Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354

by amichail • 17 years ago

20 24 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

brecht• 17 years ago

A lot of the analysis of Wave so far has (stupidly) focused on the web app that Google was showing off, on the whiz-bang HTML5 bullshit that ultimately doesn't much matter. I think it's really important to think of Wave not in terms of the front-end they were showing off, but rather in terms of the underlying protocol that powered it. Google envisions it as a sort of SMTP 2.0, powering most person-to-person communication on the internet; if (and only if) the industry gets behind it unilaterally, I think it has a real chance of success.

The paucity of existing documentation can be forgiven, but only to a point -- it's definitely on Google to make the complex elements of that protocol (and there are many) developer-accessible. As cool as the technology is, it'll wither and die without proper support.

foulmouthboy• 17 years ago

Agreed. I especially am frustrated with the people who are excited because, "you can see each letter the other person types as they type it during chats!"

There's very little appeal in that. Lots of people need to edit typos and want to formulate complete thoughts before letting others see them. On the other hand, the underlying technology that will make that process even possible is what's really exciting. I'm looking forward to what creative people will be doing with it.

gfodor• 17 years ago

Nevermind the fact that I remember that being the norm almost 20 years ago on BBS systems :)

bjelkeman-again2• 17 years ago

Google Wave as a tool is the way people visualise what the protocol can offer them, which makes it easy to discuss. Think of trying to have a discussion about http vs. a discussion about web browser with the people who are discussing it. (Most people wouldn't know a protocol if it hit them in the head.)

J_McQuade• 17 years ago

To play fence-sitter for a moment, I won't be able to tell you what I think until I've used it.

Ignoring that, though, from what I have seen it appears to be providing the communication benefits that have recently been explored by social networking sites, while cutting out a lot of the potential for the egocentricism that seems endemic to places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like.

If it delivers on that, then I shall be very pleased. It'll be good to be able to once again focus on the interaction with my friends, rather than the banner at the top of the page with their name on it.

brisance• 17 years ago

What is the IETF's stance on this? Or has the entire process become so politicized that it is now up to large commercial entities to dictate the future development of the Internet? I'm not entirely comfortable with this if it is true.

pt2• 17 years ago

Ditto sentiment. I am curious what is IETF's take on this proposed protocol.

guille• 17 years ago

I am confused with your fear. Google is just utilizing XMPP, they are not creating anything new, its open sourced. Plus the group that developed XMPP were formalized by the IETF.

pt2• 17 years ago

Much like XMPP extended IMPP (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2779), Google Wave Federation Protocol is an extension of XMPP. While XMPP went through the RFC process (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3920), the google wave protocol is merely being termed as an open extension. Although I trust Google to believe that they are going to be doing the right thing, I am curious what is IETF's take on this.

jsz0• 17 years ago

I'm sure it will be useful for some people but I'm pretty skeptical of all this "social " stuff. Most of my online communication is compartmentalized and direct and I like it that way. As a result it's hard for me to judge it since I'm looking at the product from the "will I* use this? Is it useful to ME?" perspective. The one thing I'm pretty confident about is the UI looks overly complex and convoluted for the average person to use. (look at the success of Twitter and Facebook UI change uproar for proof of that) I think Google needs to seriously improve the UI if they want it to be a mainstream product. Otherwise I see it being a niche service for people who really need this type of tool.

DomesticMouse2• 17 years ago

The UI is built by geeks for geeks. Google's issues with keeping designers is well known.

DomesticMouse2• 17 years ago

The exciting thing about Wave for me is that it is a way of distributing update capability to a server hosted xml document. The spotlight that is being put on Operational Transforms is the game changer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

gritzko• 17 years ago

OT is an obsolete approach, to my taste. (1) centralized (2) quite complicated (3) just workarounds the real problems.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

The demo reminded me a lot of using Basecamp.

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

I doubt it will catch on.

(edit) Huh ? Downmodding this for what exactly ? This is a valid reply - I have no specific opinion on where Wave stands compared to other technologies, but I am pretty confident that it won't catch on in its existing form. They are not the first ones introducing new communication paradigm and they are certainly not the last ones. So far only evolutionary changes sticked, nothing revolutionary did (e.g. IBM's Remail).

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

Although I disagree with your original statement, I'm not the one who down-modded you.

I think it would have helped if you had included your additional commentary into your original reply. The short version was basically redundant to your poll response.

nwatson• 17 years ago

Merging Wiki with e-mail, IM, and threaded discussions with fine-grained security already is powerful. I hate discussing an issue with 5 other people over a three-day e-mail/IM/phone thread and settling 7 or 8 decisions ... but nobody updates the "authoritative document" in a file share or in the Wiki. Two weeks later you need a big e-mail hunt to find what the decisions were. Google Wave consolidates all that discussion ... sales strategy sessions, collaborating on writing technical specs, deciding where to meet for extended family vacation, handling a tech support case where 1 support engineer + 2 customer contacts + 3 internal engineers + 1 account manager need to interact ... all these become more efficient and possible.

Add to that good multimedia content, versioning/branching/merging, embeddable widgets, and human-machine interaction ... Google Wave becomes a very powerful platform. It suddenly becomes much easier for a corporation to add human intelligence to deal with exceptional circumstances in automated workflows. There's fertile ground right there.

trapper2• 17 years ago

If it works as it could, I'd hate to think how many startups just because completely obsolete. Our wiki, internal laconica, document sharing and collaboration software will probably all die if this works.

bjelkeman-again2• 17 years ago

And these things will die because they have been superseded by something superior. What is the bad thing in that? That is what startups are all about after all.

In addition, there will be tons and tons of new opportunity to build on this. I suppose one can hate the fact that the Internet killed a lot of BBSs, but it sure created more opportunity to build an industry than what these BBSs offered.

dlevine• 17 years ago

Too complicated. Anything worth having should be explainable in 30 seconds. I watched the first ten minutes of the Google Wave presentation, and still didn't understand what was going on. Maybe it has some cool features, but I think that it will go the same way as Google base and Google coop.

javert• 17 years ago

That's because they barely talked about what it was in the first 10 minutes - they just talked about what a supposedly great thing they were supposedly about to reveal. I almost fell asleep!

twohey• 17 years ago

It seems like this is really "enterprise collaboration" done right. Think of how many places installed lotus notes or ms exchange to get some of these features.

Sprinkle in some calendaring and todo robots and you have an extremely powerful collaboration tool. Add in search and you have a new way to manage ad-hoc information.

It will be interesting to see how they come up with efficient representations when these document trees get to be large.

One downside of wave is that I haven't seen anything about how to stop spam. That was a major problem for email, and is becoming a problem on twitter too. Throw in differing social contexts like proper distribution of tweets for spymaster and you have some thorny social issues.

mistermann• 17 years ago

I hope the server can be run in house. God, I would love to get off sharepoint.

Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?

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