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Comments: 365 +- Developers: Google Wave Reviewed on Wednesday July 22 2009, @07:46PM
Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday July 22 2009, @07:46PM
from the what's-the-skinny dept.
from the what's-the-skinny dept.
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Michael_Curator writes "Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of Google's Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of what it's really like to use, unfiltered by Google's own programmers. Ben Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged that, it's 'probably the most advanced application in a browser that I've seen.' Wave is like giant Web page onto which users can drag and drop any kind of object, including instant messaging and IRC [Internet Relay Client] clients, e-mail, and wikis, as well as gadgets like maps and video. All conversations, work product and applications are stored on remote servers — presumably forever. 'It's like real time email. On crack,' he wrote. And unlike the typically minimalist Google UI, 'It feels a lot more like a desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser.'" User molex333 has already written a Slashdot app and shares his initial reactions here.
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This may seem obvious to some, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?
Re:This may seem obvious to some, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?
I always interpreted that phrase to mean "way more hyper and totally unpredictable". So in my mind, anyway, that's a "no".
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Re:This may seem obvious to some, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This may seem obvious to some, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Linguistic intensification (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely, this is an attempt at a linguistic intensification of the idiom "on steroids." There was a time when steroid use was more of a taboo and to reference it in casual conversation was marginally titillating, but perhaps "on crack" comes closer to attaining that mischievousness today.
Even though it doesn't really make sense (steroids increase muscle mass, but crack doesn't really increase anything except an extreme imbalance of neurotransmitters) it fits with our general cultural pattern of intensifying language. "Going ape," for instance, was an appropriate term for wild human behavior as apes tend to be associated with wild movements, but "going apeshit," while sounding more intense, doesn't make any semantic sense in that an ape's feces don't exactly move much at all.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For realz, yo!
Re:Linguistic intensification (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume that crack has similar effects to other forms of cocaine. That means that it will make people feel energetic and wakeful - it is often taken by people doing jobs that require long hours or constant fast reaction.
Sounds to me like "on crack" is a very good analogy.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"on crack" is hyperbole (Score:5, Funny)
hyperbole on meth
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Re:This may seem obvious to some, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The "on crack" comment is so vague, it says a lot more about the reviewer than the technology being reviewed.
That being said, since I also participated in two Google events in which we were using the Google Wave technology, I'm going to give you my own personal review (which may be as bad as the initial review, it's mostly a disorganized brain dump at this point, so bear with me as well). I did agree to an NDA during those google events, these last couple of times you actually can't get in if you don't agree to one, but I don't think Google is the type to enforce it on me, especially since my review is mostly positive overall (even if it includes a few barbs).
First off, here is my description of Google Wave, it's a cross between a Wiki and an Instant Messenger (with some added capabilities that may not seem initially obvious to everyone, but that will seem completely obvious to power users of the wiki technology and power users of the instant messengers technology). And each Wave itself is the equivalent of a wiki page (if that makes any sense).
Now here is my first impression of Google Wave, which differs significantly from my overall final impression of it. Google Wave is buggy (even in Windows Chrome and Firefox, and even in Windows Safari which does support HTML 5 and which is supposedly faster, and I was advised not to use IE with it -- so I assume that this part is even more buggier still). The initial inbox interface looks rather busy and clunky (especially from a Company like Google, I just didn't expect an interface like that). Searching for your friends (who already have wave sandbox accounts) and adding them to your address book works only 90% of the time (although, that part does work 100% of the time if you go to your gmail address book that comes with your new wave sandbox account, you just have to know to use that workaround -- otherwise you just get frustrated by it especially since the interface doesn't give you back useful informative feedback that something went wrong). Also, the inbox doesn't always refresh (even on a blazing fast guest connection inside the googleplex campus). And initially, I was quite baffled by the wave inbox interface. I had created ten empty waves by mistake, that I didn't know how to delete (now, I know how thought, at least I think I would know how to delete them, I haven't tried it yet).
Where Google Wave shines however is in its actual use (even in its buggy alpha state, it's actually quite useful, I would totally use it if I could get my colleagues accounts), and it's in the actual wave itself (not the surrounding interface). I don't know how many we were, may be 150 or 200? May be 70% of us had laptops in front of us. May be 30 or 40% of us had the actual wave opened, others were doing something else on their laptops or had them semi-closed. And may be only 4 or 5 were taking actual notes (one or two were doing the bulk of the notes). The notes were excellent. Everything that was being said was transcribed live, "livewaving" that's what the google employees called it (just like for Twitter, the Google employees had many cutesy-cheesy names for everything wave was doing), and the notes/statements/questions said out lout during the presentations were clarified, corrected, rephrased, and formatted by two or three people (just a couple of lines above where they had been captured). There was no coordination whatsoever, people just added things wherever they felt they could contribute. Also, the initial attempt at coordination by the Google organizers was foiled, because they were too slow to create the group and start an official wave on their own, the participants already had a wave underway by the time they started -- so that became the official one by default.
At the same time the notes were being taken, there were a few more participants who started a couple of threads (within the wave itself, just at the bottom -- a couple of scroll
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Re:This may seem obvious to some, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I wasn't really seeing her, it was more of an one-nighter.
Maybe the guy is a crack addict and he means that it's really really great program that he'd happily steal and lie to get some more of.
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Great! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Google is probably one of the most if not the most innovative companies in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if they have just created the next generation of communication!
Are you kidding? Again, Google has cobbled together existing technology and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years. Why create new technology when you can duct tape existing things together?
While I'm teetering on the brink of ranting, so Google is releasing an OS, while they continue to overload the web browser with javascript and flash in an effort to turn it into an operating system. Again, we've al
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app.
How is that going to get them more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The corollary to that is what exactly does it offer to users?
I have this great application that allows me to drag and drop things ("applications") where I want them on the screen. It's called "Windows" and if you don't like it, there's several similar applications called "OSX," "GNOME," and "KDE" that do the same thing.
Right now, my chain goes:
Operating System -> Windowing S
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
" Right now, my chain goes:
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Application
or
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Virtual Machine -> Application
Google Wave is several abstractions farther down the chain:
Operating System -> Windowing System -> Browser -> Virtual Machine -> Google Wave -> Application "
Yeah.
What I want is:
BIOS --> that shit they had in minority report
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has cobbled together existing technology
This is the mother of all 'get off my lawn' arguments. Using existing technology is what brings us most innovations. In fact, using existing technology is what every programmer does.
... and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years.
SMTP is in beta?
I've only seen the demovideo and done a bit of reading. The ideas behind wave are innovative, ambitious and pretty well thought through. If wave becomes a success, it will take years before it's massively deployed. It might also take years to fail spectacularly, either through bad development decisions, or just through failing to come up with the killer-app.
But to bash it now is stupid. Google is doing this the right way. They're following a vision that might be wrong, or might not be what you're looking for. But it will be open-sourced, so you can create your own wave services. And it doesn't have to be inside a browser, as far as I understand it.
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Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
A web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory
A word processing app should never come on more than one floppy disk.
Games should not be in 3D.
Computers do not need sound cards goshdarnit!
Gah... change!
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I see your problem, you're using Firefox. That's what's eating your RAM, sir. Google spreadsheet in Chrome: 33MB.
Running apps from your desktop adds another layer in your file storage. If you leave your desk, you have to bring your files with you to use them.
It's a trade-off. Desktop apps have their purpose, web apps do as well. Find what suits YOUR needs and use the best choice. No one is forcing you to go one way or another, you are free to keep Excel, Word, etc. Calm down. Breathe.
There. All is
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
Are you kidding? Again, Google has cobbled together existing technology and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years. Why create new technology when you can duct tape existing things together?
If something taught us SMTP is that is not panacea, there is a big hole in that specification and is called "real time" (well, if you want, add spam to the mix). Wave goes directly to the heart of it, having communication between one or several people (like smtp), but in real time, adding authentication, easy to use and powerful web interface, multimedia and more things that will be disclosed/developed in time. And takes on instant messaging/xmpp if you want too, adding things that are more from smtp realm.
Could had done it mixing and matching existing protocols? Maybe yes, maybe not. And maybe those alternatives dont have the flexibility needed for wild evolution that this could have.
While I'm teetering on the brink of ranting, so Google is releasing an OS, while they continue to overload the web browser with javascript and flash in an effort to turn it into an operating system. Again, we've already done this. We have these tools already. It's called a Native Application. Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app. Maybe some QT/OpenGL? Writing all these applications for the browser is putting a square peg in a round hole.
Considering how safe proved to be the most used operating system around, taking most of the responsibility into something that they could control and fix is not a very bad move. Native Applications could be faster (faster than all the push google and others had done to have a very fast javascript engines, but not for so much now), but could pass easily the ball to the underlying operating system, and of course, not be future proof (future as in other architectures at the very least, both because be totally new or gains more popularity alternative ones).
And maybe you could be right... for local, very cpu intensive applications. But for writting internet applications building them over existing internet clients (i.e. browser, you have there all the portability, all the security, etc) looks reasonable.
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
"instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago " which lesson in particular are they ignoring?
As for the thick app argument, why do you care? Seriously, if the solution works it works. The toggle switch guys scoffed at the punch card guys, the punch card guys scoffed at the interactive asm editor guys, the asm guys scoffed at the C guys, the C guys scoffed at the Java guys, the Java guys scoff at the Ruby/Python/PHP/JS guys.
You don't see the trend?
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Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm all about the right tool for the right job: I don't care who makes it as long as it works well, is reliable and efficient. Google does a lot of things, none particularly well, sans advertising; Wolfram even has better search then they do and I really to hate to say this, but Bing has decent results. (i still default to google search though)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure how bolding makes your point, I didn't say it was a coke vs. pepsi thing I was saying it was a grandpa vs grandson thing.
It uses 400% more resources, big whoop. 9 iterations of moore's law and that amount of resources is just as negligible as the office client is now, let alone *manageable* which is the important number and where 100mb squarely sits at the moment.
The *difference* the "magic sauce" is specifically in the automatic collaboration and portability enabled by the server-side nature.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
I agree with everything you've said...except for the punch card guys. Screw the punch card guys, they deserved every scoff they got. Screw them!
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
What you're not seeing is Google's strategic intent (I work for Google, but this stuff is public).
Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on. The hardware is pretty much commodified already. Plenty of competitors and the profit margins are razor thin. Next levels are the OS and the applications. These are not yet commodified due to Microsoft's aggressively maintained monopoly. Contrary to common knowledge, Microsoft's real monopoly is in the Office file formats. From that, they've levered a monopoly into basic individual productivity applications and then (with Apple's cooperation) the operating system. They are also a serious player in second-generation collaboration tools (extensions to basic email).
In order to reduce Microsoft's war chest and eliminate their competitiveness, Google seeks to lower the profit margin on everything Microsoft currently produces at a profit (Windows and Office). So they produce a cheaper operating system, cheaper productivity applications, and cheaper collaboration tools (ideally free to the typical user). Google doesn't need to make money (though breaking even would be nice), Google just needs to apply pressure to Microsoft to cut their revenues/profits and the strategic goals are being met.
Writing apps that run on Windows? Doesn't help Google very much (though SketchUp and Picasa and a few other things are native apps).
Writing protocols that run on any machine? Helps Google a lot.
Writing web applications that use those protocols and run on any machine? Helps Google a lot.
Look at the bigger picture. Google is acting extremely rationally here.
As for whether Wave is innovative or not, I don't think you've tried it and are speaking without informing yourself. Wave is to email as email is to snail mail (single addressee, no broadcast, etc.). Wave tackles the problem of a widely CC:'d email with an attached Word or Excel document (two threads of changes: one in the email thread, one in the document) (multiple obsolete copies of the document available) (possible confusion and delay as people are added to the thread and have to re-read the history duplicated in most of the recent emails). Wave creates a "place" for this discussion/collaborative authoring to happen and then let's everyone bring whatever they want to help out. Wave is not email++ (which is what Outlook and Gmail are).
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I do want to share the fact that I haven't used Wave, you are correct. Based on your description of Wave and what I perceived it to be from reading articles and seeing demos, I am still correct in my analysis. Here is an old writeu [vt.edu]
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, it's very difficult for corporations to not be sociopathic, but in my experience, Google management does try to avoid most of the pathological problems of modern corporations. "Don't be evil" has been getting pretty rough treatment in the press, but from my inside perspective, the whole company perks up and pays very close attention if it looks like the company might be reneging on that statement. Upper management keeps on trying to be transparent, which also helps a lot.
In this case, the behavior is a rational response to an aggressive competitor known for doing underhanded things to eliminate competition. I don't mean to make excuses, as Google's behavior is not defensive in nature, but in the (sometimes, occasionally) free market, competition is rough business and Google is willing to step up, even if our culture does put some big ethical boundaries around what we will do. Microsoft has been famously big on much shadier tactics. Starting acquisition talks with competitors to get strategic information, then screwing them over. Google won't do that.
The value of Google's behavior is a situation where the consumer spends less and less for more capabilities until they only have to pay for the marginal value of the hardware to do just about anything a computer can do.
Next sub-question: who's at risk? Without needing to ask anyone inside Google, any organization who can throttle or put a toll on Google's services is at risk. Speculatively, telecommunications companies, mobile carriers, governments, etc. are all vulnerable to various tactics intended to minimize the chance that they'll be able to cash in on or otherwise interfere with how Google makes money.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now you're talking gibberish. So, HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript are not considered foundational tools? Odd. I would rather you point out their design or implementation flaws (there are many) rather than make obviously untrue silly statements. You can say the foundation is poorly implemented, but you cannot argue that these tools are not foundational.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wave is open source implemented in JS, XML, and HTML5. Not Flash. Secondly, GWT is open source written in Java and Javascript. Why in the world would you expect google's application library (slash Java->Javascript converter) to be "foundational" (as in used by everyone, everywhere)? That word implies something like W3C specification standards. It's a freakin application library. Lastly, writing some core functionality and bundling it into AWT and then REUSING that in a web application doesn't count as co
Sounds like g.ho.st (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I had never heard about g.ho.st before your post. It's interesting technology, but looks like it has a ways to go. Less than 10k views of their demo video on youtube. Also, it ran pretty slow in my browser (firefox 3.5). On a good note, since it is a web page, adblock+ works.
Let me know when they release the server (Score:5, Insightful)
They've said they're going to open-source the server so others can host their own waves. Until then, since I'd want to use this for collaborative development, and possibly for hosting my own sites, I'd rather not they own my content.
Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
I want guarantees that no-one and nothing at Google, Inc or anywhere else I don't expressly authorise has access to anything I drop into this magic box in my browser.
Based on Google's track record, users should otherwise assume that anything and everything they let this system touch will be stored indefinitely even if deleted, indexed, and trawled for marketing and other purposes.
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Tried it (Score:5, Informative)
And meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)
There's a girlfriend wondering why he won't annnnnsweeeeer any of the phone calls, voice mails, text messages, emails, or she's sent in the last ten minutes.
Mod me paranoid (Score:5, Insightful)
But between this and Google OS and everything else, google is getting dangerously capable of mass information collection for nefarious purposes (read: more than is currently possible). Ive been willing enough to forgive the search engine because of its usefulness, but I see Google as the biggest potential data mining operation in the world. Have an OS, web search, email, chat, and voice all have the central management of one company who for all we know could have been served on of those secret orders they cant even talk about that all data mussed be passed on to some crazy orwellian agency. Not saying its true, but it makes you wonder...now I'm off to finish building my patented alaskan off-the-grid living structure called an igloo.
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But between this and Google OS and everything else, google is getting dangerously capable of mass information collection for nefarious purposes (read: more than is currently possible). Ive been willing enough to forgive the search engine because of its usefulness, but I see Google as the biggest potential data mining operation in the world. Have an OS, web search, email, chat, and voice all have the central management of one company who for all we know could have been served on of those secret orders they cant even talk about that all data mussed be passed on to some crazy orwellian agency. Not saying its true, but it makes you wonder...now I'm off to finish building my patented alaskan off-the-grid living structure called an igloo.
It's safe to be with Microsoft [google.com], after all. Thanks for helping me calm down.
Re:Mod me paranoid (Score:5, Informative)
This is missing the point of Wave. It's not patented. It's open sourced. It's federated (with no central authority). There is nothing preventing a company, or an individual, from setting up their own wave server (either the one given away for free by Google, or another one developed by a third party), and not sharing one piece of data with Google.
That's what makes the proposition so compelling. Google is not trying to lock in your data. It's doing everything it can to do the opposite actually.
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Video (Score:5, Informative)
And here's the obligatory hour long video to show the potential of the thing:
http://wave.google.com/ [google.com]
Some new and interesting concepts if you have the time to spare.
Non-browser GUI version? (Score:3)
It would be nice if... you know... Google Wave existed outside the browser, and in a proper Windows/Linux GUI interface for faster widgets, less memory consumption etc.
Internet/comm things don't HAVE to be done in the browser all the time.
Re:Non-browser GUI version? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Non-browser GUI version? (Score:5, Informative)
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The open protocol is a BIG win (Score:5, Interesting)
If this thing catches on, it's going to turn the whole Internet on its head -- in a good way. It's the end of being locked in to walled gardens like Exchange and Facebook -- although either of those products would be able to tie into the global Wave federation if they wanted to.
I'm looking forward to seeing lots of different software and sites that speak Wave protocol. For that matter, I'm looking forward to writing one someday.
I have tried it, and wrote a robot and a gadget (Score:5, Interesting)
The documentation is good, so it is easy to get started. I view Wave as "something for the future" but I think that it is worth 3 or 4 hours a week coding to it. It was a thrill when my robot replied to a wave that I had invited it to join (like a human). For writing robots, I look forward to a local runtime and debugging setup. Overall, I think that Wave looks promising and I am mentally re-evaluating several web application projects that I have done in the last ten years, thinking of how I might re-implement them on Wave.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There's this popular misconception that Google Wave is some sort of service, when in fact it's a protocol built on XMPP [wikipedia.org]. Google's offering of the service is of course a major part of this, but the essential character of the thing is a protocol and messaging semantic.
Re:More info, please... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Sharepoint is a marketing term covering a disparate range of collaborative applications from Microsoft. Similar to how the .NET label was a marketing label for a bunch of disparate technologies.
Google Wave is a single innovative new technology on which many collaborative tools are and may be built.
Do you work for google PR? Sharepoint is a portal server and a webapp framework. Disparate huh?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sharepoint is a way of "sort of" sharing Word >=2003 documents to "sort of" make a wiki.
Other than that (which isn't much that twiki can't do), it's basically a gigantic waste of everyone's time.
(I do work for Google)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
you can not really do much with JavaScript (e.g. write a multimedia player)
HTML 5 is pushing the envelope enough to do most of what you need Flash and Silverlight for.
Take a look at the webkit blog to get an idea of all the things possible in HTML 5 and CSS 3.0, now:
- CSS masks: http://webkit.org/blog/181/css-masks/ [webkit.org]
- CSS reflections: http://webkit.org/blog/182/css-reflections/ [webkit.org]
- CSS animations: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/ [webkit.org]
- CSS 3D animations: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms/ [webkit.org]
- video tag, already in use by dailymotion: h [dailymotion.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)