Mon
Oct 12 2009
05:31 am
Progress walks the path it knows it should...
By: EricLykins

...then again it's good to sometimes have the good sense to stay home.

Why am I being weird right now, and does Google's next big thing to replace everything, Google Wave, want to keep you locked indoors forever? Am I going to let them and are you going to like it? Confused? We'll work through this. It's probably going to be important because it's probably going to be the largest user developed intrusion since the invention of government. Will we make it useful for the general welfare of mankind,will it be dangerous or just fun to laugh at? Google Wave is brand new- 100,000 people were given invites to test it and each of them was given 8 invitations to give out. Before this infection spreads from these 800,000,000 lab rats like a zombie apocalypse I will attempt to steer you around the hype, over the hoopla and straight into the thorough confusion that is Google Wave so far. Then we can decide whether or not we need to gather weapons and run to the hills.

continued...

First, a semi-related side link from the Saturday NYT about IBM's new partnership with Big Brother.

From the indiatimes.com today, "Google Wave: Here's the first user experience" This is your very basic overview.

"Google Wave: First Impressions from Real People, Not 'Experts'" at thoughtpick.com offers the conclusion that

Google Wave is a phenomenal new technology that we have yet to see or imagine how it will impact our online & offline world. But I am as certain as I can be that it will definitely impact it somehow...Will it replace email or Twitter or Friendfeed or other existing tools? I don’t know. But I suggest that instead of comparing it to the things we know, Google Wave is quite possibly going to become something unlike anything we can imagine.

So we still don't know what it is, but
It may even turn out to be useful in the education and health fields, which means it's harder to understand than the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or damped harmonic oscillators but easier than understanding the Swedish Chef or the health care reform bill:
*If anyone has any ideas for streamlining healthcare IT with waves please see Brian Ahier
*The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning offers their excitement about an "all-in-one software platform for the classroom and beyond" with "The Wired Campus." This thing could be used as an efficient course management system. This post at tumblr also covers how wave could be used for customer support, as a project management system, how it could change places like blogs and forums, and reiterates the excitement of educational institutions which have been given a lot of these early invites:

With Google so focused on education as to giving early invites to Educational institutions before the world had a glimpse, makes sense. I refer once again to the “What Will You Use it For?” Wave in the dev preview for some ideas for how Wave can be used in education.

- Building a more interactive / creative learning environment
- Proofreading / writing papers
-Brainstorming potential project ideas
- Interactive tutoring from home
- Collaborative Environment for Cyber Schooling

With more widgets, you could embed streams and communicate with professors in real-time. We’re excited about Wave’s potential to transform education.

There are of course some paranoid notions with awesome titles such as "Desperate Fiends Paying To Have Google “Big Brother” Their Lives" to consider:

Naturally, people are gonna put their lives on this thing, which Google will hold in their severs to one day hand over to the government when they ask for it. This is mildly unsettling.

and a snapshot of the Google Wave extension list does look a little creepy: Table of Contents/Robots/chatbots/conversion/games/groups/integration/polling, etc.

"Google Wave - A case study in 21st Century User Assistance":This is the link with all the other links you'll want later when you actually start using this thing, and this post at tumblr also covers how wave could be used for customer support, as a project management system, how it could change places like blogs and forums, and reiterates the excitement of educational institutions which have been given a lot of these early invites:

With Google so focused on education as to giving early invites to Educational institutions before the world had a glimpse, makes sense. I refer once again to the “What Will You Use it For?” Wave in the dev preview for some ideas for how Wave can be used in education.

- Building a more interactive / creative learning environment
- Proofreading / writing papers
-Brainstorming potential project ideas
- Interactive tutoring from home
- Collaborative Environment for Cyber Schooling

With more widgets, you could embed streams and communicate with professors in real-time. We’re excited about Wave’s potential to transform education.

So, how does it actually work and how can we make it work really well? jasonkolb.com = crystal ball of the internet.

Here's something else you might need: WHEN ZOMBIES ATTACK!: MATHEMATICAL
MODELLING OF AN OUTBREAK OF ZOMBIE INFECTION

Topics:
bizgrrl's picture

eWeek's Top 10 Complaints

Submitted by bizgrrl on Mon, 2009/10/12 - 8:46am.

eWeek's Top 10 Complaints about Google Wave:

1. Don't believe the hype.

Brian A.'s picture

I'm uninvited

Submitted by Brian A. on Mon, 2009/10/12 - 10:43am.

But from the previews/reviews I seen it at least looks like a neat techno-toy.

I doubt the wave adds much more government snooping beyond that which already exists.

Brian A.
I'd rather be cycling.

EricLykins's picture

Absolutely. Do you think

Submitted by EricLykins on Mon, 2009/10/12 - 2:20pm.

Absolutely would like an invite. Do you think there's anything to what the crystal ball says about this XMPP protocol?:

XMPP is so versatile that if it becomes widely adopted it will be to the Internet what HTTP was: a platform for new types of applications. And where HTTP as a platform is a server-centric model, XMPP is capable of peer-to-peer communication.

Remember what happened when everyone got HTTP clients (they're called browsers :) ? The Internet exploded. Well, if everyone gets a full-fledged XMPP client I think you can expect roughly the same thing to happen.

One of the most fascinating features of XMPP is the way things are addressed. EVERYTHING is addressable over the network. You can talk directly to ANYTHING, and ANYONE. I can't stress how big of a shift that would be from the current model. It's HUGE. I wrote a whole series of posts on this a few years ago, and it's just as exciting now as it was then.

Let's take a step back and think about this for a second. I'll probably do another post just on the addressing scheme at some point because it's so key, but it's worth a brief recap.

* Right now I cannot send text directly to your instant message account (unless you're using an XMPP-based client), I have to send the message to your IM server which relays the message to you.
* I cannot send audio directly to your phone, the phone company has to route it there.
* I cannot share a picture directly with your Facebook account, I have to sent it to Facebook first to be carried on to you.
* I can't send a file directly to you, I have to put it on a share or email it to you.

(Not to mention the fact that these are all disconnected, you can't combine these into a single message stream. XMPP addresses that problem very nicely, as the wave client shows.)

XMPP removes these intermediaries from the network. Social networks and proprietary transports no longer have an exclusive license to deliver content, the clients talk directly to one another.

Do you see the difference? There are no longer social networks or any other type of networks required to relay the communication, we are now down to exactly 3 components:

1. Clients
2. Storage
3. Applications

Of course there is always the underlying dumb pipes that transport the data, but from a functional perspective the network has been normalized out of importance.

What are the cable companies going to do when google becomes my tv guide and the keyboard or phone controls the display panel in my living room (or all the rooms) that I use for watching movies and sports and news that get pumped into my house wirelessly?

Stick's picture

Looks cool

Submitted by Stick on Mon, 2009/10/12 - 5:02pm.

It looks cool, but I am dubious of all the hype. I'm working on my third online learning environment, and I don't see Wave as being that big of shift for the academy that Google is claiming. What interests me is that it might make it easier to work collaboratively on a journal article or research project. If anybody has an invite they are not using, please throw it my way. A colleague and I are beginning a new project in November, and it would be a great way to test it out as a collaborative tool.

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