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.

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.

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

 pygowave.net doesn't seem to work... I didn't knew about it.

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.

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.

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/

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…

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.

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.

also there is a FiaF wave site build on the googlewave spec at http://pygowave.net