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Google Wave is not Email - its so much more.

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Re: Google Wave is not Email - its so much more.

#4

Post by vidarh »

The "see you typing" thing disappeared to a large extent from IM clients because it was horrible. Users don't like other people seeing their "thoughts" and it creates a much stronger pressure to formulate/complete an immediate answer.

And the "robot" thing is just inane - it's not like bots are hard to interface with e-mail or with the web; it's just that at the current level few bots are very interesting beyond the very basic (IRC type) bots that keep track of when people last were around etc.

Wave looks interesting, but because it provides distributed/federated group chat / document editing / collaboration more than it competes with e-mail.

I'd be much more inclined to see it as an alternative to (some) wiki's and project collaboration tools like Basecamp than to e-mail.

Re: Google Wave is not Email - its so much more.

#5

Post by growt »

This is how it came to be:

Inside the Google Headquarters:

Marketing/Finance Guy: Hey we need "live" search, its hot right now!

Tech Guy: Go buy twitter!

MG: Are you crazy we're in a recession, we don't have the money.

TG: Ok I have this old new-way-of-doing-email sideproject, that was kind of "live".

MG: Great, can you make it even more "live"?

TG: (sarcastic)Well the users could see each other typing.

MG: (exited) Great! Make it so!

TG: (concerned) That would kill our server if we ever released it.

MG: Don't worry we wont release it, just prepare a demo.

TG: And if we eventually release it?

MG: We make it Open Source, so somebody else will run it and their servers will crash.

Re: Google Wave is not Email - its so much more.

#7

Post by zimbabwe »

adamhowell wrote: post #2

If I had a dollar for every "serious game changer on the web today..."

Then you'd probably have a good $8.

We're in a tech renaissance. Lots of cool stuff is coming out, and they're all doing things in really different ways. It makes perfect sense that the game is constantly changing. It's exciting!

Re: Google Wave is not Email - its so much more.

#8

Post by stcredzero »

vidarh wrote: post #4

The "see you typing" thing disappeared to a large extent from IM clients because it was horrible . Users don't like other people seeing their "thoughts" and it creates a much stronger pressure to formulate/complete an immediate answer. And the "robot" thing is just inane - it's not like bots are hard to interface with e-mail or with the web; it's just that at the current level few bots are very interesting beyond the…

Wave looks interesting, but because it provides distributed/federated group chat / document editing / collaboration more than it competes with e-mail.

But isn't this precisely where computer use is trending? The whole Web 2.0 thing in retrospect was as mass of more mainstream users discovering that interacting with and getting to know others resulted in many cool things. It's been trending that way since we had 300 baud modems dialing in to BBS. Add to that, the discovery that interaction is a lot more fun when it's about something, like pictures, journal writing, software, news...

But we are still at the infancy stages when it comes to collaboration. Things like the "Minority Report" style multi-touch interfaces, Microsoft Table, and Reactable are the direction we should go. We need interfaces that aren't designed for one person to focus all of their input on one machine. We need interfaces that let us focus our attention on communally manipulated digital media and each other with equal ease.

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