants.

"They" are Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the brothers who developed the technologies behind Google Maps.

 

[Ursa major]

and add or delete members of the conversation as needed

That sounds like fun, depending on who - or what - gets to add and delete.


(I have an image of this being like the tea rooms at their most frenetic - remember how exciting that was, Lenny - but on steroids.)

 

[Lenny]

The logical way to do it would allow the original conversation starter to add and delete anyone as they see fit, and give those who add more contacts the ability to delete the contacts they've added (the only problem I can see is if you delete someone who has added a lot of contacts - what happens to those contacts? Actually, on second thought that only really matters if you think of the hierarchy of added contacts as a tree, in that a node must have a parent. If it's more of a cloud/graph, with everyone linked to the conversation starter, and then with (directed?) links/edges between contacts, it would make it much easier to sort out).

I haven't thought about it that way - it would be pure madness!

My thoughts were more along the lines of team projects (such as the example given with finding bugs) - next year, and in my third year, we have to build a program as part of a team. I've been thinking how easy it would make the planning and development stages with something like this in place.

 

[Ursa major]

As with anything, small groups do tend to be easier to handle.

 

[Lenny]

Google releases Google Wave demonstration video | Webware - CNET

It's about an hour and twenty minutes long, but it's well worth the watch. It's split into three parts -

Product, which gives a demonstration of Wave
The API with which Wave is created
Wave as a Protocol.

If you watch any of it, watch the first part - some of the things it does are amazing!

EDIT: I'm 37 minutes into the video, and I'm lost for words. The things that Wave can do are incredible! Not only do you get live Instant Messaging (that is, you can see the other person typing in real-time), but you can edit in real-time, post to web-pages and edit those from your client in real-time (whilst people on the page can watch you do it), and, perhaps the thing that has most amazed me so far, collaboratively edit a document, in real-time. I've just seen five people editing a document together at the same time.

To think that the whole technology is built on existing protocols, and is an HTML 5.0 document is beyond belief.

 

[Lenny]

I'm in awe. The demonstrations within the Google clients were impressive. The cross-client demonstrations built upon the Google client demonstrations. The demonstrations with technologies outside of Google were beyond breath-taking.

The implications of the Google Wave technology are huge! If enough developers start to work with it, it can revolutionise communication and completely change the way that we use it.

I've had a look at a few of the APIs, and some code examples (interested to see that they were in Java - when it's finally released, I could have some fun!. There were Python examples of the same extensions, too), and my respect for the Google programmers has gone up.

A lot of people say that Google is becoming too big, and that's they're taking over the Internet. If they're bringing out things like this even when there's no market and competition to force their hand, then who cares? Let them!

Basically, this is the best technology I've seen for years.

 

[Lenny]

Google Wave is amazing!

I've been using it for just over a month now and, after a quiet start with only a couple of housemates on it, it's come to be as popular in my browser as Facebook, Gmail, Google and Wikipedia.

I mentioned in my second post how I was thinking of using it with my group for my second year project, and we've been doing just that. Every time we meet I note everything down on Wave (I also do the same when we meet with our Project Manager), which we can then discuss further afterwards, we've got a Wave for files, which is a lot quicker and simpler than using the one on the Uni system (though we do put our important things on there - if Wave explodes, we're doomed, but if the Uni system explodes, we have backups or, failing that, someone to blame, shout and curse at). We've also got a Wave for scheduling things and, another thing I mentioned in my second post, one for keeping track of bugs. All the different Waves are to in a central Wave with very basic discussion, that we clean up every now and then.

Team members have been ill for a few practicals, so we had them on Wave at their end whilst we were in the practical, and we were discussing things as if they were with us.

As a tool for business and group work, Wave is incredible. I assume there are other systems out there geared more towards development, but I doubt they have the flexibility of Wave.

However, if you want to use Wave for social things (apart from planning parties. You know, social as in chatting to others), you might as well stick with [insert IM of choice].