Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today | Hacker News Reader

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today

radar.oreilly.com

110 pointsajbatac33 comments

> If both people are online at the same time, a wave acts just like an instant message -- except that you see each character as it is typed, just like in subethaedit.

Ah, back to the good ol' days of

  You are a fucking asshole^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmistaken

The article mentions that you can turn off instant update for these messages.

I didn't get that far, but I assumed that it surely would. Still, there will be many people who will be unaware of this, at least long enough to make an initial snafu.

There is an obvious "hide while typing" check box (At least in the current version).

How did you get hold of it?

I saw the demo at google IO. Attendees have early access to develop.

And then the person at the other end thinks "wtf is this guy hiding? Is he even talking to me?". Technical limitations can be very useful to avoid awkwardness sometimes (like the fact that if I don't answer an email within 30 mins it's not taken as a snub - unlike a text message people don't presume you have constant access).

I'd rather change the social norms than continue working with limiting technology - wouldn't you?

No kidding, this is just the traditional Usenet version of threading being made part of the protocol. (Modern web and e-mail threading custom all suck compared to what is the norm now.) While I can see the reasoning for making the system aware of threading from the start, it doesn't seem to solve any of the real problems e-mail and IM suffer from. (All related to signal-to-noise...)

Agreed -- it looks like Wave will dump MORE information overload upon me. I want less, dammit! Less e-mail, less IM, less pictures. Give me only what I will find of utmost value.

I totally agree. I really love imagining a filtering/triaging feature being a part of Wave. If incoming messages were automatically (or with just some amount of learning) given an importance rating, that would make my mind much clearer.

Have you heard David Allen (GTD) talk - he makes a good point that it's not "information" overload that the problem (otherwise your head would explode the first you walked into a library or logged into the Net) - instead it's the "potential meaning overload" - each little email may be very important and so pulls our attention.

I've always found it a good distinction

Great, now we will have spam that tries to game the system to be flagged more important.

I totally agree with you abossy. I just wanted to mention that some people might actually "like" having information overload. People who are information addicts/junkies, or people who have attention deficit disorder, or people who are unskilled when it comes to "focusing" on a single task. There might be two sides to this...

I'm also curious if there's a pattern between introverts and extroverts when it comes to info-overload like this. Assuming spam isn't a problem, an extrovert may enjoy interacting constantly online, with many many different people, over the course of a day. An introvert may be the exact opposite. This would correlate well with "offline" introvert/extrovert behavior.

So the term "information overload" would have a different meaning for an extrovert and an introvert. For the former, it would be spam, or unwanted conversations. For the latter, just too many conversations which have little obvious value (small talk, etc...).

I've not seen any studies comparing introverts-to-extroverts when it comes to online information usage patterns (if anyone knows of one, please post it! :) ). So I'm totally theorizing here without any data.

You just made me nostalgic for talk.

I wonder if this new functionality would entice more people to learn touchtyping over time, since the difference between slow typists and fast ones would be directly observable. Right now if someone sends IMs slowly you're never sure if it's just a case of the other person doing other things or thinking or rewriting... (even with a "is typing" indicator).

I'm doubtful. Looks like something that a few people will think is really cool and 99.9% of the population will ignore.

Google goes for the long term approach and not the short win.

O'Reilly just blew up my buzzword-o-meter with "Federated Wave Clouds" and "a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud."

So instead of sending messages to someone we just send it "in the cloud" and our federated waves generate a response?

Maybe O'Reilly intentionally reinforces vague and confusing terminology in order to publish more books explaining what should have been stated using simple terms in the first place.

Let's give it a try: Google Wave adds structure and web functionality (think embedable widgets) to conversations in a more meaningful and semantic way than normal text-only threaded email and IM. A Wave server uses an XMPP extension to allow peer-to-peer communications thereby removing reliance on sole providers for communications infrastructure.

I realize its just a demo but that UI looks horribly crowded to me. Regardless of how useful it is, I think staring at that all day would give me a headache and send me back to my "old" email.

My initial impression is that it looks like an online version of Outlook/OWA, albeit with more/different features. It's very, very busy with stuff flying all over the place.

They're hitting on a big problem though; centralizing online conversations, regardless of medium, into a single location. Something like this can plug right into your Facebook friends, or company address book, etc... Very neat idea.

Too much marketing lingo though. Please, stop inventing words, like "waves" and what-not; they rarely stick (Who still tells someone they're about to "beam" money to them over PayPal? Who knows what a "lens" is on Squidoo?). I can't even get my Mom to comprehend what "twittering" is yet, never mind a wave. It's too confusing for many people.

For the people that watched the keynote: Kinda funny how they praised JavaScript for an hour and latter, on the AppEngine note they tell us to write Java and let them handle all the conversion to filthy JavaScript :>

Yay, we reinvented Usenet, more cluttered though.

I've figured out what actually supports the internet: the cloud is actually a large piece of hype that escaped sometime in 2001 and now is running its own operating system and sending out press releases.

Seriously, that article was a little too breathless for me. I certainly hope that it is really that cool because that would be awesome. But I've read a lot of hyped articles over the last few years.

Is it too much to ask for a reviewer of a new product to be on a bit of a critical hat? After all, this is a large company coming up with something new that they are going to own. We've got Google Gears, HTML 5, Google Maps, Google Mashups, etc. Would you like Google fries with your Google shake?

It looks great. I hope it is great. I worry about things like identity management and levels of friends with such tools -- not sure if they've solved that. I'm also not sure how other parties besides Google are supposed to own the data, which might be important for some folks.

It's cool, no doubt. But it's not the Apollo moon landing. It's more like Outlook on steroids.

They are opening the protocol. http://www.waveprotocol.org/

Silicon Valley Google Wave Discussion lunch tomorrow (5/31)

Come, Bring a Friend and let's discuss Google Wave over lunch.

Please use the following link: http://www.socializr.com/event/976099347 to RSVP.

Feel free to forward to anyone who might be interested.

Not ready to get excited, right now.

Well maybe I am willing to be excited about the general direction. We have a distributed development environment and the levels of quoting in email do get horrendously out of control. Some of the features described in terms of managing conversation threading and "playback" have potential to address this kind of problem.

Did you watch the video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

I found it pretty exciting, at least.

That demo video blew my mind so much that I'm having trouble processing all the implications of what I just saw.

suggests that the amount and quality of participation goes up radically when comments can be interleaved at a paragraph level.

The way emails grow with repeated and old information and forwards is something I really dislike about email and like the sound of wave.

However, unfortunately wave is destined to fail. Exchange 2010 with Outlook 2010 claims: "Improve user productivity with the ultimate inbox experience." - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/apr09/04-15Exc...

Since Exchange/Outlook will have "the ultimate" inbox experience, Google Wave can neither equal it nor improve upon it.

Oh, I'm sure these products, just like laundry soap , in the superlative war of marketing (see link below), will come up with something to one-up "the ultimate" inbox experience.

Why stop at the inbox? The inbox is so... limiting. Who wants to be stuck in a box?. Maybe something like that.

Article: Detergent can be so much more (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982087.... ).

Thanks Google! This totally validates our collaborative browsing startup, http://www.browseology.com

If you don't want to wait for Google Wave to see updates from everyone in real time, check it out.

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