I just read the CNN report on this. I don’t see what’s so special about this.
It sounds like “chat” or even a bit like a very old application that ran on DEC VAX’s called phone, where the screen broke into parts and each person could type in their part of the screen.
To be fair, I don’t even see why the inventors of this are touted as geniuses.
Google maps is great but they didn’t invent the concept of accessing satellite photos and merging them with street maps. They made it nicer.
I guess I’m a bit peeved at “improvers” being called “inventors”.
If you build a better mousetrap, you built a better mouse trap, you didn’t invent mouse traps. The distinction has to be made.
It’s not though. It’s chat meets email meets adobe’s PDF sharing and editing tools. None of it it new, but putting these ideas together is something I haven’t seen before.
Right now the best applications for it would be in business type settings where people can collaborate on a project together in real time and share changes etc. It takes the air out of email communication and makes it more personal, without becoming just a conversation the way that chat or IM would be.
It’s cool. It isn’t perfect yet, and to really reach it’s full potential it needs to become as ubiquitous as email, but right now it’s still pretty damn cool.
This is a nice article on what wave can be used for.
As stated in the article, the problem with Wave is that it was released to geeks, hackers and social media types first but it really is a tool most useful for corporate types.
I have no idea exactly how Google’s Wave protocol works, but I highly doubt that it is as lackadaisical as SMTP (the current email protocol). SMTP has various flaws in it that make it very easy to send out spam emails without people being able to track it back to the original server, and which allow them to pretend to be someone else. I can’t imagine that Google didn’t correct these flaws.
Similar to how forums like the SDMB supplanted Usenet, we can hope that Google Waves will replace email.
All the extra gimmicks are just candy to lead people away from email. They’re not really the prime selling point.
When I first saw the Wave video my immediate thought was that if my whole office got on board with it we could all start working from home. 90% of everything that we currently need to be in the same office to do could be replaced by effectively using Wave. Now this will never happen with *my *office because they aren’t going to move to a web based anything system anytime soon, but still that’s a fairly exciting idea. This is Jetson’s type stuff we are talking about here. It’s just so simple and obvious that it doesn’t look like it at first glance. But this is the freaking flying car.
The second thought I had was about designing mafia games and how much easier it would be to collaborate using wave than a message board, but that is a slightly more niche use.
The reason they released it to the geeks first is because geeks are good at figuring out how to make tools like this fun. But wave is more like the revolution that the Blackberry was when it first came out then like a social network.
Actually it’s about giving people seriously useful shit for nothing other than almost non-existent inconvenience of seeing some discreet ads. Google didn’t market its search engine, or sketchup, or Google Earth, or Google Maps, or Streetview at me at all. I heard about them through users (often on these boards) telling me they were useful or fun, and me trying them and finding they were useful and fun. Marketing had nothing to do with it.