Initial impressions of Google Wave
If you don't know what Google Wave is, you should take a moment and watch the highlight videos they have put on their site, because I'm not going to go in depth into the basics.
Right now it is an invite-only beta. Despite being an early sign-up person (apparently not early enough) I went a couple weeks without an invite. But, thanks to Gina Trapani, former editor of LifeHacker for running an invite give-away, and picking my use-case as one of the good ones, I was able to get an invite.
[Aside] My use-case was coordinating information with Lauren and the paid-staff at Breaking Free. Lauren and I do informational meetings with churches around the area (mostly Lauren actually), but when we are coordinating who wants to sign-up for volunteering, something more living and editable than email, something more communicative than a shared document on Google docs, would be super-useful. And after my first trip to a church this Sunday it was really great to read my notes off of the wave, and make live edits, and take some notes about info to pass on back to the pastors when I was finished. It will be more-great when Lauren is online too. (I just sent her an invite, so we will see how long it takes google to approve them) [end aside]
Before I launch into my thoughts about how this it is important that I explain a simple division necessary to understand Google Wave. Google, in an effort to answer the question "If email was invented today instead of over 30 years ago (by Jesus himself, because it is older than me, it must be biblical) what would it look like" came up with the wave. Because it is an effort to supplant email it has to be open like email, and just like GMail there are two things we are dealing with: 1) Wave protocol - like the protocols that drive email it is open, anyone can run a server themselves, and 2) Google Wave - Google's product that implements the wave protocol, much like GMail is Google's implementation of email.
K, confused? Clear as mud? If you are, you are in good company. It is a bit of a confusing differentiation.
Anyway, I have to give you a brief technical disclaimer. I'm very much a fan of the protocols that the wave-protocol is derived from. It is the same underlying technology as GChat, or livejournal chat. It is called XMPP, or eXtensible-Messaging and Presence Protocol.
It is a mouth-full, but what you need to know is that it is an open, standards-based, instant messaging and presence protocol (which is a fancy way of servers knowing if you are online and connected) - like AIM but open-source. Google is already partial to it because it is a rocking standard and well thought out and free. And there are gobs of cool extensions to the protocol that have been standardized for sweet stuff that I will write about sometime later.
So, my disclaimer restated: I think that this protocol is the key to the next iteration of the internet, so I'm biased. I've already been doing a ton of research and written just a very little bit of code to make use of this protocol.
That being said, I think wave is going to gain some serious momentum as a protocol extension to XMPP in the not-so-distant future. Now, on to the part that doesn't involve my personal crystal ball.
First, negatives:
- The Google Wave application is buggy, and not feature complete. It is in super-early alpha stages of development, and using a ton of sweet new web technologies. Running it in Firefox requires the Google gears extension to really get the best of it. And it is still a little laggy, and you have to refresh the page every so often. Google Chrome seems to be a bit faster with it.
- Nit picky, but when you drag something from one place to another it doesn't let you know that it got dragged into the right place, and it doesn't highlight the thing you are dragging it over, so there is no visual cue to indicate where it is going to go.
- When you first start using it, it is overwhelming. You can click anywhere, edit anything, reply to any line in anything else.
- On a more technical note - more formal review and improvement of the protocol extension to XMPP before I'm going to be completely happy with it. There are things that can probably be improved with community involvement. Also an open-source integrated server is going to be sweet, but that isn't Google's fault - they open-sourced their main back-end parts of their implementation (which is awesome of them, and will only help their cause in getting the protocol adopted).
- There aren't a lot of people on it. It will only get better (and more overwhelming) as more of my friends use it to communicate. But for now there are mostly big informational public waves going on, or it is a glorified, editable chat between me and a friend or two.
Now, the good:
- When you are done having it blow your mind from the sheer overwhelming number of places you can click and make things happen you start to sync into a rhythm of it. It reminds me of the mental adjustments I had to make when I first started using non-ICQ based chat. There is a unique flow to how information goes between you and the person you are chatting with. So it is with Wave. When you start to flow with it (pun intended) you feel like you can get in a grove with it. Definitely paradigm-shifting though.
- You can playback the changes in the waves, because of what it is. It is really only a starting out place, a list of changes, and then a current copy of the 'state' of it. So it is fun to see how things developed and catch up on it.
- In-line replies are wicked. Ever get into one of those IM conversations where you are asked three or four questions before you could answer one. And try to preface each reply with which question you are answering. Imagine that, only you can go and click on each question and just put your reply right after it. That is fun, and it reads much easier when done well.
- The Openness: Google has already open-sourced the hard part of their implementation - the part that handles how the changes of the wave fit together to make the final form. They call this the operational transform, but you don't really need to keep that term in your head. Besides that, this is a 'federated' protocol. Meaning, anyone who is running a server can get in on it. And like email, or gchat, you can hook up with people not on your same server/email name. So my wave address is bigcat1 AT googlewave DOT com. Just like my email and gchat address - nothing new or fancy, it is just an address. This is because Google knows that if they keep it to themselves it won't get off the ground. This is a big change, and if everyone gets to play, it will only help their piece of the pie get bigger by making the pie get bigger.
- Google just gets features we want. Their implementation of the wave protocol is as feature-packed as GMail. It really gets the idea of how we interact with conversations. It is hard to explain, but when you get the hang of using it (or at least get the hang of it a little, cuz I'm not that far along myself) it just fits with how you naturally interact with people.
- Google made their implementation easy to expand upon. I can't explain too much of this, but they made it so people can make a variety of add-ons. Not a super-ton of must-haves, but the few that are out like Google maps trip-planner, are really nice. And that paints a picture of what is to come as more developers get on it, and the developer tools mature.
- Potential: They are going to work with the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) to make this part of the standard, and that means as good ideas percolate up this will grow and expand by community involvement. We have a TON of potential here. The XMPP standard already has extensions for voice, video, file transfers, subscription and publications. I'll expand on this a little in a bit.
Where is this going?
Well, as soon as we have some more people on it that I will communicate with I am ready to drop email for inter-personal communications. I think email is still great for me blanketing a newsletter to friends and family or reading emails from amazon about what is on sale this week. Basically things that aren't interacted with.
Same goes for Google docs. This pretty much replaces it for the text-editor (word) part whenever it is a document that needs to be edited by multiple people. The playback part is GREAT for this. But if I'm writing a paper to turn in for a class, Google Docs/Word is still good for that.
That being said, I wrote a while-back about what I think the future of communications could be. That can be summed up with this statement: Voice and video communication are just data.
So imagine if you will, not just sharing pictures and maps in the wave, but making phone calls right from the wave. Those phone calls could be recorded (if the other person OKs it - don't want to break the law) and transcribed into the wave as a reply, or even better you could do the same thing with video. Voice mails could be a wave, and you could re-assign them as an add-on to waves. You could be live-interacting via video conference, which would record everyone while a document was being edited, and then later you could playback everything including the video clips so you know what was being discussed while people were editing the document.
Oh, and did I mention that XMPP has a draft calendar extension. So, that big flashy exchange server that pushes email, calendars, and contacts to your phone and costs an arm-and-a-leg is now instantly obsolete. XMPP is entirely "push" based, and has extensions for contact sharing as well. Meaning that a corporate server running the wave could have push updates, push contacts and push calendaring (all with two-way syncing). And my implementation would play nice with apples which would play nice with everyone elses (just like email), because it is an open standard.
Basically, I think it is a great possibility that could break us out of proprietary eco-systems like Skype and Microsoft exchange.
So, you don't have an invite yet most likely. Don't worry too much, Google wants this to be an open beta or released product in 2010, so the wait isn't that long. But even if you don't, I have about 5 left today that can go to the first people I know personally who are SUPER EXCITED about trying it.
Just reply to this blog, and I'll respond if your lucky enough to fit into my top 5 list :)
Originally published at Home of BigCat the Awesome.
Right now it is an invite-only beta. Despite being an early sign-up person (apparently not early enough) I went a couple weeks without an invite. But, thanks to Gina Trapani, former editor of LifeHacker for running an invite give-away, and picking my use-case as one of the good ones, I was able to get an invite.
[Aside] My use-case was coordinating information with Lauren and the paid-staff at Breaking Free. Lauren and I do informational meetings with churches around the area (mostly Lauren actually), but when we are coordinating who wants to sign-up for volunteering, something more living and editable than email, something more communicative than a shared document on Google docs, would be super-useful. And after my first trip to a church this Sunday it was really great to read my notes off of the wave, and make live edits, and take some notes about info to pass on back to the pastors when I was finished. It will be more-great when Lauren is online too. (I just sent her an invite, so we will see how long it takes google to approve them) [end aside]
Before I launch into my thoughts about how this it is important that I explain a simple division necessary to understand Google Wave. Google, in an effort to answer the question "If email was invented today instead of over 30 years ago (by Jesus himself, because it is older than me, it must be biblical) what would it look like" came up with the wave. Because it is an effort to supplant email it has to be open like email, and just like GMail there are two things we are dealing with: 1) Wave protocol - like the protocols that drive email it is open, anyone can run a server themselves, and 2) Google Wave - Google's product that implements the wave protocol, much like GMail is Google's implementation of email.
K, confused? Clear as mud? If you are, you are in good company. It is a bit of a confusing differentiation.
Anyway, I have to give you a brief technical disclaimer. I'm very much a fan of the protocols that the wave-protocol is derived from. It is the same underlying technology as GChat, or livejournal chat. It is called XMPP, or eXtensible-Messaging and Presence Protocol.
It is a mouth-full, but what you need to know is that it is an open, standards-based, instant messaging and presence protocol (which is a fancy way of servers knowing if you are online and connected) - like AIM but open-source. Google is already partial to it because it is a rocking standard and well thought out and free. And there are gobs of cool extensions to the protocol that have been standardized for sweet stuff that I will write about sometime later.
So, my disclaimer restated: I think that this protocol is the key to the next iteration of the internet, so I'm biased. I've already been doing a ton of research and written just a very little bit of code to make use of this protocol.
That being said, I think wave is going to gain some serious momentum as a protocol extension to XMPP in the not-so-distant future. Now, on to the part that doesn't involve my personal crystal ball.
First, negatives:
- The Google Wave application is buggy, and not feature complete. It is in super-early alpha stages of development, and using a ton of sweet new web technologies. Running it in Firefox requires the Google gears extension to really get the best of it. And it is still a little laggy, and you have to refresh the page every so often. Google Chrome seems to be a bit faster with it.
- Nit picky, but when you drag something from one place to another it doesn't let you know that it got dragged into the right place, and it doesn't highlight the thing you are dragging it over, so there is no visual cue to indicate where it is going to go.
- When you first start using it, it is overwhelming. You can click anywhere, edit anything, reply to any line in anything else.
- On a more technical note - more formal review and improvement of the protocol extension to XMPP before I'm going to be completely happy with it. There are things that can probably be improved with community involvement. Also an open-source integrated server is going to be sweet, but that isn't Google's fault - they open-sourced their main back-end parts of their implementation (which is awesome of them, and will only help their cause in getting the protocol adopted).
- There aren't a lot of people on it. It will only get better (and more overwhelming) as more of my friends use it to communicate. But for now there are mostly big informational public waves going on, or it is a glorified, editable chat between me and a friend or two.
Now, the good:
- When you are done having it blow your mind from the sheer overwhelming number of places you can click and make things happen you start to sync into a rhythm of it. It reminds me of the mental adjustments I had to make when I first started using non-ICQ based chat. There is a unique flow to how information goes between you and the person you are chatting with. So it is with Wave. When you start to flow with it (pun intended) you feel like you can get in a grove with it. Definitely paradigm-shifting though.
- You can playback the changes in the waves, because of what it is. It is really only a starting out place, a list of changes, and then a current copy of the 'state' of it. So it is fun to see how things developed and catch up on it.
- In-line replies are wicked. Ever get into one of those IM conversations where you are asked three or four questions before you could answer one. And try to preface each reply with which question you are answering. Imagine that, only you can go and click on each question and just put your reply right after it. That is fun, and it reads much easier when done well.
- The Openness: Google has already open-sourced the hard part of their implementation - the part that handles how the changes of the wave fit together to make the final form. They call this the operational transform, but you don't really need to keep that term in your head. Besides that, this is a 'federated' protocol. Meaning, anyone who is running a server can get in on it. And like email, or gchat, you can hook up with people not on your same server/email name. So my wave address is bigcat1 AT googlewave DOT com. Just like my email and gchat address - nothing new or fancy, it is just an address. This is because Google knows that if they keep it to themselves it won't get off the ground. This is a big change, and if everyone gets to play, it will only help their piece of the pie get bigger by making the pie get bigger.
- Google just gets features we want. Their implementation of the wave protocol is as feature-packed as GMail. It really gets the idea of how we interact with conversations. It is hard to explain, but when you get the hang of using it (or at least get the hang of it a little, cuz I'm not that far along myself) it just fits with how you naturally interact with people.
- Google made their implementation easy to expand upon. I can't explain too much of this, but they made it so people can make a variety of add-ons. Not a super-ton of must-haves, but the few that are out like Google maps trip-planner, are really nice. And that paints a picture of what is to come as more developers get on it, and the developer tools mature.
- Potential: They are going to work with the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) to make this part of the standard, and that means as good ideas percolate up this will grow and expand by community involvement. We have a TON of potential here. The XMPP standard already has extensions for voice, video, file transfers, subscription and publications. I'll expand on this a little in a bit.
Where is this going?
Well, as soon as we have some more people on it that I will communicate with I am ready to drop email for inter-personal communications. I think email is still great for me blanketing a newsletter to friends and family or reading emails from amazon about what is on sale this week. Basically things that aren't interacted with.
Same goes for Google docs. This pretty much replaces it for the text-editor (word) part whenever it is a document that needs to be edited by multiple people. The playback part is GREAT for this. But if I'm writing a paper to turn in for a class, Google Docs/Word is still good for that.
That being said, I wrote a while-back about what I think the future of communications could be. That can be summed up with this statement: Voice and video communication are just data.
So imagine if you will, not just sharing pictures and maps in the wave, but making phone calls right from the wave. Those phone calls could be recorded (if the other person OKs it - don't want to break the law) and transcribed into the wave as a reply, or even better you could do the same thing with video. Voice mails could be a wave, and you could re-assign them as an add-on to waves. You could be live-interacting via video conference, which would record everyone while a document was being edited, and then later you could playback everything including the video clips so you know what was being discussed while people were editing the document.
Oh, and did I mention that XMPP has a draft calendar extension. So, that big flashy exchange server that pushes email, calendars, and contacts to your phone and costs an arm-and-a-leg is now instantly obsolete. XMPP is entirely "push" based, and has extensions for contact sharing as well. Meaning that a corporate server running the wave could have push updates, push contacts and push calendaring (all with two-way syncing). And my implementation would play nice with apples which would play nice with everyone elses (just like email), because it is an open standard.
Basically, I think it is a great possibility that could break us out of proprietary eco-systems like Skype and Microsoft exchange.
So, you don't have an invite yet most likely. Don't worry too much, Google wants this to be an open beta or released product in 2010, so the wait isn't that long. But even if you don't, I have about 5 left today that can go to the first people I know personally who are SUPER EXCITED about trying it.
Just reply to this blog, and I'll respond if your lucky enough to fit into my top 5 list :)
Originally published at Home of BigCat the Awesome.