[ExI] Surfing the big G-Wave

[Eschatoon Magic]

Surfing the big G-Wave

http://cosmi2le.com/index.php/site/surfing_the_big_g-wave/

Go ...ogle has answered my prayers and given me early developer access
to Wave. I am now the proud owner of the Wave account giulio at
wavesandbox.com.

A couple of months ago, immediately after watching the presentation of
Google Wave on Youtube, I wrote in Big G-Wave coming?:

“Google Wave could be a Big paradigm shift, and change the way we use
the Web. Email, chat, discussion groups, wiki, IRC, blogs, microblogs,
social network and groupware all in one. Wave may be a Facebook killer
and a new Twitter much more integrated with the rest of the Web. Email
and IM are obsolete, we will spend our online life in front of a Wave
screen. Instead of sending email, IM and tweets, writing blogs and
logging on Facebook, we will plug in dynamic and interconnected Waves…

As a transhumanist, I really look forward to trying Wave.
Transhumanism , a sparse and global social movement, required the Web
as an essential enabler to bloom, and I wonder how we will use this
new powerful communication platform. By enabling us to do things much
faster the Web, the new Web 2.0 (is Wave the first example of Web
3.0?) and the mobile Web wake emergent properties of our collective
consciousness. We could send snailmail letters hundreds of years ago,
but we could not build a new global social movement in a matter of
days. Wave may permit doing things even much faster and achieve a
critical mass to enable new emergent waves in our developing
noosphere.”.

My first impressions: awesome. Of course, this is a developer preview
and some features are not implemented yet, others are implemented but
not working, others used to work but today are not working… what you
can expect in an alpha developer preview. But the potential is there
for everyone to see. Wave is open source, and users are developing new
extensions which will certainly result in new and unexpected usage
patterns. But I can already see how common Internet usage
patterns—email, IM, chat, IRC, collaborative wiki editing and group
discussions—are simpler, faster and better in a Wave implementation.
The simplest example is adding new participants to any Wave. Many
users say that this is the most impressive application they have seen
running in a browser, and ZDNET has an interesting analysis of the
potential of Wave for the enterprise.

By one of its creators: “Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you
create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use
richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other
sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly.
It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly
instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That
means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for
persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and
communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see
how it evolved.”

Mashable: “Less than two months ago, Google dropped a spectacular
surprise upon the world: Google Wave. The communication tool aspires
to redefine not only email, but the entire web. And from our very
first test of Google Wave to our complete Google Wave Guide, we have
to say that it’s a game changer.”. I agree—Wave has the potential to
change the game. See also the Complete Guide to Wave on Mashable.

Wave is an all-purposes communication platform, meant to offer an
alternative to all things people do on the Internet. Something so big
would not be accepted if it were a single vendor solution, but Wave is
an open source system. I am sure new Wave developments and user
extensions will begin moving into the social network niche soon, and
developers will create native, embedded voice and video conferencing
applications and 3D virtual worlds. The next few months will be
interesting. Unfortunately we cannot invite new testers to
wavesandbox, but I wish to encourage everyone to request an account:
Google will open Wave to more early users in September.

For current wavesandbox users, this review is also available as a
wave, you can comment in Wave.

-- 
Eschatoon Magic
http://cosmeng.org/index.php/Eschatoon
aka Giulio Prisco
http://cosmeng.org/index.php/Giulio_Prisco