Lately, I've been following Google Wave's progress, and have recently received an invitation to the service.  As far as a huge communications network is concerned, I'm very interested in it, but I do have some concerns.

What you see here is a wave containing a vote for a logo for something called GTUG Sao Paulo.   I'll use this to illustrate a couple of things.  When you hover over the wave, you see the 3 options pop up in the upper right (as they do in the screenshot above) - reply, edit, and an arrow that drops down a couple more options (see the screenshot at right).  Later on in the wave there is a voting applet where you press a button and it automatically marks your choice in a process that reminds me of Facebook events.

Anyway, this kind of thing is where I envision Wave shining, since anyone can submit another design anytime by editing the wave, after which it'll be marked as "updated" (notably, you can choose to view only updated waves in the box at left), which, in turn, will let others know to possibly change their votes if they have voted already.

This screenshot, on the other hand, showcases a single or multiplayer Sokoban game, one of the many plugins.  I'm not sure if Wave is an ideal place to play games, but to each his own, I guess.  Notice as well that here I've minimized the inbox window.  So there's that, wham bam bam, more space.

And lastly, here's what happens every once in a while when you error.  Again, it's a developer preview, so it's still buggy.  Interestingly, this wave (which shows off a weather plugin called Dr. Weather) is really really long, and made Wave bog down and run quite slowly (even on Firefox 3.6a1, which I'm running - and I heartily recommend - it's noticeably faster than even the just-released Firefox 3.5).  It didn't initially cause Wave to pop the "refresh" error screen, but that seems to pop up if you click through a bunch of inbox items in succession.  Which I did.  Several times.  To prove a point.  Cool.

All in all though, Wave is a pretty neat application.  It's still too early for me to form a concrete opinion, mostly due to there being so few friends of mine that also use it at this stage of development.  The public waves I'm getting aren't always in English (as you might be able to tell from the shots of my inbox) and are generally geared toward other developers.  So that's that.

Labels: Preview, Reviews, Technology

The web is abuzz recently about Google Wave, Google's answer to the question - what if email was invented today, instead of 40 years ago?  Well, apparently, it would look a little something like this:

So what exactly IS Google Wave?  I'll try to make this answer snappy, since the Google I/O presentation about it is a full hour and 22 minutes long.  I watched it so you won't have to.

Basically, Google Wave is an interface for dealing with complex conversation threads that Google is calling "waves."   In starting a new wave, you can select who participates in the wave, and start typing much like you would an email.  Neatly enough, if the other people you're sending to are online on the wave, they will see that you've made a new wave - and what's super-cool - they'll be able to see you typing in real-time.  This makes it something like a chat program too, but also unlike any other that's been made. 

Another very cool thing is that people can comment not only on the entire message you wrote, but on different segments in the middle of your message.  By default, as well, anyone can edit the wave (editors' names will be added, so you can't just edit your friend's message to say something embarrassing) - which makes it ideal for project work and makes it very much like wikis and Google Docs documents in that shared composition is a major part.  Personally, I think this is awesome, since I use Google Docs for a lot of things already, from writings scripts for theatre or writing code collaboratively for CS group projects.  I only wish that dealing with spaces was better for writing code, but whaddyagonnado.

Finally, Google Wave is very extendible.  It features drag-and-drop file sharing already, and there are already extensions for using the popular microblogging site Twitter through Wave.  Another cool extension is the Maps extension, which allows you to show a certain point on a google map embedding in the wave.  As you scroll and zoom around the map, everyone else sees that activity, again in real-time.  Likewise there are "robots," which look like other contacts and you can add them to your waves the same way, but they are built to do very specific things.  For instance, the presentation shows off the "Bloggy" robot, which posts up your wave on your blog and stores comments in the wave as well.  The whole Google I/O Conference was geared toward getting developers to develop more extensions, so I'm confident there will be even more of these soon.

So will this replace email, as Google seems to be angling for?  Yes and no.  For now, email is very entrenched in the business world, and it will be difficult to change that quickly.  However, among the currently-in-college generation, I can see this becoming huge.  Social networks like Facebook thrive on being a provider of information about one's friends and family and on having a good user interface, and this is something with the potential to be bigger than anything before it.  So this definitely has the potential to take over, but it will take time.

Labels: Preview, Technology