Archive for March, 2010
In Post on 2010-03-30 by Joshua
closeAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: email, future, opinion, protocol
It’s Old
- Why it’s bad:
- Email was invented 40 years ago to deal with a very different set of communication problems. The web didn’t exist, and email was a simple way to get text from one place to another. Think black screens with green writing and geeks talking to geeks across America. Now we have Twitter, Facebook, and whole new ways to communicate, but our basic building block is email. Everything useful eventually finds an implementation in email, but it’s ill-suited for the task. Sure it’s universal, but just sending images was an afterthought!
- How Google Wave can help:
- It’s built on the latest proven internet technologies. It’s built from the ground up to handle rich media of all different types but still retains some of the things that worked for email in the beginning, like addresses using the @ symbol to send messages to the right place.
Read More »
In Post on 2010-03-30 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: future, opinion, problem, spam
The Wave team have said very little about how they will address the spam problem, but from some clues and hints in the interface and what they have said, I can take a couple of guesses about how they could start to tackle it.
- First up, Wave will ensure messages are signed and verified from the source. Currently email can be forged and made to look like a legitimate email coming from a trusted source. The Wave Protocol specifically addresses this, making it impossible for anyone to “spoof” another address without access to that user’s account.
- Email currently makes it very easy to send millions of messages with little to no cost involved for the sender — they send and delete and don’t need to save copies of them, and the recipient is forced to deal with the accumulated data. The Wave Protocol however, requires the sender to host the wave and keep a copy for future reference. Spammers will no doubt find ways to send and then remove their waves, but if a host no longer hosts the wave, that could be a reliable indication that the sender was a spammer.
- Finally, the few times the developers have been asked about spam they’ve mentioned a possible white-list system. White-listing involves choosing who can send you messages and blocking everyone else. People worry that this will stop legitimate communication, say from long lost friends, getting through. But already built into the interface is a “Requests” link that Wave says are “Waves for users not in your contacts list”. This could allow anyone to contact you, but you’d know at a glance that they weren’t from people you knew and trusted, and could more easily add them to your contacts, or mark them as spam.
I believe a combination of these three factors will go some way to addressing the spam problem. By tying everyone to a Wave server it’s not as economical to spam using waves. By not allowing completely anonymous communication, reported spammers can be more easily shut down, and by white-listing users we can identify potential spam at a snap. The Wave team will hopefully come up with even more solutions to implement and I’ll be interested to see how it develops.
The Google Wave Federation Protocol excited us, because for the first time since email, it provided a way for collaboration systems to cooperate in a non silo’d way . The promise is that each organization can choose what product to use and the communication will flow unimpeded between the different systems, in the same way that people on different email systems can send and receive messages to each other today. This is a collaboration revolution we wanted to be a part of.
“Novell Pulse and Google Wave” — Google Wave Developer Blog.
This is exciting. More detail up soon.
Posted 2010-03-26 by Joshua
In Post on 2010-03-20 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: direction, future, new feature, preview, users
In a short and succinct tweet by Joakim Nejdeby, we finally have news of Google Wave in an Apps environment. With almost little to no fanfare.
Google Wave activated for our students, http://wave.student.liu.se #googlewave #Google #GoogleApps #liu
Joakim Nejdeby on Twitter.
Read More »
In Post on 2010-03-18 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: competition, discussion, future, interface, problem
When I was in grade 8 I learnt French. I say learn, but it was a handful of disconnected words and maybe a sentence or two that I couldn’t possibly remember now. The problem for me was that I knew I was going about learning it the wrong way, but relied on the teacher to teach me the “best way”. See, when I wanted to say a word in French, I first had to think of the word in English, then check my mental filing system for the equivalent word in French. It’s a slow and cumbersome way of recall that never really worked for me, no matter how many times we repeated the words by rote.
I’m not bringing it up now to point out the flaws in my year 8 education, but to highlight something about the way people learn. When Wave was first announced and launched it was described by various people as “sort of like email” or “part instant messenger, part Google Docs”. This is because we often find it easier to understand something new when we “pin” it on a concept we already know and understand. Likening one thing to something else is sort of like my metal filing cabinet I had in 8th grade, useful up to a point, but no way to go about using something on an advanced day-to-day basis.
Which is why I think Google or a third party need to seriously consider how the non-tech-minded are going to learn how to use Wave.
Read More »
In Post on 2010-03-16 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99)
As a follow on from my last post, I felt the need to clarify that this site, First Waves, is not meant to be cutting edge day-to-day technology news. As Google Wave slow cooks over time, so will the posts here. I will cover important developments as they happen, focusing on the shaping of the Wave interface and the maturing of the Wave Protocol.
I want to make it easy for my readers to keep up-to-date as Wave grows, so I’ve added some social media gadgets over in the sidebar. If you join up in some form, I can let you know when First Waves has new content. I’ll refine and make some decisions about which ones I keep in future, so if you have a preferred method, sign up with it now to help me decide which ones to keep! I also have a feed to subscribe to (which also provides an email option) and I update the First Waves Twitter account with posts from here. As you can see on the side there, FirstWaves follows a few hand-picked Wave Geniuses which you can follow with one click if you want to.
I’d love for input and extra perspectives on Wave from the wave community too if you’d like to contribute. You can suggest posts using the Skribit tab in the top left, or email me at josh@firstwaves if you’d like to see something of yours in print.
I know it’s a bit backwards to use a blog for this instead of a Wave, but as the tools that are built for Wave improve, I’ll hopefully do some sort of crossover/merging to cater to dedicated wavers in their native environment!
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
In Post on 2010-03-16 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: debate, direction, discussion, future, use case
I get the feeling talking to regular web-folk that Google Wave was a huge disappointment for them. With the introduction of Buzz, comments and posts flew asking “will this be better than that Google Wave failure?”
It’s taken me this long to figure out that people are not viewing Google Wave the way I do. The current technology life cycle goes something like this:
- Readers are on the lookout for new products to try, and better yet — beta invites to get early exclusive access to the next big thing.
- They try the site, decide if it fits in with their day-to-day activities and if it gives them any benefit over the last shiny new thing they tried.
- They talk it up to their friends to get them to join, as these sites are almost always no fun without a large number of people you know and respect.
Then the cycle repeats for all manner of sites and services.
I do this. Every day I pop open Techcrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Web Worker Daily and others to keep informed of the latest hot places I can claim my name on. I’ve joined Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Plurk, and others too numerous to mention all vying to be the place I share my daily activities. It’s almost addictive to keep on top of the latest sites.
Read More »
In Post on 2010-03-05 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: addon, direction, email, new feature, official help
One of the problems with Google Wave for the non-geek crowd has been how you know you have a new wave?
For dedicated geeks, there are browser extensions, OS specific software, iPhone Push notifications, and more.
But most of these don’t figure in the non-geek arsenal for managing the wash of information from the internet. And for regular folk convincing them to use Wave without these sorts of notifications will be hard simply because they don’t want to bother checking for new waves as well as new emails.
Convincing them may have just gotten easier however with the release of integrated email notifications for your Wave inbox. In a post on the official Google Wave Blog, Ged Ellis explains how to turn on email notifications for new waves. Using the drop down list next to the inbox link (it’s hidden until you hover over it) you can choose an email address to have notifications sent to. The tool even picked my Google Apps email even though it’s not my official Wave address because I’ve set it as primary in my Google profile.
Read More »
In Link on 2010-03-03 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: api, bots, extensions, gadgets, new feature, official help
In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.
The first new feature is the:
Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.
Google Wave Developer Blog Announcement.
Read More »
In Post on 2010-03-02 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Email: josh@firstwaves.org
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows. You can Wave him at nunn.joshua@googlewave.comSee Authors Posts (99) Tagged: bots, extensions, gadgets, official help
Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to publicise more bots and extensions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start seeing a new Extensions link in their navigation panel. Then enterprising Wavers noted that anyone could get access to this Extension information with a search for [group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].
Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.
Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.
Read More »
aves
