Riding The Wave
When Google Wave was first announced back in May 2009, the hype-o-meter almost went off the scale. While bollocking Google is the new black, Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge have a play with wave, explore it and talk about whether the hype is justified, what it’s opportunities are and what Wave needs to do to succeed.
Of course, we are the very beginning of the conversation. What do you think? Have you played with Wave? What did you think? Did you use it for anything other than type ‘here is a test of wave’? Do you think Wave will change the way we communicate? Share your thoughts in the shot comments below…
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If you haven’t got access to Google Wave yet, you will need an invitation to participate in the Beta. Because I have no mates, I have invitations to spare. If you want an invite so you can see what all the fuss and the shot is about for your self, leave a message here and we’ll hook you up.
I am interested in checking out the Wave. I love the work that Google has been doing. Chrome is great looking forward to nexus coming to CDMA. Can someone send an invite? Great work on the show Jono and Stuart!!!
I have sent an invite to the email address listed on your Website. It might take a few days to come through.
https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BzCvDkNZdF.1
I started a public Wave – I think this links to it.
@b1ackcr0w: here here
Does that mean you need an invite, or were you being nice?
Sorry, I’m easily confused.
Sorry, I shouldn’t write comments while having a cold. I would realy like an invite if you can spare one
and of course I’m also being nice!
OK you guys really got me worked up about this…
First off wave is currently a development preview. I wish people would understand these kind of things better and I expected you guys to do that. I know Wave has been overhyped but that’s really what always happens with open development. People are used to the old marketing machine that create “excitement” for a product and then release it when it’s ready for the biggest bang possible. Open development means that you have to release before it’s ready so that you attract developers to help out and build on what you started. Now if people judge that initial release as what that product is of course they are not going to be impressed. It’s what has been happening to Linux for years. People keep saying to me “Well Linux has been around for so long and you say it’s better but it hasn’t really achieved anything”.. but what they don’t understand is that we, the linux user community, are usually more excited by the potential and the incredible evolution than by where the product is right now. And that’s because we know we can trust it to get better without worrying about corporate crap ruining it.
Secondly I don’t have any of my close friends on Wave. I didn’t even knew you can invite people. I just goggled it and found out I actually deleted that wave. Good thing it’s still in trash
. So yah… nobody to talk to on wave most of the time. But did have one really interesting conversation with an old acquaintance that I lost touch with. It was really fun and I do have already a few things that I think should be improved usability wise.
Third, it doesn’t work in IE ? are you kidding ? I mean that’s almost insulting. It’s like saying “MS Word doesn’t work in Ubuntu”. I’m a web developer and I’m glad Wave doesn’t work in IE. For all I care IE can burn in hell. And yes Wave is quite taxing on the browser but then again browsers are improving by leaps and bounds so I don’t really see that as a problem.
And coming to the last few bits… I’m sure e-mail integration will be done once the rest of it is at an acceptable level. I mean they did chose to have the same format for wave addresses as e-mail… and last but not least: most of the great new things on the web were hard to explain when they first came out. Remember how it was with twitter ? For me the fact that lots of people don’t get it is a sign that it really could be the next big thing.
Nah, see, I don’t buy “it’s a developer preview” as a reason for something to be broken. If it’s a developer preview, then only open it up to developers. Open up the source so we can help fix it, maybe.
My point about email integration is precisely and absolutely that at the moment Wave is a walled garden. In order to buy into it, everyone you want to talk to needs to also be on Wave. There are no benefits until you make that leap. If I had a Wave-enabled Thunderbird I’d be ecstatic. As it is, I have to go to some completely different website to talk to a few people, and I have to find those people all over again, and I have to wait to see if they get invited, and the website’s unstable and broken, and…I’m not seeing that “I can see someone typing an email to me” is enough of a benefit to get over this. One jolly good way of reducing that impedance mismatch would be to allow people to be Wave-ish when talking to other Wave-ish people without having to go to a special place to do so.
Of course it’s early. Of course we can’t expect Google to do everything at once. Of course this will be better when other people get on the bandwagon, and there are other Wave clients. The problem is that building a Wave client is a pretty big engineering effort with no guaranteed outcome. This is why we compared it to IPv6; anyone who takes the time to learn about IPv6 agrees that it’s important, and it needs doing. But there’s almost zero-benefit to going to IPv6 before everyone else does. So no-one does it, and therefore IPv6 fails. If Wave really is as good as you’re proclaiming it to be, I don’t want it to die in the same way; I want it to succeed. Making a magic wave.google.com black hole that irritates the shit out of half the people who have to use it is not the path to success.
“Nah, see, I don’t buy “it’s a developer preview” as a reason for something to be broken.”
Well wait what do you mean by that? What about the Ubuntu alpha and beta releases? Should we expect those to work ? Now I’d like Wave to be open source myself but it’s not. The protocol on the other hand is open and they need more than one implementation of wave if it’s going to go anywhere.
And also how would you expect them to release something for developers only ? Would I have to send in a copy of my degree in order to get an account? Have you ever considered that Google is maybe keeping wave as this closed box just so that it doesn’t attract too many average users ?
My point is take things for what they are. Don’t make them into something else and then get disappointed because that’s your own fault. I see this sort of thing around open source projects all the time and in this case it’s not really any different.
Oh and it’s nothing like IPv6. IPv6 only really works if everyone supports it. I mean it’s the most basic component of the whole internet. So yeah it’s going to take a while until we do a real switch. On the other hand wave doesn’t need that. There’s already people trying to start their own implementation. The real problem is that the protocol isn’t what you would call mature. It’s actually still a draft whereas IPv6 has been finished for a really long time.
This is the point, though; Wave only really works if everyone supports it, too. The whole point of Wave is collaboration, right? I mean, if I just want to have a one-to-one conversation with someone, I don’t derive massive benefits from Wave; the key beauty of it is how I can easily involve lots of people in a collaborative discussion. But if I have 5 people I want to be involved in that discussion and one of them isn’t a wave user, then, bang, no wave discussion for me. That’s precisely the same as IPv6. If I have to artificially limit who I talk to because, to a first approximation, there’ll always be someone without an account who I want to be part of a conversation, then that the same thing as “everyone needs it”.
And by “make it suitable for developers”, I mean, don’t write things like “Communicate and collaborate in real-time. Or anytime. Use Google Wave at home, at work, and at play.” if something isn’t suitable for ordinary use. Ubuntu beta releases aren’t easy to get; you have to drop to a terminal, run “sudo update-manager -d”, and agree to the upgrade. It’s not just a case of rocking up to the website with your existing Google account. If someone suggested that we provide one-button access to run the latest Ubuntu 10.04 alpha to every Ubuntu user, and use marketing-friendly phrases like “Use Google Wave at home, at work, and at play” rather than phrases like “This is a developer preview and it might break”, then I’d be opposed to it.
Well it’s true that they’re overselling it I’ll give you that. I haven’t actually looked at the site in a really long time. But when they announced it I’m pretty sure it was as a preview.
But the rest of it I don’t really agree with you at all. I don’t intend to use wave to “collaborate” with people. I’m using it for personal stuff. What am I supposed to collaborate on? I think that word was overused just because “collaboration” is kind of the new cool thing.
And if what you say would be true no other service on the internet would work in current conditions. I mean why use yahoo messenger if there’s people that don’t use it ? or skype or facebook or twitter or ICQ ?… You don’t need everyone to use it you only need the people you interact with the most to do it.
The bottom line is Google didn’t really put a clear label on Wave. They more or less just put it out there even if it’s nowhere near being ready but they didn’t make that clear enough. Even worst than that is the fact that they gave very little information about the status of the project after the initial release. I have a feeling that the world isn’t ready for wave yet. Browsers aren’t fast enough, latency isn’t low enough. We still have some way to go to get there. And that’s what I would of liked to hear on your show… not bickering about what is actually a marketing blunder.
and with that I have to go now… sorry for being a bit of a troll today
o/
It’ll take AGES to get critical mass. Facebook and Twitter seemed pointless when people first signed up. But then.. It hits that critical number of users and suddenly it’s fantastic, and the minority get accounts.
So, mostly what google need to do is wait.
As a side note, I’ve bullied my department into using it and for us it’s bloody fantastic because we’re all on there we can share thoughts and the realtime-ness is far more useful than I ever imagined.
Although we do do a lot of emailing of wave links still
Could you give us some more details of your experiences and what you use wave for.
Would email be as popular as it is if there was one provider that everyone had to use, through their website? Would IM? Would twitter (one provider, but multiple clients used to access it)? My point here is that my first thought when Google Wave was released, was that it’s not going to get widespread without third-party support.
Once there are desktop Wave clients by the likes of MS, Novell (http://is.gd/80mDO ?), Mozilla and so on, or as Aq said, integrate the protocol into existing clients.
Sorry, I didn’t finish my sentence. That should say “…into existing clients, then it’ll start to take off.”
Desktop clients ??? Really ? You think that’s the problem ? Because I haven’t used one in ages and I don’t personally know anybody that does.
Really? Everyone you know does email/IM/Twitter etc solely though web interfaces?
Perhaps I was a little narrow with what I said there anyway. What I really meant was non web-based Wave clients, including widgets, mobile clients and so on. What I’m getting at is that I don’t believe that a web application realises the potential of the Wave protocol, and I don’t think it’ll even begin to replace other forms of communication until that’s realised.
Yeah I don’t know anybody that uses desktop clients for anything other than IM. And yeah it will probably be interesting to have desktop clients for wave. But I don’t think that’s essential in order for wave to get off the ground. And when did this become such a black and white issue ? Why does it have to be all or nothing ?
That’s a fair point. I’ll revise my earlier point and say that it’s one of the things that’ll help it move to being a more mainstream form of communication, not the thing. It just seems to be that the proliferation of client programs on different platforms would make it more useful, and therefore more widely used. It worked did it for Twitter, which I’m not sure would be as widespread as it is if it was only accessible through one website. I definitely wouldn’t use it a much.
I am also surprised that everyone sorin7486 knows uses web clients. I personally cannot stand web clients and genuinely think that desktop integration would help waves cases.
Just an Outlook or Thunderbird plugin would sync the idea with many more people I suspect.
I thought they were developing it as a protocol, not just as a Google only service? IE, eventually you’ll be able to set up a wave server instead of your email server.?
You already can, if you want to. See http://www.waveprotocol.org/. The issue is that doing that’s pretty hard, and you’re even less well off if you do that than otherwise, since sending waves between servers (rather than between users on the same server) is still very new and no-one’s doing it yet. Running your own Wave server is like running your own private status.net instance instead of using Identi.ca — you can sorta-kinda send messages between status.net servers, but it’s pretty new and people aren’t doing it much, and meanwhile there’s no-one else on your server to talk to.
btw I hate this comment system … as a side note.
The server that they released, FedOne, is just a reference implementation. It’s not supposed to be a full blown server that you can install and actually use. And it’s not that hard to set up really. I’ve done it and even though it takes quite a few steps to get it up I didn’t really have any problems with it.
Yes that’s exactly how it is.
That’s the way I’d hoped it would go when I saw them announce it. Just like you can run your own email or Jabber server at the moment within your business (or even at home), you could run your own Wave server that can communicate, in real time, with everyone else’s.
What we really need from this point of view is someone to produce the Apache of Wave. And I know I’m saying that offhand like it’s a piece of piss, I realise it’s probably not.
We’ve been (trying to get more of us) using Wave for a bit of project management – but you can lead a horse to water… For me two things are crucial for the future of Wave: 1.Usable lightweight client – one that works on a Lin/Android phones for example, 2. Ability to communicate with existing channels – email/irc/feeds whatever
Get coding now – first to make a decent lightweight (command line?!!) client/server solution for this protocol will be king!
The reference implementation is a command line app… but I don’t think it’s what you want
I would love to see how Wave looked if it was built into the Linux desktop. Is anyone aware of any projects doing this?
I would happily be using Wave as a personal wiki system (all the functionality is there) if the editor didn’t suck so horribly.
In the five months or so since launch, there have been very few visible improvements to anything in Wave. I don’t understand that. I’m unsure of Google’s commitment to Wave, which is kinda critical if they hope to eventually replace email.
After listening I found this and now my interest is severely piqued: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/ConsoleClient
Again please notice how there is NO HTTP. This looks more like logging into an IRC server, finding an open wave, adding yourself and you can now post much like posterous. SIICK! imo #2c
yup … that’s the reference implementation… it’s supposed to help people create new server implementations not to be actually used !!!
I for one think the problem might be that Google Wave doesn’t really “fix” anything. The success of most of Google’s apps and such is because it filled a gap and offered either an easier way of doing something or gave users something that was really needed.
What is it that Google Wave is supposed to offer that existing technologies already have? And no, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t evolve our functions or use new tools. I am just saying that it really doesn’t offer anything new. Just different.
In response to sorin7486 about not working in IE, it is Google’s prerogative to determine if something works in IE or not. However, being a web developer I think you should understand that not everyone uses FF, Chrome or whatever. They should, but they don’t. Making something that doesn’t work in what I have now, will make me probably not use it.
I don’t really think that your last part is relevant. There’s probably a reason why Google is blocking IE and my feeling it’s because of performance. And if applications are to move to the web that’s bound to happen.
And I don’t think people won’t use it just because of the browser. There’s plenty of pressure for more performance and it’s more a question of whether MS will actually step up or if they will leave IE to die.
On IE.
The reason it doesn’t work with IE isn’t due to some evil Google plot to bring down Microsoft. Rather it’s a function of Googles Wave service utilising HTML5 and javascript functionality that IE just doesn’t support. You can still use IE if you install Googles Chrome Frame thingy.
Internet explorer is a truly awful peace of software and an absolute nightmare for web developers and designers. Google not supporting it is a good thing. IE can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.
That’s what I thought at the beginning too but I had a look at the page source and it doesn’t look to be HTML5. But it does have allot of JS and I suspect that’s the problem. But yeah I agree with you: if MS would pull it together and release a good browser I don’t think Google would have any problem with Wave running on it.
I use Wave relatively often and really like it. For my purposes it’s the closest to perfect I’ve found so far.
It’s easier to edit than MediaWiki, it’s more permanent than IRC or IM and it doesn’t have the multiple messages and horrid text jumble that I’ve found with collaboration via email.
I was really excited when Wave was announced and in general I love it. It does get a lot of flak for being hard to describe, but it’s pretty useful if you “get” it. Apparently a lot of people don’t, how strange.
What do you use it for – can you give us an example of the projects you have collaborated on that use it?
completewave.com and smarterware.org
Gina will school ya on wave – me having tried it can see the great uses for it but at the moment, meh…..
Not sure completewave.com is right; it’s a parked domain.
http://completewaveguide.com is where Gina’s book actually lives.
Whats with the loud breathing on this shot? Especially Aq around 1:45-2:00. Or am I just listening too carefully? I do have my noise-cancelling headphones on.
Think the silence detection went a bit wonky. I will check into that in future shots. Thanks for the note!
Really? I thought Aq recorded his sound coming in and you did the same, then they were merged. Or does the mic have silence detection features too?
Maybe I’m missing it. Its not a problem, its nice to know Aq is still alive, but I did have to check someone wasn’t lurking behind me
I was at the Google I/O conference last spring where the Wave debuted, and at the time it did seem like a world-changing event. The developers literally received a standing ovation. But when I finally got my account and checked it out, I was underwhelmed. It was very much not ready for end users. I tried it again a few months later, but still felt like it was too much of a chore to use.
I think the analysis in this shot is spot-on in regard to the Wave not being truly usable until everyone is using it, and Google not making it easy for people to adopt this new technology gradually. I still think it has world-changing potential, but it’s going to take some time.
Thanks for the comments, funcrunch. Glad you liked the shot.
I’ve just been reading about some uses on lifehacker – http://lifehacker.com/5466862/google-wave-in-action-real+world-use-case-studies – and one aspect that comes through is that it effectively provides an adhoc, private, shared wiki space. And you can make it public if you want. That seems like a pretty handy thing, though it is a rather different mindset to email/IM.
The examples they mention include todo lists, planning events (you can drop in google maps) and collaborative meeting notes.
[...] While Google Wave vies to be the next generation of communication (as we waxed lyrical about on the recent Shot Of Jaq), in reality email and microblogging are unlikely to be unseated as primary methods of [...]
I too have the problem in that I can’t explain to others what Wave is all about. One of my friends said “It’s just IM isn’t it?” When I try to explain it to family who aren’t very techy it just goes straight over their head. They also are very dubious about being able to see and change what other people are typing, they either see it as an invasion of privacy or a recipe for disaster.
Here’s what I’ve used Wave for so far: IM – tried to use it exclusively for this but the waves quickly become long and unmanageable. The client just isn’t ready for this use case IMHO. It is interesting to try out with >2 people in the conversation but quickly fragments into many different conversation threads.
Meetings – This is by far the best use case I’ve come across so far. Collaobrating on the agenda before the meeting, making notes during the meeting and producing minutes after the meeting all make perfect sense with Wave. The only problem is convincing the other people to use it. So far we’ve got 4/8 in our group to use it, and that isn’t enough, so its use has declined.
Pseudo-wiki: I have used it to take notes on recipes, and embedded images of the final product. I am also currently using it to plan my upcoming trip to New Zealand, there’s a map with a list of places I want to visit, images of the campervan we are hiring and the flight details copied and pasted from the email I got.
My overall feeling is one of disappointment, but that mainly stems from the fact that I only have 2 other friends actively using wave. Perhaps the Shot of Jaq community should get together on Wave, I noticed there’s already a public wave…
I don’t think that Wave will replace conventional Internet e-mail, at least not any time in the near future. What I think it would be good for is to replace corporate e-mail systems like Outlook/Exchange or Notes/Domino. It offers a lot of collaboration features which large organisations use, and it can be installed simultaneously for a large number of people who need to communicate with each other.
To deal with the outside world you would still need a gateway to regular Internet e-mail, because the whole world isn’t going to switch to Wave at once (or ever). However, for large companies, most of their communications are internal, so that isn’t a problem.
As for not running on MS IE, well so what? You install your server (or outsource it to Google), and you install the e-mail client (Chrome, Firefox, etc. – take your pick). Where’s the problem? If you restrict the Wave client to just whatever works in IE, then it would always be crap because Microsoft isn’t going to cut their own throats by making it easier for you to replace Outlook.
I think that Wave will need at least another couple of years of development before it is ready to used in businesses. After that, what I think it would need is for it to be packaged up for easy installation so that third party consultants can take it around to clients and sell it as a system. For small businesses who want to participate in “waves” with clients who have Wave, they would probably need to have an account with a Wave service provider (such as Google).
Google has two ways to gain with Wave. The direct way is as an outsourced service provider. The other way is to undercut one of Microsoft’s key revenue sources, which is Outlook.
I think that any of the wave systems are useless without an external notification daemon. Not all of us live in our webbrowser. Without a deamon to let us know of updates it just becomes another website we all have to check.
also there is a FiaF wave site build on the googlewave spec at http://pygowave.net
I use this extension for Google Chrome https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aphncaagnlabkeipnbbicmcahnamibgb
I pretty much do live inside my browser, except when I’m coding. I gave up with Thunderbird and switched to GMail a while ago as I had check each one of my imap folders individually for new messages which I don’t with GMail, but now I’m getting OT…
Hey,
Also notifications are on the HTML5 list as far as I know .. so that's for the future of web apps. But on the other hand there's that idea in time management that you shouldn't have notifications for e-mail because they just interrupt you. E-mail is supposed to be something you check on your own time rather than a way for you to be bothered... (just an idea). I don't use notifications for e-mail and I don't really feel the need for them. But I suppose there's lots of people that would like to have that.
googsystray supports wave for external wave notification
Wave is an interesting concept, however I don’t see it becoming an email replacement any time soon. For that to happen I feel that there needs to be other implementations of the client and server besides Googles one.
I have played around with Wave, but it is of little use to me as I do not know anyone else using it.
The interface of Googles implementation is extremely annoying because it cannot be controlled properly with the keyboard(Vimperator), and it breaks if you use a generic CSS page colour changer, like mine which globally gets rid of white backgrounds, replacing them with white on dark grey, which is far less stressful on the eyes.
There is also the problem that none of the current web editors are anywhere near as powerful as something like Vim or Emacs. Meaning that they are a pain for editing anything more than a few lines long.
I think that wave is perfect for the Corporate environment. I would love to see if any open source groups are using it as one means of communications in creating a project. It seems like you could do a lot of scheduling, looking at code and such, in a quick and easy manner, that could still remain private. This could easily allow a team, that is working to collaborate, before a product is put out, and go back to see what steps were taken.
The feature of Wave that got me hyped up originally was its embeddability–like a YouTube video, you could just throw a Wave up on your blog.
Or rather, that was how they pitched it.
Last time I checked they were still developing that feature.
When that feature rolls around, I think we’ll begin to hit critical mass, as the tool becomes SUBSTANTIALLY more useful (it becomes a decent, collaborative WYSIWYG editor instead of a buggy IM client).
Currently, I think ya’ll hit the nail on the head: it isn’t SUBSTANTIALLY better than email or IM, which makes it not worthwhile to switch.
And because it’s a closed ecosystem right now, there’s no motivation to switch over.
That’s something else I really liked the idea of, embedding Waves in web pages. For instance, if you wanted a blog post with comments, you could just embed a Wave. I know Apache Wookie is working on adding Wave gadgets to the widgets that it supports: http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/
I think Wave will prove usefull as a framework for providing custom solutions. It does a great job of showcasing abilities in the Web 2.+ world but it takes computing and communication in the wrong direction. We need more “less is more” type solutions, eg. Twitter.
So here’s an idea for a Wave robot: A Shot of Jaq robot, add to a wave and type the name of the shot you’re interested in, and the robot automatically updates the wave with new comments…
Hmmm, now I think about it, I think there is an Rssybot which does just that with RSS feeds.
Further searching shows that rssybot has been down since last October, rubbish.
http://www.wave.to/robots/rssybot/
Is Google Buzz (http://www.google.com/buzz) one of the stepping stones needed to get more people to Google Wave, or is it a replacement altogether?
think Buzz is a sort of twitter clone … looks interesting but I’m not really a big fan of twitter in general.
I hate Twitter, but I’m kind of loving Buzz.
Buzz smushes together some of the best features of Twitter and Foursquare to make a lightweight (for the user) system that’s pretty compelling.
My fundamental problem with Twitter is that I really don’t give a shit what the entire rest of the world is thinking. The signal-to-noise ratio is absurdly low. With Buzz, I can pull up Maps on my Android phone, see what people in my neighborhood are doing, see what they’re saying about local businesses, and instantly start a conversation. Buzz is a huge step towards something Facebook used to be (when it was confined to universities): local communities amidst the big bad internet.
We’ll see what adoption is like after the “shiny new toy” phase, and how well they integrate with other services. They’re missing a ton of restaurants that are on Qype, for example. But I have high hopes.
wooow… look at all the new comments… so many of them and so little time to troll them all
But one thing I don’t really see is constructive criticism. Wave is for now, if nothing else, an awesome experiment. It shows what happens when you get an environment almost completely free. In wave you can change anything and everyone can do it at the same time so chaos is really easy to achieve. I think that’s to a lesser extent the problem with most other media (like twitter and facebook). Question is how do we fix it ? How can you make the relevant stuff stick out ?
And once again: no we don’t need wide spread adoption of wave for it to work. It’s enough if your close friends use it. And e-mail integration should be really easy but I don’t think Google is ready for any kind of wide spread adoption. Anybody that knows the protocol knows that wave would really create a lot of network chatter and I don’t think they’re ready for that.
Oh and yeah I don’t use desktop mail clients. I only use one at work because I have to. I find web clients way more convenient because I can use them from anywhere. I haven’t actually seen someone use a desktop client for personal e-mail in a really long time.
actually scratch that … I’ve seen some interesting constructive comments.
Wave has been useful in our community but only when it’s benefits have been beneficial. In our community we have a large group and then the core group of organisers. Before wave we tried a project managment system for things that could not be done easily over email ie collaboration but it seemed lacking in integration. When wave came about it seemed to resolve a lot of these issues. So the core group was sold on wave and all signed up because we could see the benefit. However to communicate with the larger group we use a mailing list as that does not require everybody to sign up to a new service just to get announcements of a new meeting. I think this is where wave will take hold; it may be a long process but I think individual groups will find a benefit for wave and hop on. Eventually everybody will be on wave and it will be another medium to communicate. I do not see it replacing email rather being a supplement to it.
Here’s how I see things:
With Wave, Google is aiming to provide a ubiquitous platform for online collaboration. This notion is more import than the crude UI we are currently experiencing. I think that Google hopes to grow a thriving community (both open and commercial) around this platform where people and organisations will build value adding plugins for wave.
In fact, this is already happening. SAP built the awesome graphical modeling tool “Gravity”. There also exist a shared whiteboard like thingy (Napkin). There already are several teleconferencing plugins. There also is a little plugin for firefox that alerts you for updates to waves that are in your inbox.
In other words: Google provides the platform and the online community builds the stuff you can use on top of it.
Loving this great podcast btw. Great formula: short and spicy.
OK, I’ll bite… What’s wrong with identi.ca?
I think buzz is sort of like a stepping stone to wave and if google implement wave into gmail people will be waving with their friends on gmail and still think they are just doing some sort of enhanced email not actually using wave. My biggest complaint is that it crashes every browser on the planet. It’s only succeeded a couple of times and after that it’s still pretty laggy. Even the iPhone version is laggy! I send invites to loads of my friends but they couldn’t actually use it because it crashed on them. Google need to implement wave in a way that more people will adopt it (into gmail and eventually replacing it) and not making it crash pretty much everything on the planet
[...] While Google Wave vies to be the next generation of communication (as we waxed lyrical about on the recent Shot Of Jaq), in reality email and microblogging are unlikely to be unseated as primary methods of [...]
So I’ve gone ahead and started writing a Shot of Jaq robot and gadget. I’ve stalled on the robot at the moment because I want to use cron jobs which aren’t working properly yet. I’ve put the source code at http://github.com/ibbo/shotofjaqy if anyone wants to play with it. I’m hosting it with appspot at http://shotofjaqybot.appspot.com and I’ve added one gadget to the shot of jaq wave at: http://bit.ly/d5Xsxe.