Google Wave

[charmian]

So, 100,000 invites for Google Wave have been sent out. Anyone have one? What do they think?

As for what Google Wave is, it's explained here. Basically it helps people collaborate and communicate in real time. It sounds really powerful, and it can be embedded.

Plus, developers can create applications/robots which can be used inside of Google Wave (see here for some examples).

I wonder how this will affect blogging? Right now, there is something that will let you embed a Wave into a Wordpress post. (Wordpress seems to have stepped into the world of vaguely twitterlike real-time blogging already.) So, it seems the blog post is merging with the comments, in a cross between a chat-room and a wiki? Interesting. Could this to some extent replace IRC chatrooms, as it allows rich media embedding and private conversations as well?

Some, though, are more skeptical. The way that "it's like email and IM got together and had a baby" doesn't impress him; he finds large Waves to be un-usefully noisy.

Comments

[zorkian]

I suppose it's no surprise I've been using Wave for months.

I think it's a really damn awesome piece of technology and the social questions are unanswered as yet and will take some time to figure out. As well as use cases, and seeing what people are going to do with it in the wild.

[charmian]

Really? What do you use it for? Professional usage or personal usage?

Hmm, are there any surprising social issues which have come up regarding it? I was looking at it and was wondering about the privacy issues involved. Also, I'm not really sure whether if I want everyone to be able to see my typos when typing into chats.

Heh, any plans to make it work with Dreamwidth in some manner?

[zorkian]

Professionally, at work. I now have a personal account, but I don't really know anybody that's using it, so that's not going very far yet.

There are certainly a lot of social issues around using the waves themselves. One thing that's interesting is that, since you can edit them collaboratively, you can edit someone else's blip (the messages in a wave). You can edit it while they're still typing it. You can make it say anything you want to say.

Imagine if you could edit other people's comments on LJ and DW. Sure, it annotates that the comment is now "by user1 and user2" but you don't know who wrote what unless you watch the playback to figure it out. Learning how to navigate these social ropes and behaviors is going to be interesting.

Also, there are ways to prevent people from just seeing your typos as you type. You can start a wave and type it all up, get it perfect, and THEN add the recipients. Of course, if you're responding in the wave, then it's a lot harder to do that. There's nominally a "draft" checkbox but it's still disabled.

I have been thinking about ways to integrate with Dreamwidth. I'm not really sure if we're going to, or when, or how. I imagine it will be entirely optional and very much a community driven project to figure out if we can use the technolog.

[charmian]

Yeah, I'm wondering how long it's going to take for those 100,000 invites to come out.

Wow, that would be something to get used to. Chat-as-wiki seems to be a fairly new model, although at least there is authentication via playback possible. I suppose this means you can only allow those whom you trust to join the wave. (How much power does the owner of the wave have over the wave? Is the moderation sophisticated, or fairly basic? )

Yeah, I guess it remains to be seen how people will use it, and whether it catches on among the DW userbase.