

Google Wave - First Impressions - dabeeeenster
http://www.solidstategroup.com/page/2804/company/tech-blog/posts/google-wave-first-impressions

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philfreo
Having had a Wave account since the week of its demo at Google I/O, I am
extremely impressed with its possibilities. I believe that if anything will
replace email in the next 20 years, it will be this.

The question is do we really need to replace email? It has obviously served us
well for so long. If you think about the "what would email have looked like if
invented today?" question that Google was trying to answer, you start
realizing that there are so many limitations in the current model.

How? I think Wave will be a win when everyone with a Gmail inbox has a Wave
inbox automatically. Then, if you're communicating with other Wave users, you
get _tons_ of added benefits (which slowly everyone else is going to want).
Otherwise, they can simply interface it to send good old fashioned emails to
"old" addresses.

~~~
roc
Wave isn't email 2.0. That's just the marketing pitch to make it seem like
it's not _that_ new, so it can't be that scary. But it is. (new, at least)

Wave is computing 2.0. And I don't say that lightly.

It aims to do no less than gut and replace the core folder, file _and_
application metaphors. It's a Newton-esque data object soup + internet, with
the role of applications and workflow largely relegated to anthropomorphic
services.

That's why the "wave = a + b + c" metaphors ring so hollow; it's a new
conceptual model for computing that does not directly map to the old one.

And _that_ is what makes its future so murky.

I think the browser and intervening decades have changed habits and
expectations enough to give Wave a better chance than those who've presented
such things before. But I also think the single smartest move Google did, was
enable the building of seamless bridges in-to and out-of the Wave model.

Being Google will let them get their foot in the door. But allowing people to
make a wave from a simple word document and save a wave off to a PDF or simple
email will give them time to make their case.

But it's still an uphill battle.

~~~
eatmyshorts
I think you've hit the nail on the head. All of the parts, while impressive,
amount to only a part of the story. You've got a better approach to IM &
email. You've got an API that provides real-time collaborative editing. You've
got an API that leverages Google's front-end tools (Google Web Toolkit) and
the scalability of Google's back-end tools (AppEngine). And you've got an API
to integrate it all together. Each is nice and useful in its own right. But if
they are combined together...

I'll be very interested to see if Google releases some facsimile of Google
Docs that are Wave-enabled and allow for full real-time editing/collaboration.
Combine that with the email & SMS killer, and I believe Google has a viable
alternative to Office + Exchange + Windows. The unifying element of the Wave
acts to capture a company's workflow. In the end, business will want to use
this instead of the MS solution because it provides more business value that
the sum of the parts (IM + email + office suite + workflow), and it does so in
a way that MS cannot. Companies can extend the Wave to add further business
value to the whole approach with the Wave API. Finally, with the whole thing
being open-sourced, companies will be able to run their own servers (something
I think is critical to mass acceptance of the technology within corporations).

It is an ambitious project. I hope Google succeeds. I am watching it closely,
and look forward to my own invitation. I already can see a number of areas
where I would like to build my robots & gadgets.

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yankeeracer73
Looking at the UI screenshots and hearing this person's experience, I imagine
this will be used for awhile only by the elite digerati until they really
streamline the interface and come up with a better metaphor of what this is.
Also, until you can talk about solving someone's problems with it or why it's
better than what they have now succinctly, it just seems like another cool toy
cooked up "in the lab" and that's not necessarily a recipe for widespread
adoption. Even now I've read a fair amount of the Google propaganda and
other's posts about this and I'm not sure why I would suggest our team move
away from the tools that replicate a lot of this functionality.

~~~
tc
I have the feeling this will be decried as a failure three months after launch
and taken for granted as a part of our lives ten years from now.

~~~
pra
as google mail is. It sure killed all those nasty email apps.

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jlangenauer
I've seen Google Wave in action at a BarCamp here in Sydney, and while it
seems ripe with technical possibilities, I think the bigger challenges by far
with its adoption will be social and cultural.

With email, there already existed norms which could be taken from real life
and applied to the new electronic analogue. So the new technology dropped
pretty neatly into an existing cultural structure - which then evolved.

But Google Wave knows no such existing cultural structure I can think of -
perhaps there are certain etiquette rules that apply to multiple people
talking in a group at a party while simultaneously writing on a single piece
of paper. But if there are, I don't know them.

So adopters of Google Wave will face social challenges as well as
technological ones, and I don't think Google has really thought this through
as well as they've structured the protocols and technical infrastructure.
Start to consider Google Wave being used in a corporate environment, and
you've got legal and commercial challenges on top of that - I shudder to think
how a contractual discussion could be conducted over Google Wave. You might
answer that it won't be, we'll still rely on email, but if we do, then why add
another communication channel?

We shall see - though it speaks of how deeply Wave challenges current
paradigms of online communication that no-one - least of all me - is prepared
to offer concrete predictions regarding how it will be used.

~~~
pegobry
I agree with you that it's a problem -- as the name indicates, there's a
strong offline metaphor for e-mail.

But I think the way Wave will get around this is by being used first primarily
not as a communications tool, but as a _collaboration_ tool.

When you're a business or other team trying to get a project done, you use the
tool that lets you work together most efficiently, and you don't care if it
feels more like IM or email or a wiki (wikis, here's something with no offline
equivalent and whose mainstream usage took off like a rocketship), and so
that's how I think it will get traction.

From that point forward, as people use it as a collaboration tool, they'll
seamlessly come to use it as a communication tool, and it might progressively
replace email and IM (and social networking?), as I believe it can if it's
indeed as good as it sounds.

------
omouse
Computer agents have been discussed a long time ago. It's a good someone's
putting some time into making them a reality.

[http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism....](http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism.php)

 _"Licklider's messages and examples on the screen now involve fill-ins and
subroutines and modeling. He shows how he can program his computer to make
dinner arrangements when he goes to a certain city: if the first person
invited can't have dinner, his computer scans the list of his other friends in
the same city and issues dinner invitations to them . All this in a simple
conditional language."_

but wait, there's more,

 _"Agents will handle "augmented telephone calls," stacking the calls and
pushing them through automatically. Agents will pay your bill, checking them
against the appropriate invoices in standard electronic forms. They will sniff
out information a friend may have set out: his birthday, gift preferences and
sizes, party invitations, information he would like from whoever knows it."_

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Matte80000
I agree with Dabeeeenster on this one, I just spent the last 20 mins playing
with wave and although I had a big spurt of "Wow, this is really cool, real
time comms", I was also faced with a usability question of "What is this" and
more worryingly, "What can I do now".

It's not obvious what you can do with the system easily. I spent about 10 mins
trying to tag up a google map whilst other people did the same, the result
being a map dragging fight and trying to type in a description before someone
deletes the pin.

In summary... er... It might be useful for small internal groups of people you
know, but it's going to need some marketing and training.

~~~
easyfrag
I have never used it but from what I have read I wonder how much of it could
replace Exchange and SharePoint within the corporate environment.

Could you see a company hosting it internally and manage permissions via
Active Directory or LDAP groups to allow collaboration on documents or
discussion groups?

Does it have potential to help the information overload that plagues corporate
email (or maybe it will make it worse).

Calendaring? Does it even exist in the Wave universe?

------
extension
Any advice on how to get a sandbox account or how long it takes? I submitted
the form a couple of days after I/O saying I wanted to work on Ruby bindings,
along with a nice haiku, but nothing yet. I am _dying_ to start hacking on it.

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dpnewman
I think we have to remember that wave, the UI experience, is simply 1
application built using the new platform/protocol. To me it looks like, in
large part, a proof of concept that gets the ball rolling for devs, more than
a surefire new product for end users. The google wave UI will evolve, and in
theory other devs will offer entirely new visions built on top of the platform
in more and more exciting ways. Wave's success will be more based on the
platform success imho, than whether this early UI is a game changer.

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yread
The part about SMTP is true. It sucks terribly. I just wished we switched to
some more connection-oriented protocol that would say things like message
delivered or message not delivered because your professor's mail server is a
jerk and thinks the mail is a spam because it is coming from gmail and jerkily
decided to throw it away and not send a notice back.

</rant>

~~~
pra
it's administrators' fault, not the protocols'

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shimi
The change the Wave brings the enabling pull push over http, currently pull
works well but push (from the server to the client)is more complicated.

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peregrine
It looks like a real time forum to me.

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Matte80000
Wave is going to change comms. I hope

