Quote: Original post by drakostar

Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper
Am I missing something

It's an open protocol and an application platform. That's the cool part. "Vanilla" Wave is next to worthless; it's when you understand the potential of robots and gadgets on top of a great collaboration/communication protocol that it starts getting exciting.

I disagree, "vanilla" wave is (ignoring current slowness and bugs) way better than traditional email, and the open protocol + platform means that that's a real possibility.

The existing email protocol is a creaky old thing which needs replacing. It's only with lots of crazy client side shenanigans (see: google mail) that it actually becomes half-way usable. We need an open replacement that has the basic functionality (like the concept of a thread, and nested replies) built-in so that we can build more interesting things on top of it.

I got in today. Bias alert: I was pretty interested in it from the first announcement, and still am.

with:public is kind of mind-blowing. It's basically a forum for the entire planet, updating in close to real time. I think people are underestimating just how awesome of a concept that is. Sure, technically the entire world could be on GDNet, but that would never actually happen nor would the server framework be able to handle it. Meanwhile, Google is doing it right now as if its the easiest thing in the world. Just a hidden little side-feature. A few months from now it'll be the biggest forum of all time. A side feature. Is that "meh"?

Sure, it's filled with crap - just like the rest of the internet - but it's Google: not only do you have a global forum covering every topic imaginable but you can search it. You can then go immediately from any random wave into a private email chain or start IM'ing or video chat. You can add friends and turn it into a social network. You can get robots to translate other languages in real time. You can start public games to play with people. You can ignore all this shit and just email people.

Is it totally going to change your life? No. Is it the biggest revolution ever? No. If anyone is expecting that then they're stupid for expecting stupid things. Wave is pretty cool.

They've got some work ahead of them making it not run like crap, though.

i like that they make it independent on google servers, so that it's not a typical google-everything-eating-all-your-privacy thing.

everything else about it is great. please watch the 45min video, even while it's long, it really gives an idea about it that you can't get in shorter videos.. it gives you enough time to think about it while watching it, and understanding it.

still waiting for an invite.. :(

I've already been in at least 3 situations in the last couple of weeks where I could've *really* used Wave if I only had the chance. It just seems it'd be really good for collaboration on a document, or just explaining something to a person.

Bah, why couldn't they let my account in... >_<

Quote: Original post by OrangyTang

Quote: Original post by drakostar

Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper
Am I missing something

It's an open protocol and an application platform. That's the cool part. "Vanilla" Wave is next to worthless; it's when you understand the potential of robots and gadgets on top of a great collaboration/communication protocol that it starts getting exciting.

I disagree, "vanilla" wave is (ignoring current slowness and bugs) way better than traditional email, and the open protocol + platform means that that's a real possibility.

The existing email protocol is a creaky old thing which needs replacing. It's only with lots of crazy client side shenanigans (see: google mail) that it actually becomes half-way usable. We need an open replacement that has the basic functionality (like the concept of a thread, and nested replies) built-in so that we can build more interesting things on top of it.

Huh? Yahoo Mail in its pre-2008 version worked just fine. It's email, not Instant Messaging. Maybe I don't understand what "shenanigans" need to be added for email as it is (or was) to be usable?

Quote: Original post by Alpha_ProgDes
Huh? Yahoo Mail in its pre-2008 version worked just fine. It's email, not Instant Messaging. Maybe I don't understand what "shenanigans" need to be added for email as it is (or was) to be usable?

My point is that email (as a protocol) is just raw text sent to one or more adresses. Everything above that is just convention - such as replying with the same subject to maintain a 'thread' of conversation, or keeping the previous message in your reply, or adding a new person to the conversation by forwarding a message with the new address added to it.

Things like google mail or yahoo mail do a very good job of spotting and converting these conventions into a more high-level representation, such as joining multiple emails together into a single thread based on subject name and/or quoted body text. But becase these are just conventions they can (and frequently do) go wrong when someone doesn't obey them, or when another email client with different ideas gets involved. I'm sure we've all seen friends and workmates accidentally 'fork' an email conversation by replying to the wrong message, or forgetting to reply to all, etc. etc.

Because with Wave they're moving the abstraction layer up a notch, so it's actually aware of things like threading and participants. You don't have to see (and receive) messages like "Fw: Adding person XXXX into the email chain" because you just add them into the wave. And because it's got the basics down you're free to extend it in all sorts of ways that wouldn't have been previously.

Yes, wave right now doesn't have much functionality you couldn't get in an existing email client, but that's not the point. It's moving the base line - wave in it's most primitive form contains all the functionality we've got from the most advanced of email clients.

It's empty. I might want to use it with my LucidChart team, but as jpetrie mentioned, it's useless as team collaboration until they give me invites to get my team in on it.

I also have zero chance of using it regularly until it contains Gmail. The navigation tree needs to have a place for Gmail messages. Then I could work on slowly proselytizing all my friends into using Wave.

If I wind up with some extra invites, I'll post them here for the interested. But be warned, you'll have to wait some time after signing up before you get invites for your friends and teams.

Just got my Wave invite today. I've enjoyed playing around with it, but so far it's definitely not "there" yet. Most importantly, it's still too much of a resource hog to replace email, if that's its intention. While it runs OK on my dual core laptop, it would be unmanageable on, say, a cellphone or probably even a netbook (we'll see what Chrome OS has to say about that, though).

As for communication, it doesn't seem to change much if you're just doing a one-to-one conversation (I only have one friend using it right now). Real-time display of typing is OK, but certainly not revolutionary. Two people will probably always want to hold a linear conversation as we are used to in real-life. With more, the branching and editing could be nice. Collaborative projects might be nice too.

the GDNet team has suspended use for now due to stability issues - it crashes out on me like 85% of the time in Firefox and FrizzleFry can't even open it.

But what we've done with it has been really cool. Hoping to be able to pick it up again soon... maybe when it hits Beta instead of Preview...

Quote: Original post by OrangyTang
[...]My point is that email (as a protocol) is just raw text sent to one or more adresses. Everything above that is just convention - such as replying with the same subject to maintain a 'thread' of conversation, or keeping the previous message in your reply, or adding a new person to the conversation by forwarding a message with the new address added to it.[...]

Actually, there are quite a few things supported by the original email specification(and the current current spec, too) that you list as done by clients. For example, the standard defines a header that allows giving each message a globally unique ID that can be referenced in other header fields such as "In-Reply-To" and "References". In other words, the standard has supported message threads since day 1.

You could argue that SMTP doesn't support such things, but then you might as well argue that HTTP doesn't support displaying pictures.

[Edit: Changed "original email specification" from rfc822 to rfc640 - even older]