Google's big reveal at I/O? Meet Wave, the Next Big Thing from the Lars and Yen Rasmussen, makers of Google Maps. It's a very early build, meaning we won't see it anytime soon, but here's the gist: a "wave" is a chat session that enables you to send messages live, with each word being transmitted live -- no more "person X is typing" messages (don't worry, that can be deactivated momentarily / permanently with a "draft" button). You can also add others to the wave, drag and drop images for instant transfers, and share documents for on-the-fly edits (with all the
participants working simultaneously, mind you), and get this... it does
real time translation. So hot, and the crowd is in an uproar over this. The "waves" can be played back to see the conversation evolve / documents edited dynamically. We just got confirmation that it'll be coming to Android and iPhone, also, but they have yet to get the mobile platform to do the live updating. As they keep telling us, this HTML5-based platform is still in a very early stage, but all attendees will be getting an invite to a sandbox build later today. It's an open protocol, so expect other devs to add their own toys to the mix. Hit up the gallery for more pics.
posted May 28th 2009 1:14PM
My attraction to IM is being able to edit what I am going to say before saying it. If I want to sound like an idiot, I will just talk on the phone (or post on an engadget thread). So I guess it's "draft" button for me.
I hear ya there!
Many a time ive begun to type something and backspaced it because either:
A: It wasnt appropriate
B: Could get me into trouble
C: The person may never want to speak to me ever again
Exactly. There's a reason PowWow didn't survive!
Well, there are many reasons why PowWow didn't survive, but still.
I came here to say the exact same thing. I can't count how many times i've been g-chattin it up with my fiance and had to edit what I was going to say and prevent her from becoming my ex-fiance.
Ugh . . . now I have to think BEFORE I type.
ICQ had this in their chat application (not the instant messaging peice), and as noted before, PowWow (that goes way back!) only did this. ICQ also had the ability to record and playback conversations... you know, ICQ may still offer this today. I'm not sure where ICQ went wrong, but stuff that was possible in 1997 from that program is slowly being reintroduced as new technology.
AOL is what went wrong with ICQ. That application rocked before AOL bought it.
I just watched the video... it's over an hour long... and Google Wave is downright secksy... O_O I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of it! And it shows that you can disable character by character posting so you can hide what you're thinking.
Wow... that's crazy.
It's a neat idea, but it's far from innovative. The real time typing was a feature of the Talk unix utility. I expect this is a little bit better executed, though. The other features are also interesting, but not really that new. Is real-time document collaboration really all that different from a google doc link in a chat?
It's innovative because it's all those things combined through the browser with no plugins needed, it's all over HTML5.
Wekk stillinbeta, you beat me to the punch, but yeah... xtalk & ytalk clients. Ytalk was.is a multi-user talk program that displayed every character typed bya user on the other user(s) window/terminal.
Always kinda thought that when instant messaging went mainstream with AIM, Yahoo, etc. etc. and you had to wait for "ENTER" to send dialogue was a bit of a step back. About time they caught up to 1990 (when ytalk came out).
Maybe now we will finally figure out why some people take 10 minutes of "typing" to send like 2 or 3 words...
Adam
Gah, first thing I thought was ytalk too. I rather like being able to gather my grammar before I submit my phrase. It also makes for more coherent conversations, so you don't have people responding in the middle of someone else's sentence... that was always confusing. Are you responding to what I'm typing now-now, or then-now?
No WinMo love? :(
You have Windows live chat...oh, I guess see why you are upset.
lol whats wrong with windows live chat?
I'd like to see it on blackberry too. I love my gmail app.
Real time translation isnt that big. I mean I wrote a AIM interface that used Google's Translation API to translate all incoming messages and outgoing messages.
and I dont really see teh point of real time text entry :/
Meh, we had this back in the 80s on old BBSes only we called it 'sysop chat' and you saw each and every char the person typed as they typed it (including backspaces, typos, et. al.)
Didn't ICQ do this 10 years ago, too?
Nobody said it was new. It's just extra functionality for people who use GTalk. Plus it's free and you can turn it off if you don't want it, so I don't see anything to complain about.
Yeah I used to hate^H^H^H^H LOVE sysop chat.
even Google is running out of ideas..
I heard the next update to Google Mail would include a Theme Park, Blackjack, and Hookers.
I just read the longer article at TechCrunch about it. This is indeed impressive. I just want to see how this will integrate with Gmail and GTalk though, as these two services won't "die" overnight. It seems to be a Twitter and Facebook killer -- we will see.
However, what really got my attention on the Engadget article is the bit about "having got to update live in the mobile devices". Which is an inherit problem of GSM, as far as I know. So basically, software has caught up with the hardware offered. Carriers are better off pulling out new technologies to satisfy these new kinds of demands, rather than caring about "yet another mp3 store that works with your phone".
Hmm, I am not so sure about the system requirements of this tool. The full screen screenshot seems to require a 1366x900 screen in order to fit perfectly all the toolbars and not create horizontal scrollbars. This pretty much rules out most lightweight laptops that are sold today, which are using 1024x768 or 1280x800 (I am not even talking about netbooks). I think that they need a way to make it fit at 1280-pixels-wide screens at least (if not XGA).
It's not a tool, it's written in HTML 5.
"Tool" is anything that makes you accomplish something. Be it written in C, HTML, or Chinese.
live chat was obnoxious in ICQ chat... the rest sounds good.
Agreed and sometimes it would spook people when you replied before they were finished typing.
I really miss that feature, actually. Seeing someone type onto my screen was a real "wow" moment, and made for some really entertaining conversations. Like, typing something, then deleting it and typing something else, like a phone call but in text. I've kinda been missing that.
On the other hand, the delayed-live features of "modern" IM make it much more compatible with a real-life situation, like when you're working, because you can shift your attention away from the chat without missing out or make people think you're ignoring them.
In this case, Engadget's description is pretty subpar, focusing on the wrong things. I recommend Tim O'Reilly's review of it to fully appreciate how cool this will be.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-wave-what-might-email-l.html
Thanks Finite (TheFinite, toinfinityandbeyond, etc.) Really good post by O'Reilly, makes me appreciate this wave thing much more.
So Wave isn't like the "Nexus" from star trek afterall.
Yes, it makes a lot more sense after reading that article. Engadget barely scratches the surface and makes it sounds like, as someone else said, the old Unix style chat. It's not quite the same thing as a group chat, either. It's more like a convergence of all types of written electronic communication that we have today - email, blog comments, chats, newsgroups, wikis, etc. I think it will be clearer when they release something.
Clearly you guys don't get it.
When I'm collaborating with my work colleague who lives in India, or France or China, and I want to talk about what we're jointly developing, I can write my comments on my laptop (or phone) and have them instantly see what I'm getting at--without needing to know Hindi, French or Chinese. And no requirement for them to know English. There will be errors, of course, because machine translation always has errors. But this is an amazing productivity and communication tool.
Oh, and expect Microsoft to announce a competing product sometime in the next 36 hours...
I think we get it. The translation alway has errors so it sucks. Beside the real time translation, there is nothing really new.
Oh pish. This is great! In films screen-based communication is always real-time. I've never understood why IM can't work that way. And it takes away the most annoying thing about IM, which is when by the time you've responded to question one another two questions have come through.
MovieOS 2.0?
YOU MEAN THIS WON'T BE COMING TO THE ZUNE HD?!?!%#?!%?%!#
(sorry, had to) :P
Go, Google!!! Amazing product after amazing product.
Just FYI, Google is Skynet. 2012 is fast aproaching... :scared:
PowWow also had "live chat".
PowWow robot voice.
Hmmm, maybe I just don't get it. I work with people all over the world at times, however they have all just happened to speak English so maybe that's why I'm not excited about this. :P
Ummm... is that a joke, or did they misspell Jens Rasmussen?
Been there, done that. ICQ. Liked it then, because i felt more like I was really there with someone having a realtime conversation. It went away from what i can tell, and good old google is resurrecting it in the form of "NEW FEATURE IN CHATTING"....yeah...been there - as much as I love google.
though i must say i also enjoy being able to edit my comments.
Im not a fan of machine translation, but dang dude! this stuff was friggin awesome! :D
Touch typists suddenly slightly cooler.
kind of like etherpad
If you ever played Warcraft II on a LAN (like with KALI!) this is how their game lobby chat worked. I always liked it.
You beat me to this... Only I played over 56k modem.
A "wave"? Firefly reference?