I recently watched the Google Wave developer preview video, that is on http://wave.google.com. I had heard about it, but really only heard that it was “Email if it had been invented today”. So I was like “yeah…alright…sounds like a farse”. But, I can tell you, it really will be amazing.
I am embedding the video so you can have a look at it before you read the rest of the post. However, I understand many of you may not want to watch 1:20 of video, but to see the full extent of it you need to. However, to get a small idea of how cool this is gonna be, I would recommend watching maybe half an hour of it. Seriously…do it, you will not regret it. Think of it as being a TV program.
Click here if you are reading this in a feed reader, and can’t see the video.
Right, so, I would like to talk about some of the things that were shown in the video, and also a few of my own ideas about how this could be used.
- Message editing.
- Playback
- Spell Checker
- Contacts
- API/Protocol
I couldn’t quite word the title to this section how I wanted to do it. Basically it is about the way you can edit the “waves”. So, recently, I was sent an email from a person in my church about something they are thinking about doing soon, and he wanted my opinion on what we could do with a server. So, I got this email that had about 10 emails in the previously bits. So I had to scroll through pages and pages of writing from about 4 different people (Pastor, deacon, website guy and another guy) that seemed to be all about the place, just to get an idea about what was actually happening.
I did not enjoy this, but in Google wave, I would see it all in a much more sensible way. I would see the original email, with the comments everyone had put in it, and I would have to scroll down past “So and so wrote” and “On this date, so and so wrote, to so and so”. It makes so much more sense, saves so much time, and looks so much nicer. This leads on to the next feature.
Instead of trying to figure out what is happening and in what order, I could have used the playback feature. This would show me in what order things will have happened. I really love this feature. It is so cool.
It also shows potential in other areas – if you watched far into the video, you would see that they played a chess game, and showed you the full game through playback. Not very useful, but still a cool way of showing what could be done
Isn’t this the best spell checker you have ever seen? I would just tell it to do its job. I think it is amazing that they managed to get such an advanced spell checker that knows what you want to say because of the context. Very very amazing.
And, if it isn’t “confident” about what you are saying, it allows you to change the word yourself. This is just so cool, and I want this in everything else that I use as well.
I’m not sure whether this happens, but it looks like it from the preview. It seems like it works in such a way like social networks. Unlike email, where you have to maintain your contacts yourself, I think each person maintains their contact details, avatar, etc, and you just add them as a contact. This means no more using a phone number, but realising they changed it 3 weeks ago. Again, I’m not 100% sure this is what happens, but I think it is.
Completely open, has a nice API, and is an actual protocol. This opens so many things. From setting up your own “wave” on your server, to creating desktop clients (like thunderbird and outlook are to email) to creating extensions, to integrating it with other products. It is just such a clever move by google that means we can use the Wave but without using Google.
Obviously, there are so many things you could use this for. From email, to IM, to document collaboration, to coding in groups, to monitoring twitter and identi.ca.
I also had an idea that incorporates with their “Bloggy” extension. They only used it to send photos to their blog, but you could use it as a full blog editing client. This is cool.
I’d love to see how the Wave would work with RSS feeds as well.
I’m sorry guys, I think this is well over the 1000 character limit, but hopefully that didn’t put you off reading this because I think Google Wave has sooo much potential, and I cannot wait until I can ride the wave. Lets hope it makes my surfing so much more exciting.
p.s If anyone gets into Google Wave, and you have invites…I would LOVE one.
