Has anyone heard of Google Wave?

Yes, it looks interesting. the concept of “email, if it was invented today” is kinda cool. i’m waiting til i can actually get my hands on it before i pass final judgment.

Yes, it was/is developed here (Australia) and has quite a bit of local publicity. I have played around with it and it doesn’t impress me. Maybe it will get better.

Yeah, I’m not going to watch that whole video. Summary, perhaps?

Like @eponymoushipster said. It’s the concept of email, if it was invented today. There’s really no way for me to summarize it.. It’s way too complex.

I think it is very interesting. Definitely stole the thunder from Microsoft’s Bing announcement. I’d much rather run my own wave server than join Twitter.

“Hosted conversation” is the model, rather than electronic communications aping the model of sending letters back and forth through a postal system. The demo shows e-mail threaded and interwoven with IM, with features that allow such things as dragging from desktop straight into a thread, adding others to the in-progress thread, replay of the thread as it developed, PMing within a multiperson thread, instantly visible replies as they are being typed, interfaces to blogs and mobile devices, dynamic editing, collaborative authoring, and lots of APIs for developers to plug into.

This summation is based on watching the first half hour of an hour-and-twenty-minutes presentation to developers.

(I’m curious what a wave-based fluther would be like)

@phoenyx I’m pretty sure it would be quite awesome.

Yeah…isn’t that with The Cure and other wave music on google?

Wow… I’m amazed at how similar the paradigm is to what we wanted for fluther—- real time collaboration that doesn’t need to be real-time.

We even thought about showing what people were typing as they typed—but decided it’d be too weird.

@andrew please don’t do the showing what people were typing as they type thing talking about privacy man…

Yup, I watched the video when it launched. It seems very interesting, and I love their “show what you type” approach to chatting. However I’m really not sure if they’ll be able to gain a large audience… people are getting used to using one tool, so to switch over to another would require the tool be very easy to use and widely adopted. Still, I’m hoping for a beta account!

The feature where they show what people are typing as they type it can be turned on and off. They had it on to show that it was possible.

I sure hope you can turn off “show as you type”. I did see a little bit about the spellchecker, that sounded cool (but that’s from my interest in linguistics). But yeah, an hour and twenty minutes is too long, I hope I’ll get to try it out sometime soon ;-) (Thanks for the summary @Jeruba.)

@andrew I think that would be cool. You should make it so we can pick to have what we’re writing seen, or not seen.

@Vincentt You can turn it off on Wave :D

I tried it when it released & I hated it. Overly complicated design for what should have been a relatively simple user interface. Either way, here is Google’s blog post about shutting Google Wave down. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here is what you need to know, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”

This only further proves the point, that Google can’t do everything & should stop trying to.

@rpmpseudonym That’s a curious remark – why should Google stop trying?

Just my opinion. They are spreading themselves very thin across a wide field of software & technologies. Instead of focusing on what they do well, search engine related things, they make attempts at other projects that, the end result may not be great, but it builds to the reputation of Google. I feel Google would like to dominate every aspect of owning a computer. Which, I suppose wouldn’t be a bad business model, but what happens in the end, is a large collection of moderately okay services. I would rather have a small, but fine tuned & expertly executed group of my creations.

You can tell Google doesn’t know what to do with their search engine anymore (now that it is near perfected) because their new ‘changes’ seem gimmicky & are met with widespread discontent. From them adding wallpaper to their homepage, to changing the way Google News looks. Google just doesn’t know when to quit. They can’t just sit on their hands & watch the money come rolling in. They are a very greedy company.

I’d say some very nice things have come out of Google’s experimenting – Android is cool, I know of no better RSS reader than Google Reader, Gmail is without doubt the best web-based email client, and I could go on a bit I think. (Yes, they’re getting a lot of control, but from a business model point of view I can totally understand why they’re doing it.)

Also, change is always met with discontent, but without improvement you get behind. They’re also constantly working on their search algorithm and experimenting with self-learning algorithms and the like.