Google Wave?

Benjamin Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Mar 9 00:43:24 EST 2010


  Here's what I learned about Google Wave tonight:

GENERAL BEHAVIOR

  Google has implemented some common GUI concepts in JavaScript/AJAX.
Things (like your folder list, your contact list, and Waves) appear in
what are basically "windows" drawn on the web page canvas.  Clicking
the minimize button turns the window into a button-shaped thing at the
top of the page (kind of like the MS Windows Taskbar).  You can
maximize and close these windows, and drag them around.

  As maddog notes, *very* interactive.  High-latency links need not apply.

  As maddog also noted, the whole thing is very much unfinished.
"Preview", it says.  Some UI elements appear but don't do anything;
obviously needed functionality is missing; it is buggy.  It has a
tendency to occasionally do random things, or to hang, or to error,
etc.

  When it errors, it pop up an error message in a banner across the
top.  It reminds me somewhat of the Amiga "Guru Meditation" banner,
although this is translucent gray, not black with a blinking red
border.  The error text is "Everything's shiny, Cap'n. Not to fret!",
and gives you the option of submitting bug information before
refreshing.  One nice thing is that most of the state is server-side
and transmitted in real-time, so reloading the site/page and then
re-opening what you were doing usually picks up where you left off.

BASIC INTERFACE

  The navigation you see at login resembles something like Gmail or
other web mail clients.  There is a folder list in the upper left, a
contacts list in the lower right, and an Inbox message list front and
center.  Folders are similar to Gmail labels.  There is an "Inbox", an
"All" magic folder, a "Trash" folder, etc.

  Contacts list.  Mine appeared to default to people from my Gmail
contacts who had Google user accounts with Wave access.  It picks up
the user icons ("avatars") from elsewhere in Google's account/profile
system.  The icons are used a lot, which can be an issue if nobody has
uploaded an icon, leaving everyone identified by the same generic
icon.

WAVES

  The major unit in all this is called a "Wave".  Think of Waves as
like a conversation in Gmail, or a topic in a web forum, or a
top-level thread in a threaded mail reader.  (There are a number of
differences, but it's a workable analogy.)

  Each Wave has one or more participants, entered or picked or dragged
from the contacts list.  Participants can be added at will, but the
"Remove" button doesn't work yet.  There is a UI thing that lets you
set whether a given participant has "Full Access" or "Read Only".  I
didn't notice who can change that setting.

  Waves have Follow/Unfollow status buttons.  It appears that if you
are following a Wave, any activity in that Wave will cause it to pop
to the top of your Inbox, with "snippet" text of the update.

MESSAGES/POSTS IN A WAVE

  Any participant can post messages to a Wave.  You get a fairly
typical WYSIWYG rich text editing thingy, of the sort which has become
common in the past year or three.  The icon of the user posting the
message appears in the upper left of the message frame; time posted in
the upper right.  Next to the time is a downward-pointing triangle
which drops down a menu of things you can do with that message, like
reply and edit.

  Any participant can edit *any* message.  Not just their own.  A
message which has been edited by multiple participants gets multiple
user icons.  Comparing this aspect to a wiki seems common.  (My
thought was that it acts how I envision LiquidThreads acting (the
message threading extension that's been due to be implemented on
Wikipedia Real Soon Now for the past five years).)

  When you reply to a message, it does some threading, although
display appears limited to one or two levels deep.  There is a menu
option to hide replies, but it does not appear implemented yet.  You
can slit off a reply or sub-thread into a new Wave with a menu
command.  You can delete messages.  (You can even delete a message
someone is typing in, and it disappears from under them.)

  If you double-click a message you get a pop-up menu with the options
for "Edit" and "Reply".  If you point the mouse after a message, a
blue bar appears; click, and it turns into a new reply.  There is also
a toolbar across the top of the overall Wave screen in which commands
may appear.

  There is a "Private Reply" menu command which appears to basically
create a Wave-within-a-Wave.  The same UI elements which let you
view/add participants to a top-level Wave appear.  Presumably only
participants you add here will see you private reply in the Wave.  We
didn't test this much.  I did note that once a Private Reply is
started, it cannot be removed, which leads to clutter if you're not
careful.  (I suspect this is an unimplemented thing.)

CONTENT

  A message posted to a Wave can contain a mix of text, photos,
videos, and Google Gadgets.  Gadgets might as well be called "widgets"
or "controls", but "Gadget" begins with "G", which is a design
requirement at Google.

  Gadgets are basically embedded web content.  It appears this
embedding behaves much like an HTML IFRAME, and may indeed be
implemented in terms of such.  There are a few pre-defined Gadgets
which appear on the WYSIWYG editor toolbar as icons.  There is also an
icon that lets you enter an arbitrary Gadget URL.  However, you can't
just feed it any URL and have that content appear in the message.
Presumably, there is some kind of special format needed, or maybe the
Gadget URL produces metadata which describes the actual content.
Someone said it uses XML, but these days that's kind of like saying
"it uses TCP/IP".

  There are gadgets to do all sorts of things, including embed a map,
trip plan, Yes/No/Maybe voting buttons, weather, etc., etc.  Elsewhere
in the UI they are called "Extensions".

REAL TIME

  One interesting thing is that changes made to content in a Wave
appear to propagate to others in near-real-time.  So as you type your
message, others see your text (and typing errors) appear.  This
happens even for multiple users at once.  As different people type,
their insertion point is indicated for others as the typist's name on
a colored tag.  It looks very chaotic at first, but once you get used
to it, it makes sense.

PLAYBACK

  There is a "Playback" button, which brings up a VCR/web-movie like
control.  You can step forward through each change/edit made to a
Wave.  It will highlight text edits with strikeouts and colors.  This
lets you see the Wave evolve over time.  (It's almost exactly like the
Greasemonkey script  "Animate Changes" for MediaWiki, except the
controls actually work most of the time for Google Wave.)  At any
given step, you can click a button to restore that state.

PING

  There is a feature in the Wave screen called "Ping", which is kind
of like an Instant Messaging system, built using Wave.  Right now,
Ping seems to produce something that behaves just like a regular Wave,
except in a smaller window, and with a title bar that flashes green on
activity.  (The regular Waves do not do that.)  Obviously the intended
use is to get someone's attention to see if they can work with you on
something, but right now there is so little differentiation that I
would think we would be better served by folding the "Ping" feature
into the regular Wave.  OTOH, maybe more changes are coming to Ping.

UNIVERSAL DOCUMENT

  It's a regular thing in computer science to invent the concept of
the "universal document" (my term), where the user is presented with
the same empty document file ("blank page of paper" is the usual
metaphor) for everything, and then one applies tools (like editing
text, editing graphics, adding numbers, etc.) to the blank page to do
work.  This is in contrast to how most systems work, where you use a
text editor to edit text, a completely different program and file to
add numbers, etc.  Apple's OpenDoc, IBM's Taligent, Microsoft's Cairo
(not NT, the other one), are all examples.

  It appears Google Wave may be trying to act somewhat like a
universal document system, in that anything can appear in a Wave.
Even the "user preference settings" are exposed via special Waves.

APPLICATIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGY

  So what is this Wave thing good for?  That's a good question.  I'm
not the first to characterize Wave as a solution in search of a
problem.  It is very "neat", and it seems like it *should* be good for
something, but nobody's quite sure what.

  Part of the problem may be that Wave doesn't seem to easily lend
itself to being compared to existing stuff.  It doesn't do anything
fundamentally new, but it combines a number of old things in fairly
unique ways.

  One suggestion was that it might be good for a Q&A or focus group
type of thing, where everyone starts off on the same thing, but
discussion quickly fractures into a number of smaller groups working
on their own thing.  Indeed, this is how the SLUG meeting ended up --
three or four groups of one to three people working on different
things.

ADMINISTRIVIA

SLUG/Durham/UNH meeting of GNHLUG
Mon 8 Mar 2010
A group effort, led by Rob Anderson
8 people in attendance

-- Ben


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