samedi 8 août 2009

Google Wave too complicated? I don't think so

There is quite a bit of discussion about Google Wave, and how it’s potential for success is severely diminished by complexity. True, the concept behind the entire solution is more difficult to grasp than email, but I wouldn’t count Google out yet.

I don’t think it’s fair to judge Wave’s complexity in its current developer preview form — there are still plenty of bugs, performance issues, and usability problems. Performing basic things like marking something as “spam” or replying to a wave can take a bit of digging if you’re used to Gmail.

Google needs to work really hard on the Wave user experience, and clearly define its advantages over traditional email so that average users can grasp the concept and get excited about it. If Google isn’t 100% confident they can do that, it makes more sense for Google to build out Gmail with new Wave-backed features.

What do you think?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1506

Can Google Wave Take Facebook One Step Further ?

google-wave-facebook

Very strange ideas come to my mind on a regular basis. I guess that’s just the way I am. But then guess what, those strange ideas usually come to me in the weirdest places ever. This one came to me as was taking my shower. It appears to me that with Wave coming up, Google could very well take over Facebook. At first glance one may think both products are not related and that’s completely true but when you think about it with a certain angle (the way I do it showering…), things make more sense.

One of the reasons I hardly use Facebook is because it’s a mess. The social service first became popular because it was a free alternative to those who wanted to get back in touch with their college mates. Then people started to add their friends. Then they added their family members. And their colleagues. And some add their professional relationships. Some people also add contact from various places, in my case, people from France, from the USA, from the UK or Germany or Italy…

Sure, Facebook is a great interactive tool. But there is one problem: I don’t speak the same way to all those people. Paradoxically, people are having very personal discussions with family members in a given language that is also visible by their collegues or foreign contacts. It just doesn’t make sense. Besides, Facebook does not offer options to filter your wall. Basically, I would like to be able to categorize my contacts and be able to choose who can see each of my updates by simply checking a box.

So why Google Wave ?

When introducing Wave, Google basically described it as a private wiki editor. Instead of sending an email, the user would create a new conversation on a central server and simply invite the contacts of his choice to participate in it or to edit the conversation. For Google, Wave shoud replace email by offering a real time conversational tool mixing email and instant messenger. Wave will be extendable with modules/applications produced by third party developers in order to enpower the collaborative aspect of the tool. If this could very well define tomorrow’s email system this could certainly appeal users like me who would like to be able to filter their updates over at Facebook. A conversation sent to my family could be a sort of private wall updated on a regular basis in which all sorts of medias could be integrated. One of those plugins enables the user to embed a wave (a conversation) in a weblog and use it as a commenting system.

So much for this shower-thought. We’ll see how Wave performs when it launches later this year.

http://yahoovibes.com/2009/08/can-google-wave-take-facebook-one-step-further/

Will Google Wave Provide an SEO Benefit?

Everyone is going gaga over Google’s latest innovation, Google Wave. What they’re excited about mostly is its presumed impact upon e-mail and the social communication aspect of the service. I agree that both of these facets of Google Wave are exciting and revolutionary. However, no one seems to be talking about the implications of search engine optimization in using the service.

Read more: http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/08/07/google-wave-seo/

Google Wave on iPhone first hands-on

Check out the first hands-on with the Google Wave for iPhone web app. Just like Google Latitude, it's not an app to download from the iTunes App Store but accessed via Safari.

The lucky folks at Engadget were shown the Google Wave for iPhone app at Google's San Francisco headquarters where all of its functions were working. However, in the video above (filmed later) a number of bugs have found their way into the app.

The faults with the Google Wave app aren't really surprising as this version is just an early developers-only release. We're impressed anyway.

The app lets you access you contacts, your waves (collections of content) and their creations too. Waves are synced between the phone version and the desktop implementation of Google Wave.

Engadget says its first look at the Google Wave for iPhone app gave them a sneak peak at slideshows, picture galleries and how Youtube embeds work in the service.

Google Wave is still set to launch by September 30
and the iPhone app will appear at the same time.

Find out all you need to know about Google Wave in our complete guide.

(via Engadget)

Google Wave dev preview hands-on and impressions

After an impressive debut at Google I/O, the company's newest experiment and collaborative chat client has been making its way into the hands of developers in the lead-up to a torrent of new testers on September 30th. We had a chance to stop by Google's San Francisco office last week for a guided tour of the latest build of Wave with creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen, and have since then spent the better part of our free time working through the ins and outs of the new communication platform. Does it live up to the hype, even in this bug-infested interim build? Read on to find out.

"Everything's shiny, Capn'. Not to fret!"

Firefly fans may instantly recognize that quote, but participants of the Google Wave dev preview tend have an almost Pavlovian aversion to the phrase. For them, it's a signal that you've managed to find a bug that's crashed the program, grinding your experiences to an abrupt halt. "We're working hard on three things right now," said Lars, "stability, speed, and there's a stack of usability problems that recent users have uncovered for us." On its September 30th launch, there won't be any surprise features from what we've already seen shown -- "nothing new, but less of the 'shiny,'" he said, referencing its fail whale error screen. Our first ten minutes with the web app were apparently pretty typical for new users, tinkering around with every feature as we write and edit each other's incoherent babble, watching in a stupor as characters materialize on screen in real-time with the other person's typing.


The interface is easy to adjust to, especially for those familiar with Gmail. From start up, you've got your navigation and contacts on the left rail, your inbox in the middle, and your current open waves on the right. Any window can be minimized, and doing so will send it to a tab along the top row adjacent to Wave's logo, and can be fully accessed from there as drop down windows. Honestly, we found this preferable to having the non-wave windows propagate the screen, as it cleared up valuable screen real estate and gave us more room to spread out multiple wave conversations. Unfortunately, its system for organizing multiple open windows was puzzling: with five waves open, four vied for space in the left column while one particularly empty wave hogged the right all to itself. It was pretty illogical, and we've got no idea at this point how to drag them around and fix, but we're willing to go on faith for now that this will be remedied before too long.

In any given wave, you have the option to start a new entry, edit an older one, or even edit someone else's message. Replies can be situated after a thread or even embedded in the middle of another message altogether, and each one can be either public or private / shared with only a select number of participants. Pasting in YouTube and Google Docs links give you the option to turn the URL into a working embed, and with Google Gears, you can drag and drop images to create a gallery -- in theory at least, we're still having trouble testing that last bit ourselves. Any time you hop into someone else's message to edit, the byline changes to reflect your contributions, but at that point, there's no way to tell who wrote what without going step-by-step through the playback history. In this sense, Wave's best suited for use as a collaborative tool, and Lars' real-world example here is contract negotiation, whereby multiple participants go through a legal document, create in-line discussions (public and private) of sections, and copy over sections into new waves for more fine-tuning. Lars noted that the underlying algorithms link the original and copied wave together, and further down the road, there'll be an option to synchronize the changes you made in the copied wave with the original. At this stage, there's no export to Google Docs function, but that could change in the future and, either way, someone could write an extension to get the job done.

One of Google's initiatives to attract business / enterprise customers is the ability to create your own Wave server that doesn't live in the cloud, and as it was explained, any part of a wave that's privy only to people on the enterprise server, including private in-line replies to public threads, will exist only on the local server, while portions shared publicly or with a member outside of the server will co-exist in the cloud.

Extensions
One of the coolest tricks we saw at Google I/O -- certainly the one that earned the loudest applause -- was real-time text translation. We haven't done any language conversions ourselves, "Swedish Chef translator" notwithstanding, but we did get a glimpse at what else Wave's extensions would be capable of. Some of the more interesting (albeit not necessarily exciting) examples were kasyntaxy and i-cron, two bots that you can add as users to a wave that would format and execute your code, respectively -- again, not the most thrilling demonstration, but it does an apt job of showing off the capabilities and potential use beyond novelty. Unsurprisingly, there's also a Twitter extension in development, for making a wave dedicated to just reading your feeds or for sending out updates through the platform.

Other than an ad hoc wave listing extensions, there's no integrated database for developers to show off their wares. To our surprise, though, Lars said the team is toying with the idea of an app store with revenue sharing. He was quick to point out this was just one of many monetization strategies being floated around at this point, but we gotta say, it's definitely an intriguing idea.

Mobile
Back at Google I/O during a Q&A session on Wave, no one would say for sure if or how the live updates would work on the mobile platform. Fortunately, someone on the team found a way to make it work as recently as a few weeks back. It's confirmed to work on your iPhone or Android as a web app -- it's even got a home screen-friendly icon to boot -- but at this point, and by Lars' own admission, it's too buggy to really work at all. At our meeting last week, Jens was able to go into a wave via iPhone, watch the text update live, and even go through a gallery of pictures. As you can see in the video, however, we've had nowhere near the same stroke of luck, instead getting stuck with the "shiny" error message with every attempt to peer further into our inbox.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/06/google-wave-dev-preview-hands-on-and-impressions/

lundi 3 août 2009

Google Wave: Promising, but Still Buggy

Google was kind enough to invite me to a demonstration of the developer preview of Google Wave, straight from the Wave creators themselves.

Google Wave co-creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen last night treated a small group of journalists to the Wave experience in the Wave sandbox live from Google's San Francisco office.

I found the Wave experience promising, but buggy. However, I had a few things working against my session, as you'll soon read.

First, I attended virtually from my home office in Connecticut. I dialed into a conference call bridge and was on speaker phone for 70 minutes for the length of the demo.

Lars warned us right off the bat: "We've had a horrible day. Our indexers have fallen over, so we're having a little bit of a hard time getting Waves back and forth across the wire."

However, Lars and our small group of eight or so people were soon under way in a new Wave:

Google Wave intro screen.png

In the Wave, I found myself and the others contributing non sequiturs in a sort of real-time wiki -- editing each other's sentences.

Lars said he and other Googlers use Wave in meetings for collaborative note-taking and people don't even notice that some of the users aren't physically in the meeting room because the users are collaborating in real time. See how:

Wave concurrent editing.png

I'm not going to lie: I got goose bumps. The real-time collaboration was both freaky and liberating, a departure from one-to-one e-mails and instant messages.

Sure, I've done group chat before, but it's not the same. You can see the different colors automatically filled to delineate users. But Lars also tried to upload files, and this didn't work well today.

I watched the pictures he and others tried to pull into the Wave spin their processing wheels, but couldn't quite make it into the Wave. I sure rooted for them, though.

Google Wave demo pic 2.png

The collaboration happens so fast that unless you've been Waving awhile, it's easy to stumble across each other's words. You need to do a sort of Blue Man Group imitation, waiting to see what others write or do to know how to respond.

It was a blast. However, I kept getting crashes that looked like this throughout the demo:

Read More

What will Google Wave kill first?

Google's new Wave service is billed as revolutionising e-mail. But it might not be existing e-mail and messaging vendors that feel the pinch first.

You've probably heard about Google Wave. Revealed at the Google I/O developer conference in May, it demos Google's evolution of e-mail, a method of communication that hasn't really moved on any in 40 years. The techies were cock-a-hoop and quite a few of those who've seen videos of the demo are just as excited.
Read More

Google Open Sources Parts of Google Wave's Code

In May, at the Google I/O developer conference, the search engine giant unveiled Google Wave -- a Web platform that integrates e-mail with IM, document sharing, for near real-time interaction and collaboration. Now, Google intends to open source the platform's protocol and a significant portion of its code. Google has also made the Operational Transform (OT) code open source to all.

The Operational Transform (OT) code supports the Google Wave platform, while the underlying protocol is supposedly a simple client/server prototype that uses the Wave protocol. Google Wave is based on the operational transformation architecture introduced by the Jupiter Collaboration System developed at Xerox PARC. What is does is it puts all shared content on the server. A client cannot edit content without sending an operation to the server. The operation cannot be sent unless the server allows the client to send one. According to Google, this method does require the server to keep multiple copies of content for each client.
Read More

A Preview of Google Wave, Gmail of the FutureA Preview of Google Wave, Gmail of the Future

The Gmail (Google) vs. Hotmail (Microsoft) war continues; and this time Google has really stretched far into the lead. Google looked to the development team of the Rasmusen brothers, the creators of Google Maps to help them build Google Wave. At the Google IO Convention, Lars Rasmusen gave a sneak peak to the new open sourced, personal online communication and collaboration tool. It is a web hosted email system like Gmail or Hotmail that promises to extend beyond the current limitations of traditional emailing. Google Wave was introduced first to developers to aggregate assistance in discovering bugs and developing new extensions to enhance its functionalities.

As Lars explained, emailing was thought of 40 years ago; they based the foundation of Google Wave to reflect how email would work if it were created today. Traditionally an email is created from one source then sent out to one or multiple recipients. Each recipient has to wait to receive the email to reply and then it goes back to the originator. With Google Wave, the email message source will be thought of as one discussion started by someone that will be hosted online and accessed by everyone you would like to have in the conversation online. It allows emails to be seen in real time making it a mix between email and instant messaging.

Read More

Google Wave Developer Preview Hits More Than 3.3 Million Views

Jonas Klit Nielsen Written by Jonas Klit Nielsen

“While we’re waiting” is a rough translation of the title of a program on national TV here in Denmark. The program is shown every year on the 24th of December and starts in the morning to make the day fly by for all the children looking forward to getting presents in the evening (yes, in Denmark we get presents in the evening on the 24th. We don’t have to wait until Christmas morning).

Billede 10

Well, that same feeling hit me today when looking at yet another article speculating in Google Wave. Will it forever change the way we communicate or will it flunk?
Read More
 
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