Live Blogging Google Wave

Back at the second keynote of Google I/O. We were promised something absolutely awesome and we got it. Steve Ballmer announcing Bing on stage. Oops, that’s D. This is about a new collaboration tool. Oh, and I’m live blogging this, and I’ve had no sleep (see Bing above), so who knows where it’s all going. […]

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Back at the second keynote of Google I/O. We were promised something absolutely awesome and we got it. Steve Ballmer announcing Bing on stage. Oops, that’s D. This is about a new collaboration tool.

Oh, and I’m live blogging this, and I’ve had no sleep (see Bing above), so who knows where it’s all going. Oh my, Vic just said this is going to take an hour and a half. I only have half a bottle of Diet Coke.

Vic says the product is magical. We’ll be stunned. And the two people who made it worked on Google Maps. We won’t believe this can be done in a browser.

Three Ps — it’s product, platform and protocal.

OK, talking about email as like a thread. Wave starts out not as individual messages going back and forth but a shared object on a server, you leave your replies, go away, next person adds and so on. Kind of like bulletin board. Where oh where will my developer touchstone grunting dude be today? That’s some developer I can watch to see if any of this makes sense to them and they’re awed. I’m looking.

OK, Lars is typing an email. There was a spell checker that made the developers applaud. I don’t know why. Aren’t spell checkers easy?

Now Stephanie (hope I’m spelling that right) is replying to Lars. Steph (can I call you that) says that because this is a hosted conversation, she can insert her answer in the middle of Lars’s original email (yes, Lars’s is correct, shut up). This is cool. She says. Well, I can reply to email and shove stuff where i want, but I know i’ll be stunned soon.

Now applause because they’re like both emailing to each other at the same time, and the character by character as they typed starting showing up. So kind of like IM, but you don’ thave to wait for the “she’s typing she’s typing etc). And this is good because you can speed up the conversation, no need to even wait to see what she was saying fully. You can just start responding without letting her finish. And this is good. Unless you’re impolite. OK OK, I’m sure it’s good. And yes, if you don’t want all to show as you type, there’s a hide thing they’re working on.

Now Jens (think I got that right) is on the Wave. He’s entering into the conversation late, so now he’s using a feature called playback. So now he’s seeing what everyone said in order, and this makes the audience applaud. Because they’ve never seen email sorted by date? Or threaded conversations in Gmail? Oh my I clearly am not a developer.

Have I mentioned the incredible tiredness I feel at the moment? It wa a long night writing. That Bing thing.

OK, now we see a way to send private replies to one person in the conversation but not the others. Because the wave is a tree structure, so you can I guess block branches as you want.

Now he’s dragged pictures onto the web, and we’re applauding again. Well, the developers are. And Steph could see a preview of the images before they even fully loaded. Because so often I’m having to impatiently wait to get the picture? And the dragging is cool, but drag and drop from the desktop to the browser — can’t I do things like that already? Maybe I drag from app to app. Anyway, they applauded. It must be awesome.

Just saw MG from TechCrunch is also live blogging: Google Wave Drips With Ambition.  A New Communication Platform For A New Web. . I’m sure he’s more coherent. But I’ll keep going. I started so I shall finish.

Now we’re talking a blogging site, where we can embed Wave on its pages. And we can put an automated agent called Bloggy. Which built the page using App Engine.

Now here’s Greg, who is demoing the Firefox proxy server not found error page. And now he’s showing how he can respond to that original thread, the tree email, that’s been inserted into the blog. He’s like typing write on the page, and his stuff shows up. And now I’m sorry, I’m totally not thinking this is the most awesome thing in the world. And I’m wondering uh, how will search engines crawl stuff that’s embedded?

I wait patiently for awesomeness.

Now we’re using Orkut, Google’s social network that’s big in Brazil and I think still in Iraq. But you can use your Orkut contacts into Wave. Please please tell me you can have contact in another way other than Orkut. I’m sure you can. Sorry, correction — what’s happening is she’s inserting a Wave into Orkut.

Now it’s Wave on our mobile devices. He’s showing his Wave inbox on the phone, replying to something, and then the reply is showing up on another phone he has. Well, it would if the wireless was working in the room. Isn’t this called IM on the phone?

OK, stressing that there’s only one copy of the Wave out there. Which is confusing because Wave is the product that also produces Waves. So there’s Wave conversation out there, a single one we’ve been working with, that people keep interacting with.

Now what if you’re a product manager and wondering if you need to email something or put onto a wiki for collaboration. Wave lets you do both. Now Lars is editing Stephanie’s message on his screen, and applause, a bit. Now it goes to Stephanie’s inbox all marked up. More applause.

Now where collaboratively creating a document, with sliders that let you see what it looked like at any point, you can do a playback thing. This seems cool, I mean easier than some of the other ways you can do version control. See, version control is a fancy word for tracking changes to software code. I think. Writers, we just say tracking edits.

“This is going to become a very power document production tool,” Lars said. And now we have an official Google blog post. Here. Which is pretty much making me think I don’t need to keep live blogging. We’ll see.

Yeah, I gave up. But the developers love what I could only describe as Lotus Notes 800.0. That’s the best metaphor I’ve got, sorry. You can get more info at the Wave site.


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About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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