aves
But it’s not going to happen overnight. It will be five years before we can say “this actually works.”
Posts Tagged ‘future’
Lars Rasmussen talks to CNET UK
Why Email Needs Replacing (or Why Wave Matters)
In Post on 2010-03-30 by Joshua 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.
How Wave Could Tackle the Spam Problem
In Post on 2010-03-30 by Joshua 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.
A quote from Novell: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration
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.
Google Wave Available to 31000 University Students
In Post on 2010-03-20 by Joshua 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 #liuJoakim Nejdeby on Twitter.
French, Postboxes and Wave
In Post on 2010-03-18 by Joshua 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.
Wave on Slow Cook
In Post on 2010-03-16 by Joshua 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.
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.
Lars: Remove Participant Feature due “Within a Month”
We have begun testing remove participant internally and hopefully it will hit externally within a monthLars Rasmussen, one of the lead Wave developers.
In a Wave entitled “Google Wave User Black List”, Lars piped up to offer advice on the best way to avoid and take action against known trolls and abusers and offered the above titbit about the imminent release of the ability to remove participants from Wave.
Read a Wave in a Fast, Simple Interface
In Post on 2010-01-31 by Joshua Tagged: blogging, client, embed, future, interface, opensource, use case
Want to share a public wave with someone who hasn’t jumped on the Wave bandwagon? Need to publish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from editors and wanna-be trolls? How ’bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and displays it as a web page without the reader needing an account.
Four reasons Wave has a real chance to replace email.
In Post on 2009-10-27 by Joshua Tagged: email, extensions, future, money, preview, roadmap, store
The Next Web attended the Google Wave GTUG (Google Technology User Group) meetup in London where Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon (the two responsible for Google Wave) gave a presentation on some upcoming Google Wave APIs. James Glick from The Next Web has included a dot-point summary of the most important parts, a few of which I have included below. Read his article for even more juicy inside information.
Read the article at The Next Web for moreTo cut a potentially exhausting blog post short, a summary of snippets from their presentation include:
Extension gallery to be fully up and running in months with a wider collection and sharing functionality.
An extension store is planned where developers would be able to display and charge for apps.
[… snipped …]
Google Wave will be able to be deployed within networks and intranets for organisations and companies to use internally.
Although it has been requested by a substantial amount of preview users, there are no plans to intergrate Gmail or any mail with Google Wave. The API
The rest of the items on Glick’s list show Wave team is obviously committed to improving the experience for everyone. The four items I’ve included above highlight for me the potential for Wave to grow beyond the bounds of what Google can achieve and put it firmly in the hands of developers who can make it a thriving, useful tool. If Wave can ever dethrone email as the default form of communication, it will be because of these for things: The ability for developers to extend it and make money from it, for businesses to deploy their own secure versions, and for Wave to send and receive email. Although it looks like the Google team don’t have plans to bake email support in, I am confident it will not be long before such an extension is built and available.
