Home of Rex Havoc, Space Adventurer and other assorted Geekeries.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Wave to have application store | News | TechRadar UK
This will be a very important development in the success of Wave. The iPhone has grown enormously by making high quality apps simple to pay for and receive. The key difference for Wave will be that the protocol is open for anyone to extend, and the main client (the Google Wave interface) is web based.
Keep in mind too, that over time other clients will emerge that will access the Wave protocol, and it will be interesting to see if the marketplace will extend to such clients.