[pmwiki-users] OT: Google Wave -- the new wiki (and everything else)

Radu Luchian radu at monicsoft.net
Mon Jun 1 15:01:33 CDT 2009


Someone wasn't paying attention :) I remember people dissing html when it
came out as an alternative to Gopher...
So here's a summary for people who didn't feel like watching all the
presentation and doing the subsequent cursory research into the docs
available.

Of course, it didn't help that the wave presentation was painfully drawn out
with 'clap-for-me-I'm-so-cool' and 'watch-out-here-comes-the-bug'
interludes. Luckily, that team is better at design and programming than
making presentations.
Don't look at the wave as a tool, it's a protocol, a platform for
interaction, with people and tools transparently mingling by way of their
digital output. The first two thirds of the presentation was showcasing
individual tools they built to run on this platform.

I was looking for a long time for many of the features included in this
collaboration platform. The blip paradigm is great for maintaining concise,
(un)foldable history, and doing all sorts of other neat tricks.

The wave is much less of a mess than email. You get ONE copy, ONE coherent
message. Anyone can edit out uninteresting parts. Or change any part of the
message. Or collapse (hide/show) a (set of) sub-wave(s). I haven't seen this
level of low change granularity ever since *nix's talk and its n and y
branches. It's like real chatting, where (if you don't want to), you don't
have to wait for the other people to write an epic story and press Enter
before you can see where s/he's going. And unlike real chats, you don't have
to interrupt the speaker in order to make your own point. It's like a wiki
cured of markupitis, in which people can actually work on the same page at
the same time - without locking files and having to figure out how to
----
integrate
----
simultaneous
----
edits.
----
... because the system does it instantly. Not to mention that change
ownership is guaranteed through the robust, mature account admin tool Google
is well known for.
And the contextual spelling/translation tools? Wow. I hope those scale up
gracefully.
With background robots you can even integrate on-the-fly markup, that gets
converted to its output as soon as it's typed. Heck, the sky (and server
power) is the limit to what you can have a wave do.

No, there are only two problems with the waves (that I can see so far):
- avoiding nasty loops in robot behavior and
- the enormous amount of server activity it will generate :)
This is not a puppy one can run off of a shared hosting account :)

Cheers,
Radu

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 11:48 PM, jdd <jdd at dodin.org> wrote:

> Tegan Dowling a écrit :
> > I haven't finished watching all of it, but it's exciting.
>
> not really - the "wave mail" will become very fast a mess
>
> it's simply a way to edit a document simultenaously by several people.
> May be usefull for a wiki, but for a mail, one can't trim the
> uninteresting part, so the document can only grow
>
> jdd
> NB: I must say I stopped viewing after half an hour
>
>
>
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