Google Wave
Bruce D'Arcus
start to imagine the opportunities presented with Google Wave*, and
maybe as time and interest permit, attempt to shape the direction of
the effort so that it provides the kind of foundation we would need.
I read Wave as sort of what would happen if you were to take the best
features of GMail, Google Docs, and IM, fast forward five or so years
and rethink the assumption they need be separate, and make it all a)
distributed, b) extensible, and c) open source (in turn built on an
open protocol).
It seems to me some sort of citation robot would be an obvious
opportunity, though I think such a thing ought to be based on a
distributed model.
Still TBD exactly how extensible Wave will be though (for example,
does the rich text support allow fields?).
Bruce
ahoward
how widespread the adoption is, and that's not something we're going
to know until a good 6 months to a year after it's released, whenever
that is. Personally, I'm skeptical, but I usually am. I think that the
most potentially useful feature, going by the mashable link, is the
ability to embed Waves into a site. I'm envisioning each group having
its own Wave. Out in the wild, a Zotero Robot (ZoteRobot...?) might be
difficult to tweak just right. It would have to have truly brilliant
semantic algorithms to figure out what items are appropriate and when,
if it has the entire libraries of several people or even the entire
set of public items at its fingertips. If the robot were restricted to
just the items belonging to the group hosting the Wave, then I could
see it being more accurate and useful. It would also be a good step
toward making Zotero.org a true collaborative research portal.
Certainly something to think about. You mention trying to shape the
development of Google Wave. What sort of additional features or tweaks
do you see as potentially useful?
Andrew
Bruce D'Arcus
>
> I think the biggest factor in how useful Wave could be to Zotero is
> how widespread the adoption is, and that's not something we're going
> to know until a good 6 months to a year after it's released, whenever
> that is. Personally, I'm skeptical, but I usually am. I think that the
> most potentially useful feature, going by the mashable link, is the
> ability to embed Waves into a site. I'm envisioning each group having
> its own Wave. Out in the wild, a Zotero Robot (ZoteRobot...?) might be
> difficult to tweak just right. It would have to have truly brilliant
> semantic algorithms to figure out what items are appropriate and when,
> if it has the entire libraries of several people or even the entire
> set of public items at its fingertips. If the robot were restricted to
> just the items belonging to the group hosting the Wave, then I could
> see it being more accurate and useful. It would also be a good step
> toward making Zotero.org a true collaborative research portal.
I think, compared to Wave, one major weakness of Zotero is that it has
been built (so far) with the assumption of a centralized solution. I
don't think that needs to be so.
I'm thinking, for example, that one could cite items by simply adding
URI links, or by accessing some kind of "library" panel that could
access and persist data from different places; not limited to Zotero.
> Certainly something to think about. You mention trying to shape the
> development of Google Wave. What sort of additional features or tweaks
> do you see as potentially useful?
E.g. rich text fields:
<http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-api/browse_frm/thread/59ac91a5aea4d814>
One of the Google devs responded.
Bruce