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| 5/23 |
| 2009/10/1-22 [Computer/Companies/Google, Academia/Berkeley/CSUA/Motd] UID:53424 Activity:kinda low |
10/1 google wave is a really fancy version of wall. i can pipe
giant ascii text files through it. my dream has come true.
does anyone remember when jwang made it so if you walled
embedded html tags, it would appear in the csua lwall www page?
google wave is a little better than that. - danh
\_ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/09/google-wave-is-easier-to-understand-than
Google wave is as easy to understand as Sarah Palin
\_ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/01/google-wave-early-impressions
\_ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/02/video-3-5-of-google-wave-explained
Awesome video what a GWave is.
\_ So is there a crusty csuaer wave?
\_ lets make one when Wave is totally public. Politburo has
successfully driven just about everyone off of soda now through
the VM and security holes. I'm not mad at the VP, I realize school
is time intensive. I like the motd though.
\_ how are you going to ensure that the Google account holder
is also a member of CSUA who signed up before?
\_ No.
\_ My point is there are a bunch of forums out there for
which you don't need to be a member of anything to join.
Most of us are already using some type of forum, whether
it is Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, or some niche
specific groups. What makes motd unique is the
membership where we can participate in some type of
UCB+sysadm+comp sci+social forum. Once you let in
a bunch of random spammers in, then motd will be no
different than a random forum on the internet.
\_ True. I really doubt anyone besides people who
have edited the motd && walled will care. I am not
concerned.
\_ Then you can leave motd and join random forums
already. Good bye. |
| 5/23 |
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| www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/09/google-wave-is-easier-to-understand-than -> www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/09/google-wave-is-easier-to-understand-than/ com pits Wave against the other hard-to-understand aspects of life. On the site, you are given a picture of Wave and a picture of something else and asked to click on which is easier to understand. Users are welcome to submit other topics to put up again Wave in the competition. But the best part of the site has to be the elevator music-version of Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" playing in a loop in the background. I have it on very good authority that it was built by a Facebook employee. And now we know why we have the little "Not affiliated with any company" at the bottom. October 9th, 2009 at 4:57 pm CDT I know you warned us, but the background music that starts as soon as you load the page still reminds me of a website built in 1995. October 9th, 2009 at 5:25 pm CDT I was thinking exactly the same thing about Google wave and trying to explain it to non techie friends who I had just finished explaining twitter to. October 9th, 2009 at 6:40 pm CDT Google Wave isn't one of those cases where us techies get it and non-techies don't, it's confusing and complex for even techies as evident from reading the posts of many of those that have the invites and are using Wave. October 9th, 2009 at 5:42 pm CDT today morning i finally got the google wave invite and i have no f**ing idea how to use it. i installed the god-damn game on it and there is no way i can play it.... October 9th, 2009 at 6:49 pm CDT I think Google Wave is at the point where you need to use more creative conceptual thinking and not get stuck on how it's currently implemented. From what I have seen the vision is about communications with an emphasis on the real-time aspect. So conceptually you can imagine multiple types of communications vehicles (IM, email, SMS/MMS) from various apps on different devices being brought together in a unified way. No longer are these technologies silos with separate communications occurring within each of their own channels. Rather Wave enables users to rise above the specific technologies and apps and communicate across all of them. I'm looking forward to seeing this thing evolve and really what the very smart developers innovate around it. October 9th, 2009 at 9:43 pm CDT Funny how it's a Facebook employee. It was always easy to understand Facebook: it's like Myspace, which is like Friendster. Google succeeds with innovation and execution and Facebook succeeds with execution and stealthy PR. |
| whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/01/google-wave-early-impressions -> whatever.scalzi.com/2009/10/01/google-wave-early-impressions/ John Scalzi at 11:05 pm I received my Google Wave invite early Thursday morning and basically decided to chuck my work for the day and play with it, which was easy to do because fortunately I don't have any pressing deadlines at the moment. So here are some of my initial thoughts on GWave, based on several hours of fiddling. Bear in mind these are first impressions, which may or may not change over time; also bear in mind Google is still fiddling with GWave, and some things about it will almost certainly change before it's opened up to the general public. Google Wave basically strikes me as an innovative small business collaboration tool somewhat amusingly miscast as ZOMG THE THING WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE FOREVER, AMEN Well, no. Google Wave will not replace your e-mail, paint your house, give you a kidney or push us all headlong into the singularity, to be translated into the vasty holds of Google's data servers, where our virtual lives will be as in Azeroth, when we're all leveled up and the griefers have been banished forever into a Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge. If you have a (preferably modest-sized) group of people you want to collaborate with on a project or document or online event, Google Wave could be a good and useful environment to do that work in. If you're looking for it to do anything else, there are probably other things out there that do the job better, at least for the near-term future. One of the things we're told about Google Wave is that the people working on it tried to imagine what e-mail would be like if were being invented today rather than 30 or so years ago. Their answer seems to be that it would be like being in a room where everyone was talking all at once and you were supposed to be able to pay attention to everyone equally and give each person your full attention -- a nice trick if you can manage it, which I'm not sure I can. GWave does this by generating a "wave": An online space where anyone you allow to participate can start contributing at the same time as everyone else -- everyone starts typing and you can see what they're typing even as they're backspacing to erase the typos. Anyone of a certain technological age will watch a Wave in action and recognize what they're seeing: It's a chat room or an IRC channel, with substantially improved media-embedding capabilities. Google Wave hybridizes this by having the Wave exist as a standing document, so ostensibly you can walk away from it, come back later and not worry about having something vital scroll off the screen forever (you can even "playback" the Wave creation back to the time you left to see what you've missed). In practice (at least so far), the conversation still becomes rapidly unwieldy, and shuttling back and forth to find out what you've missed is a hassle, even with the discovery tools at your disposal. As I was using the "playback" tool I was asking myself what material benefit it offered over, say, discrete e-mail responses organized in a thread, a la GMail. The putative answer is that all the conversation is in one discrete document (the "Wave"), so you don't have to go looking for anything new. But a) at this point a GMail conversation thread effectively works as a single entity informationally, b) the nature of responding to e-mail already documents the position and time of responses, giving one a timeline, and c) searching e-mail for information is at this point a procedurally trivial task. A Wave certainly does get rid of redundancy (every bit of information from previous e-mails is often in a response e-mail, with only a bit of new information at the top), but the question is whether this efficiency advantage is substantial enough recommend tossing e-mail over the side for Wave-based communication. Let's just say I'm not entirely convinced at this point. I'm also pretty sure this won't replace social media as it exists today either, which is another suggestion I've seen bandied about. Google Wave allows one to create a Wave and then publish it to a blog, whilst still allowing people to collaborate on the Wave (with the results ported to the blog). This is kind of a cool idea, especially if a blog has multiple authors -- I can see multiple authors of a political blog embedding a Wave and then having each of the author collaborate on real-time commentary of a presidential debate or address, for example. But the current design of Google Wave isn't notably well-tuned to do what, say, Facebook and Twitter do so well, which is to efficiently ping a large group of people (one's friends and followers) with a bite-sized status report about one's life. Google Wave is good at helping assemble a contextually-relevant sub-set of people out of a larger pool of contacts and giving them a space to discuss something, but the question here is whether it's better than, say, just sending out a Facebook private message (or an e-mail) with multiple recipients and letting them all have a discussion in the response thread. Those are both "big picture" issues about Google Wave, but there are some "small picture" issues that annoy me as well. For example, one thing I really don't like at the moment is that anyone in a Wave can edit anyone else's comments; if you to write "I love cats," in a Wave we're both part of, I can go in and change it to "I murder cats" but it would still have your name on the words. And then I could take a screenshot of that Wave and post it up on my blog as an example of your evil, cat-slaughtering ways. While I get that this sort of general editing ability is meant to foster collaboration, etc, in a "wiki" sort of way, there's a difference between being able to collaboratively edit a document, and being able to go in and change around words that are being directly attributed to a person. There might already be a way for someone to specify that his/her own personal replies aren't editable by others, but if it's there it's not obvious (there's a settings area, but it's still under construction), and more to the point I think the default should be that personally-attributed comments are NOT editable rather than are. Since personal settings are being worked on this isn't something I'm too worried about yet, but if GWave gets to public release without the ability to keep others from editing your comments, that's going to be something that would keep me from using the service except in the most controlled and circumscribed way. Another thing I find annoying: right now, when you type a response, the other people in the Wave can watch as you type. First, it's distracting as hell and very much like trying to talk when someone else is talking in your ear. Second, philosophically speaking I don't know that I want to let everyone see what I'm typing until I'm actually done thinking about it. When I type I do a lot of backtracking as I think of better ways to say what I want to say and/or I keep myself from sending a comment I know I'll regret later. Also, I make a fair share of typos and other screw-ups as I type and I'd rather just fix those without other people looking. Now, maybe that sounds silly, but I think there is an underlying issue that in some real way, the substance of what someone types (the content of the statement) could be undermined by the process and presentation of what someone types (typos, reconsidered statements, typing speed, etc). People certainly do let process/presentation get in the way of other types of communication; ask someone with a "hick" accent whether or not people make assumptions about them from the way they speak. All things being equal I'd prefer people focus on the words I intend to present, not manner in which those words are composed. Again, we're early in the GWave set-up and I really do expect we'll get the option not to let others see us type, so this isn't a big deal yet. But it's something that would incline me against GWave if it's not addressed. This entry as been generally critical of Google Wave, so I feel like I should point out that I am having fun with it so far, and that I do think the more I play with it the more I expect to find myself able to do with it, so despite these... |
| www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/02/video-3-5-of-google-wave-explained -> www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/02/video-3-5-of-google-wave-explained/ answer that on TV the other day, but the truth is that as a new communication medium, it's hard to describe exactly what Wave is. It's kind of like email meets instant messaging meets real-time sharing and collaboration, but even that description is lacking. Eventually, if Wave takes off, it's probably one of those things that will just be understood for being what it is, even if no one can really describe it by relating it to something else. That said, the video below does a pretty good job explaining a potential use case for Wave. October 2nd, 2009 at 1:26 pm CDT How many TC stories about Google Wave are going to include the obligatory link to the TC "backlash" story? I get that this increases impressions on TC, and yes, you called the backlash first (so if it does happen, you'll get your kudos), but it's time to let this rest. October 2nd, 2009 at 1:37 pm CDT I sent out 5 invites over 25 hours ago, and no one has received them yet. I have an image in my mind of a fail whale surfing a wave. after RTFMing, I see now that these aren't actually invitations, these are "nominations". So your nomination might be placed in a queue, rejected, ignored, etc. seems like they would be better off with offering just a few REAL invitations so you can actually start using their product rather than 8 "nominations" which might never get sent out. what am I supposed to say, the empty white boxes look pretty? October 2nd, 2009 at 1:36 pm CDT Google Wave's ability to contextually translate languages in real-time is an amazing feature. This really removes the language barrier when it comes to trade. I've been using Google Translate, but being able to converse in real-time will be an awesome feature. October 2nd, 2009 at 1:40 pm CDT Right now, everyone on Wave is waiting for their 8 invites to go out. So what you have is people without anyone to talk to looking for random people to test with. What's now happened is everyone is creating "public" waves, which are basically open free for all forums with hundreds of participants. The technology and the concept are designed for 8 or 9 users max. October 2nd, 2009 at 1:41 pm CDT I really like the animation in that video, not quite janky enough to turn you off, not too flossy to seem pretentious or inaccessible. October 2nd, 2009 at 1:42 pm CDT New communications mediums are not designed. It's hard to see where a deliberate approach has really taken hold the way Wave wd have to to replace email. More likely, this will spur innovation in email (and ancillary applications) -- and these will get wave like. October 2nd, 2009 at 8:57 pm CDT He means twitter wasn't intented to be a game changing communication medium. On the other hand, Wave is setting itself this goal (or it might be the press). But, communication medium are social phenomenon, they can't be "constructed". October 2nd, 2009 at 1:51 pm CDT I got an invite from Google and been playing with it for the last couple of days. For the life of me, I don't get why anyone would start using this over existing methods. I get that it combines multiple methods, but it also has the requirement that everyone that you interact with is on Wave which is not exactly the case. I can't even experiment because I don't have any of my contacts using it. Creating a new medium of communication is not something that just gets invented technically. It has to be accepted globally the same way that email, SMS, and instant messaging. I know many people who refuse to get a twitter account because they are happy with email. With the advent of smartphones that can access your email and display it for you right away, why does someone need another method of communication? I only see Wave gaining ground if it will learn to work with existing technologies as well and integrate them rather than try to replace them. October 2nd, 2009 at 2:17 pm CDT You don't seem to get that the G-Wave client can be used as an IMAP/ SMS/ XMPP/ twitter/ w/e client? Even if I use Outlook and you use the G-Wave client, we could still use "email" to communicate. October 2nd, 2009 at 4:48 pm CDT Also, don't forget that when Facebook o other social networks started, it was the same... I reckon it will gain momentum, seeing all the buzz about it. October 2nd, 2009 at 1:51 pm CDT That guy speaks way too fast for my poor english, while the google's presentation was a lot more understandable for a poor frenchie like me .. If someone who received an invite do not mind sharing one of his fives (if that's second-hand invite system is effective) .. October 2nd, 2009 at 8:09 pm CDT I like to speak of a universal virtual collaboration framework that removes spatial, temporal, and contextual limitations. Probably still a bit too technical, though, but kinda accurate... October 2nd, 2009 at 2:13 pm CDT something just tells me that if an elevator picth for a new product does not work, it just won't take off. Facebook works and if you described that you would not believe it would take off. i think they have planted a plant and expect everyone to be biologists when they should have shown only the seed and asked for water sort of thing ish... October 2nd, 2009 at 2:29 pm CDT The brutal fact is that if it takes this much effort from tech pundits to explain Wave's value, its dead meat. Just simply explain what pain this is supposed to solve. October 2nd, 2009 at 4:42 pm CDT Email, IMs, Twitter make conversations hard because they easily get disorganized and statements are continually taken out of their proper context. Wave keeps everything in context, so miscommunications get minimized. October 2nd, 2009 at 6:32 pm CDT Glad to hear that Google VOICE and Google WAVE are remaining different... especially since I'm very happy with my Google VOICE account and would rather not see it turned into something completely different and renamed Google WAVE. |