What is Google Wave?

November 8, 2009 · Posted in brain dump . . . 
Is it really the next-big-thing ™ from the almightily Google or is it actually a useless overhyped piece of crap??  Well the answer to both of these questions is obviously no (although the overhyped claim may be somewhat justified 😉
One of the problems with Google Wave is that it’s new.  Google said at one point that the set out to create what email would have been like had it been created now, in the Web 2.0 (tm again?) world. However, it’s also been described as like IM on steroids (find quotes/links)
Both of these descriptions are misleading because Google Wave is neither, less and more . . . however, using those terms when trying to describe Google Wave seems to be what’s causing a lot of problems so we’re going to have to introduce some Wave terminology here or things are going to get very confused. There’s not much to know but it’ll become very obvious why it’s needed very quickly. What we would traditional call a message in Email or perhaps a conversation in IM is known as a Wave. Individual posts inside each Wave are known as Blips (a stupid name if you ask me but I guess they needed to call them something that wasn’t already being used in another space).
Using Google Wave feel familiar at first, hen gets a bit weird when more experienced users start doing things that you don’t know how to do and probably didn’t know were possible. In the same way that, with email being simple text, you can put comment inline in your reply, you can reply to an individual Blip inside a Wave. If the Wave has already moved on these replies are indented to differentiate them from the rest of the Wave. So it’s all sounding a bit more like Email now right? As usual with Wave, yes and no.
When you start a Wave you invite people to it. These Waves will then appear inside the invitees Inboxes. Wave seems to retain a permanent connection with the Google servers so a new Wave invite will appear immediately in your Inbox once it’s created.  You don’t have to wait for the person who created the Wave to actually do anything with it. All participants inside the Wave can type at the same time, either adding Blips onto the bottom of the wave or replying to Blips at other places inside the Wave.  You can see how this could get very chaotic pretty fast if you’re not careful.
To try and combat this new Blips are highlighted inside the Wave and the Wave title in your Inbox shows you how many unready blips are in each of your Waves. You can either click on an individual Blip to unmark it or press the Read button at the top of the Wave to mark the entire thing as read.  There’s no idea at the moment of marking Blips as read when you scroll past them and with he interactive nature of a Wave that’s a good thing. You don’t want to miss something that’s been said as a reply to a Blip much higher up the Wave.
One of the advantages of Google Wave over Email is the confusion of email forwarding.  Ok, so it’s not that confusing but being able to add people into a Wave after it’s started and have them be able to read the whole thing is going to be very useful. As will be the ability to be able to replay the Wave ‘s creation showing who said what when to allow people to get up to speed with the flow of the Wave.
But wait, there’s more.  If during a Wave you need to have either a private discussion with someone in it that you want to keep in context, or just to prevent the Wave getting overly noisy for everyone, you can create a private reply o a Blip and add only those Wave participants you want to be able to see it.
Getting it yet? No, you’re not really because there’s more . . . a Blip that I have typed can be edited by anyone else in the Wave (you can see why being able to see who created what and when is going to get far more important). Then there are also Wave extensions. At the moment these are restricted to things that you can embed inside the Wave such as maps, pictures and polls but anything could happen.
So to answer he question what is Google Wave? It’s a real time updating version-controlled interactive wiki messaging system, ish 😉

Is it really the next-big-thing ™ from the almightily Google or is it actually a useless overhyped piece of crap??  Well the answer to both of these questions is obviously no (although the overhyped claim may be somewhat justified 😉

One of the problems with Google Wave is that it’s new.  Google said at one point that the set out to create what email would have been like had it been created now, in the Web 2.0 (tm again?) world. However, it’s also been described as like IM on steroids.

Both of these descriptions are misleading because Google Wave is neither, less and more . . . however, using those terms when trying to describe Google Wave seems to be what’s causing a lot of problems so we’re going to have to introduce some Wave terminology here or things are going to get very confused. There’s not much to know but it’ll become very obvious why it’s needed very quickly. What we would traditional call a message in Email or perhaps a conversation in IM is known as a Wave. Individual posts inside each Wave are known as Blips (a stupid name if you ask me but I guess they needed to call them something that wasn’t already being used in another space).

Using Google Wave feel familiar at first, hen gets a bit weird when more experienced users start doing things that you don’t know how to do and probably didn’t know were possible. In the same way that, with email being simple text, you can put comment inline in your reply, you can reply to an individual Blip inside a Wave. If the Wave has already moved on these replies are indented to differentiate them from the rest of the Wave. So it’s all sounding a bit more like Email now right? As usual with Wave, yes and no.

When you start a Wave you invite people to it. These Waves will then appear inside the invitees Inboxes. Wave seems to retain a permanent connection with the Google servers so a new Wave invite will appear immediately in your Inbox once it’s created.  You don’t have to wait for the person who created the Wave to actually do anything with it. All participants inside the Wave can type at the same time, either adding Blips onto the bottom of the wave or replying to Blips at other places inside the Wave.  You can see how this could get very chaotic pretty fast if you’re not careful.

To try and combat this new Blips are highlighted inside the Wave and the Wave title in your Inbox shows you how many unready blips are in each of your Waves. You can either click on an individual Blip to unmark it or press the Read button at the top of the Wave to mark the entire thing as read.  There’s no idea at the moment of marking Blips as read when you scroll past them and with he interactive nature of a Wave that’s a good thing. You don’t want to miss something that’s been said as a reply to a Blip much higher up the Wave.

One of the advantages of Google Wave over Email is the confusion of email forwarding.  Ok, so it’s not that confusing but being able to add people into a Wave after it’s started and have them be able to read the whole thing is going to be very useful. As will be the ability to be able to replay the Wave ‘s creation showing who said what when to allow people to get up to speed with the flow of the Wave.

But wait, there’s more.  If during a Wave you need to have either a private discussion with someone in it that you want to keep in context, or just to prevent the Wave getting overly noisy for everyone, you can create a private reply o a Blip and add only those Wave participants you want to be able to see it.

Getting it yet? No, you’re not really because there’s more . . . a Blip that I have typed can be edited by anyone else in the Wave (you can see why being able to see who created what and when is going to get far more important). Then there are also Wave extensions. At the moment these are restricted to things that you can embed inside the Wave such as maps, pictures and polls but anything could happen.

So to answer he question what is Google Wave? It’s a real time updating version-controlled interactive wiki messaging system, ish 😉

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