Dion Moult Seriously who ever reads this description.

Planning to surf the Wave?

On 30 September 2009 with 10 comments

Any self-respecting online crawler would know that Google Wave has started their private invitation-only beta. No, I don’t (yet) have an invitation. This does remind me of way back when GMail went through this phase. I obviously secured myself an invite early on (where early is relative) and switched over from Microsoft’s Hotmail to turn GMail into my mail provider and client of choice. However for quite a while now I’ve switched over from GMail and have been slowly erasing my Google identity. With this switch I have gained both flexibility, control, and more importantly – insight into my workflow.

The question I’ve been asking myself is: will I use Google Wave? Initially, I would say “sure why not? It’s revolutionary” – but truth be told, I’ve overestimated the hype.

Wave is a pimped web application. The question is not whether the web was built for this technology, because advances like this never are. The question is neither if I’d enjoy integrating Wave’s API into my blog and related websites. The question is if I can realistically see myself using Wave in my workflow?

Wave is a way to communicate and collaborate. At the moment I do all my communication through my blog, instant messaging, and my phone. I collaborate through version control, mailing lists, and Google Docs. Wave will not replace any single one of those, except perhaps mailing lists. Personally, and I’m sure this applies to others too, Wave is not something I will use to replace another in my workflow – instead it will add a completely new, unrelated workflow.

But what is this workflow? I see it in document collaboration for businesses. But honestly, I don’t see it in much else. I don’t see it in social networking (if I even used it). I don’t see it replacing any form of instant messaging. And I especially don’t see it invading the web with its API. The web is changing, yes, and changing fast. A website is a blank canvas that the user will accept anything and everything they see on it. This is very different from desktop applications – where a single out of place UI widget will provoke suspicion from the user. However despite the unlimited number of things you can do to a webpage – you simply can’t bond two of them together. You can’t make the user feel like its an integrated environment. Heck, sometimes it’s hard to make a single website look integrated. This is what I believe is the biggest setback, and the biggest weakness of what Wave is trying to achieve. This isn’t said from a selfish web-developer point of view, it’s coming from a person who uses the web just as much as the desktop.

What do you see Wave in? Will you surf the Wave?

Related posts:

  1. Google Wave Review
  2. Is there such thing as a good monopoly?
  3. Big Brother Google, hello goodbye.


10 Comments

hessiess says: (2 October 2009)

might play with it, wont be using it for anything impotent as it goes against my trust no one policy.

p. says: (2 October 2009)

Possibly. As Google is releasing it as an open source project, it might be something positive. Does Google Wave have the potential to become the next big thing on the net? Yes, Google always does that. :)
Oh, and Happy Birthday!

Dion Moult says: (2 October 2009)

hessiess, I think it’s time you learned the meaning of “impotent”: (of a male) unable to copulate

I’m on hessiess with this one, I’ll play with it but it’ll unlikely become a standard application for quite a while.

Google is releasing it as an open-source project, but not handling it as an open-source project. It’s keeping the leash on the project whilst coders are attracted to the supposed freedom they get and polish off their work.

Matija "hook" Šuklje says: (3 October 2009)

I’ll just let it pass me, like most of Google’s solutions which I don’t really need.

Apart from that, I’m fairly certain I saw a KDE developer (could be some other coder though) comment that what Wave does is actually not that hard to do and could be done in KDE4 as well in the application level using NEPOMUK. Concerning *if* they’ll do it, he said that KDE4 is actually planning to achieve something similar, but better, in the future by connecting PIM, communication apps and settings with NEPOMUK’s ontologies. This would give the user a lot more power and control over the apps, their privacy and data.

So, I’d rather FOSS coders spend their time on the Semantic desktop idea in KDE4 (or GNOME) instead of working on Google Wave.

Dion Moult says: (4 October 2009)

Seeing as NEPOMUK is still very much in the it’s-all-hidden-functionality-for-developers-and-nothing-for-users-yet area implementing anything Wavish with NEPOMUK will take a long time.

Actually, I don’t think NEPOMUK is even remotely related to communication – it’s about semantics and relating data, isn’t it?

In fact recently there’s been a _lot_ of interest in exactly what NEPOMUK and its technologies are actually doing for the user. I don’t know why it’s popped up now and what triggered it but at least I now have some hope that it’s going to become useful soon.

As for Google Wave, I think a good thing to do I watch what happens to Twitter first and then try to relate it to wave.

Matija "hook" Šuklje says: (4 October 2009)

Aaaaand Google is about what? …semantics and relating data!

If nothing else, that’s the key to modern search engines and the basics of profiling for advertising. The former is the bread and the latter the butter of Google ;)

From what I can tell, if KDE were to (and AFAIK that’s the long-term plan) to use the PIMO ontology to relate all the contacts of the same person to that person; apply that to already quite abstracted layer of communication (Kopete, KMail, Telepathy, Choqoq, …); mix together with some NEPOMUK magic when it comes

I completely agree that there’s not much to look at from the users’ point of view when we’re talking about NEPOMUK and I am a bit disappointed that it takes so long to actually *see* anything. But on the other hand, I didn’t like Kerry (i.e. Beagle search) much and I think and hope that NEPOMUK, being a lot more than that — heck, even Strigi by itself is more powerful then Kerry/Beagle! — will first be done so it works decently before it gets more user interfaces.

This being said, from what I can tell, KDE devs are currently trying to port as many apps as possible to use Akonadi and be NEPOMUK-aware. Just having an indexing and searching tool pretty much useless unless you have apps that can use that data to make something more interesting.

But, yeah …I’d be wonderful if more people would be working on it to produce more interesting solutions with it as soon as possible! XD

P.S. I also miss Sonnet …it was planned to be a very advanced spell checker for KDE4 (it could tell which language each word or sentence was from from only 3 characters!), but the developer disappeared without a trace and the project died :\

Dion Moult says: (4 October 2009)

Sorry, I’m still a bit confused as to how Google Wave is alike NEPOMUK?

Matija "hook" Šuklje says: (5 October 2009)

OK, I have to be honest that I haven’t looked too much into Wave and have only read a few comments and seen the first 20 minutes of its presentation video and skipped through bits of the rest of it.

This is no exactly the post I was referring to in the previous post, but this explains it a bit …look at the comments:
http://whilos.blogsite.org/?p=144

Dion Moult says: (5 October 2009)

Aha yes, that’s more like it. It’s the OpenDesktop. The Social Desktop. Whether or not that’s integrated with the semantic desktop (which is all the NEPOMUK stuff) is secondary.

Which is a bit what I’m doing with WIPUP :)

But yes, if Wave is implemented on the application level, which I doubt’ll be too hard (right clicking? drag and drop? yeah, the desktop could do that ages ago!) with the OpenDesktop initiative I think it’ll really be quite something.

thinkMoult - Back from Australia « says: (18 October 2009)

[...] also got a Google Wave account to play with (from Marvin, whose shared interests are in the downfall of TMNet, our ISP [...]

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Dion Moult

Born in 1992 (do the math), Male, and floating around the GMT+8 timezone. I do graphic design, some 3D work, and I'm currently working on a "soon" to be released 3D animated movie. I do some programming here and there and have become fluent in XHTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. Web development is my main area of computer expertise but I always have some weird and fantastic projects being juggled around my schedule. I like the concept of open-source and run Gentoo Linux. I play the piano and compose music. I hate this blog design but I'm never happy with any design.

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