

Ask HN: What's the Big Deal With Google Wave? - Readmore

I've seen some of the demonstrations and read some of the features and I'm afraid I just don't get why this is so 'revolutionary.' It doesn't seem like anything we haven't seen before, it's just that now it's got Google's name on it.<p>Anyone care to explain what, if anything, I'm missing?
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jacquesm
I think that the fact that google is behind it is in fact that only thing that
drives all this media attention, it means that if it is anywhere near
successful that it is going to set the bar for collaborative systems, and set
it considerably higher than it has been before.

Cisco and a whole bunch of others have been trying to put together a
comprehensive suite of tools to do all this, but so far they've failed to make
it feel seamless. Google might change that, they've certainly got the
resources to make it happen.

Just like there was already free email before gmail and search before google
came along, it's a major event.

But I agree with you that all the components have been seen before, maybe with
the exception of a system like this having an API.

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ramanujan
Key idea: if N people sending emails to each other are all on Gmail, then
Google can keep only one copy of the email discussion and show it to all N of
them.

This is why gmail-to-gmail emails arrive so quickly.

More generally, rather than using point-to-point protocols to make N(N-1)/2
pairwise connections between N people, there are certain new possibilities if
everyone just maintains a single link to a document (a Wave) hosted on the
server.

Wave is kind of the inverse of P2P. Downloading is more efficient if you can
simultaneously download from N people. Uploading is more efficient if you only
need to upload to one server.

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Readmore
That's a good explanation, thanks.

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justlearning
i got an invite yesterday and my bit of playing around in my own wave (no
other contacts have wave) - was of no excitement (say compared to gmail when
it came around)

however I can imagine super productivity in communication/im for teams sitting
across continents.

A tiny advantage of wave is that you can watch your colleague typing realtime.
Those two minutes of impatient waiting (specially during a heated discussion)
now would be drastically shortened. You could forget IM etiquettes during
'waving'.

I also thought of similarity with etherpad (specially the code while on the
phone interview which was discussed earlier on HN)- where the interviewer may
see the interviewee coding live.

imho, google wave may not matter now, when the users grow to decent numbers,
we will find out.

PS: your gmail id becomes your google wave id (I had a good wave-id in the
sandbox, i ended up getting my gmail account to the public preview).

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hellotoby
Slightly off topic, but I'd be interested to see what 37signals have to say
about Wave, since it seems to encroach on their core business with the added
benefit of Wave being free.

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cmelbye
Yeah, they sure do hate competition. Remember Huddle Chat, an awesome, free
group chat client written by some Google Engineers on Google App Engine in
his/her spare time, and the whining from 37signals that ensued? It's
ridiculous.

