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:
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:
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.
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:
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire