Be Excellent To Each Other

One for the geeks here: http://wave.google.com/

Demo begins at 7:40.

But what is it?

A white hole?

I'm so sorry.

Communication. Email is based on postal mail, and is no longer as good as it can be with our powerful computers and fast connections. This is like a forum, IM client and email in one.
And document collaboration. And a lot of other things. It's most good.

Like Gmail / google chat / google docs then?

Kind of, all in one place, but that's doing it a big disservice.

The spell checker is fucking awesome. It checks whole sentences rather than words, so the dude type "icland is an icland" and it changed it (without him needing to do anything) to "Iceland is an island". Superb.

That's intelligent! Though, I do hate auto-correct, auto-correcting things I do not want auto-correcting. I like a spell-checker to highlight my mistakes but not to change them without me noticing as quite often they are not mistakes but something that the application might not understand.

Sounds crap.

I'll remind you of that when we're using it instead of visiting the forum.

On our hover bikes.

Won't need hover bikes when we can just teleport, Kalmar.

Finished the video now. That's fucking awesome.

The video put me off by appearing to be over an hour long.

Also my computer has no sound as the sound card fell off and is rattling about inside the case somewhere. That's a slight dampener too.

Yep. Signing up for that.

Teleport? Sounds crap.
Partially turns you into Jeff Goldblum.

It's not going to kill off forums like this one, but it's certainly going to change how we read the stuff on them. They won't be forums so much as "wave-centres", just a collection of people.

Forums are crap. (etc..)

Finally gotten around to watching this video, and it looks quite incredible. A lot of thought has gone into this idea.

It's so large, though, that it's quite heavy on the mind. It'll be difficult for me to understand it properly until I get my own hands on it, hopefully later in the year.

In ur wav senta LOLing ur Bitchez

A thought occurs. When in IM mode, Google rightly assumed that getting the message across fast was most important, so the other person can see each keystroke and start replying early if they wish. Is this going to mean endless half-finished sentences?

Dammit, I want a go on this.

Along with big pauses where everyone has to type everything out in notepad to get the wording right before pasting it in.

Who the Hell does that?

Well no one now, but I think Craster's point is that people would start doing that in Wave.

It would be annoying seeing someone type half a sentence, then delete it and change it. I always correct my typos too.

Well no-one - because currently you can edit before you hit submit.

You can disable it, probably on both sides (sending and receiving).

It would be a bit spooky. The only other sort of chat I can remember working like that is the direct sysop and user-to-user chat modes on certain old BBSs.

You can edit waves afterwards.
(watch the video, it's very interesting )

Yeah, but only after they've already seen you accidentally type brillioant.

This is going to be huge I reckon.

We don't need fancy technology to cobble together half-

So, did anyone get an invite?

No

Nothing here either, but then I can't remember if I registered my interest or whatever it was that was on the Wave homepage before.

Yeah.

Good oh. Shoot your good friend Rich an invite then, would ya?

Oh, I haven't got one. I was just answering the question factually.

Oh look, a tedious punchline. I certainly didn't expect that.

It's ok, you can teach me how to suck eggs later on and we'll be even.

I laughed. Out loud.

I feel strangely unable to be moved for a strange wishy washy nebulous description of what this actually is. Is it Segway again?

If anyone does get one and can invite others I would like to play.

Woop! I have an invite.

Gimme!

Or just give one to bagwaa to stop him bloody tweeting about it every ten seconds!

Sorry. My invite was to a bonfire party that I can't make as I'm planning to go to wolves vs arsenal that night. Nowt to do with google.

Apologies for any confusion caused.

Riles.

I was talking about the bonfire party!

You were on the invite too, dickface.

So... What exactly is Google Wave? I mean, I know it's clearly the future of the interwebs and it's going to reshape reality as we know it and change our lives forever, but what does it actually, y'know, do? So far as I can tell, it's basically an XMPP implementation and some other... bits. I'm really not sure I've understood what they're trying to achieve.

Have you watched the video?