The unfortunate question you have to ask is: how are pushy advertising assholes going to attempt to hijack this? Any new means of communication they immediately regard as being another method they are entitled to use to jam their wares in front of your senses. Or to put it another way, how do you keep the unwanted out?
I don’t really understand the concept yet so it may not be an issue, but it will be an issue if marketers can make it an issue.
Looks like someone at Google really wanted the terminology from Firefly to become reality: “I can give him a wave” replacing “I can give him a call.”
It looks interesting enough. The one thing I really don’t like in the article (I haven’t watch the linked video yet) is the idea of real-time typing. It certainly does allow text-chatting to work more like talking live, but it has pitfalls. I don’t know if anyone remembers a short-lived chat program called Pow-Wow back in the late 90s, but it used a similar feature. The result: everyone could see your typos as they were made, before you had a chance to correct them, and if you were typing something out that midway through you realized was dumb or wrong or insulting and you wanted to take it back, well, too late. It was really not a welcome feature, at least for me. Being able to wait until you hit Send is vastly, vastly better.
I think it looks awesome, what’s most interesting is being able to integrate it into comments on blogs and websites this means a conversation can continue long after its been dropped of the first page- comment threads can follow different articles form competing points of view.
No more dropping of a comment and never really going back to check for updates or replies.
I’m so looking forward to this.
You can toggle off the live text while you type, and have the message arrive in toto after hitting “enter”, just like any other text.
How do you keep the unwanted out of an e-mail conversation? You don’t invite them.
I haven’t even looked at it, but I imagine that the same corporations and people who insist in sticking to Outlook and/or in responding to every. Single. Email. About whatever several hours after the whole rest of the group has made a decision (because that’s when they get around to checking their email and of course they can’t just look for the most recent one) will refuse to use it.
You know, the same ones that refuse to set up a corporate IM client…
Princhester, some of my coworkers receive daily spam in their skype accounts. I’ve never received any. Either I’m an incredibly lucky beeatch, or I’m doing something right 
You don’t have to type in real time. There’s a draft mode.
The same way you don’t invite someone to collaborate on a Google Document.
I’m confused - are you backing my statement up or refuting it? Are you suggesting that you don’t have control over who can collaborate on a google document? Because I sure do.
Working? I’ve been using it since January, and am awaiting v1.5 this week.
Backing it up. I don’t know if your respondent would be more familiar with the Google Documents or not.
Well, considering the conversations are hosted on a server as opposed to fragmented among the machines of dumb users seems like it’ll make spam regulation much more effective.
Also, it would seem that maybe Princhester isn’t familiar with gmail, one of the most spam-free e-mail clients I’ve ever used.
Also an excellent point.
Yeah, I caught that in the article. My point is it’s a dumb feature in the first place.
Of course, now that I actually watched the Youtube demo, I have to say that the overall concept completely overshadows any potential issues. That looks freaking cool.
What is the overall concept?
Um, did you watch the video or are you being patronizing?
what will be facinating is the considerable (and largely unsuccessful) efforts businesses make to keep work things separate from personal matters. I presently can’t use regular email at work nor auto-forward email to/from my work account. When I am using a Wave for work, how will they keep personal Waves out of it? It is all in the cloud and on a single browser. Security, privacy, compartmentalization, it is all going to be churned up just like thumb drives and cell phones did. I can’t wait!
I watched the first 20 minutes. I honestly don’t understand what the big deal is, like I said upthread. Unless I need to keep watching.
Just like Gmail was an improvement on stuff that already exists, and Google Maps was an improvement on Mapquest, and Google Docs and Picasa are improvements on filesharing…
It looks like a very fluid platform that incorporates email, newsgroups, IMing, blogging, collaborative works, etc., with room for expansion using the API. The same feature that allows you to reply in-message to an email can also be used to add comments to a document, for example. It’s just taking all the different networking tools that have sprung up over the last several decades and integrating them into one package.