Thoughts about Wave vs other communication forums already out there.

[Doug Aitken]

I saw a rather naive Twitter post the other day saying that Google
were just annoyed at not being able to buy Facebook and Twitter so
this is the result. Personally I see this as something completely
separate from sites and apps already out there.

Though this does mean that Google will gain a bit more ground in
communication monopoly they have started with Gmail & Talk.

Thoughts?

[Kate Ho]

I think this is completely different from twitter or facebook. This is
about Email 2.0 (sorry, its cheesy, but it gets the point across). Its
about integrating email so that its a bit more clever. As they say in
the presentation, email was meant to replicate snail mail, and how
many people do you know do coordination through snail mail? Its about
Real Time collaboration and its completely different.

Although I was amused by the chat mechanism which shows the other
person each character as you type; ICQ used to have a function like
that. But it mostly got me into trouble as I would start typing in a
sarcastic reply/comment and the other person could see it!

[Brian Boswell]

I agree it's separate from things like Facebook, but it subsumes lots
of the functionality available in those apps.
The range of communication styles Wave offers leaves me wondering why
I would ever want to use an app like Facebook to communicate, when I
can have that style in one place along with the whole rest of the
range.
Roll in collabration tools, versioning, playback, filtering and
repurposing of content and it becomes a pretty heady mix.

I think the social discovery and networking (in the active sense) that
occurs early on in a persons use of Facebook and the like is something
that could very usefully be plugged in to Wave. I guess adoption will
quickly get that going, but I think it desrves more than just hoping
or assuming that people will automatically migrate coversations from
gmail/gtalk into wave - if Google (or the community) can offer a bit
of wow to motivate people to migrate existing conversations and
contacts into Wave I think it would help.

@Kate - I think it's interesting to see the the reaction on the web to
realtime display of typing - some are dismayed, some love it! Maybe a
plugin that buffers keystrokes from transmission until the sender
clicks send will become one of the earliest plugins.

Brian

[Rick Moynihan]

Agreed!! Wave has been a long time coming... And it's ideas are not new, it's
just the ideas contained within it finally got the backing and open
protocol they
needed with what looks to be a cracking reference implementation!

It is my belief, that wave is a rare technology worthy of genuinely
being called a paradigm shift. It's not just another mildly
interesting proprietary technology, but a distributed open
protocol.

Consequently it will be able create value and innovation... And if
we're to believe a corollary of the saphir whorf hypothesis, that "the
medium is the message", it will radically change the way we think and
feel about communication. If people claim that the relatively banal
twitter has changed their lives; then we can expect wave to achieve
vastly more!

@Kate is right about the Email 2.0 thing and I think Brian's points
about active social discovery are important too... Though I'm
reminded of what Jon Udell said in 2002 when describing Dave
Winer's Instant Outliner technology as "the only thing that might
displace email would be some kind of persistant IM. That's exactly
what instant outlining is. If it catches on, and it's buzz-worthy enough
to do that, we'll have a framework within which to innovate in ways
that email never allowed."

http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a//webservices/2002/04/01/outlining.html

I think Jon will be proved right about instant outlining, it's just
that it'll be in the form of Wave not Instant Outliner which lacked
the other two essential ingredients an open, distributed protocol and
a decent implemenation (OPML sucks). Wave's additional features are
nice and integrated well enough to be staggeringly powerful; but the
collaborative, persistent IM with outlining seems to be wave's killer
proposition.

The opportunities wave presents seem staggering... The fact that
anyone can create free and commercial implementations of ANY PART OF
THE WAVE STACK... That anyone can host waves, addressing many privacy
concerns whilst allowing further innovation in technology and business
models is great.... Will we see companies selling wave hosting in the
same way they do web hosting? Will we see specialised wave
client/servers for niche industries in the same way we see specialised
web servers and apps? I hope so!

For me, Web 2.0 felt more like Web 1.1... behind all the conferences
and hot air there was a small amount of progress and innovation in
technology and marketing (Web 2.0 was more about mining customer data
than anything else).

People have long been thinking Web 3.0 would be the semantic web, and
I've never agreed. Web 3.0 will happen; not because of semantic pixie
dust but because of XMPP the Wave stack and the innovations that are
built on it. Web 3.0 will be the realtime read/write web... It will
simultaneously empower and enslave us; where the extra slack it gives
us to achieve more with less, will be the rope we use to tie ourselves
tighter to the whims of others.

We can finally bebo our facebook's and tweet our last tweets. The
future is here, it's just not distributed (outside of Google) yet.

The singularity is being ushered nearer in waves,

R.

2009/6/4 Brian Boswell <eloquen...@googlemail.com>: