Image by marketingfacts via FlickrIf you're one of the lucky ones to have gotten an invite to google wave, you probably know that what you're using is something revolutionary. Okay, I admit I had my doubts over Wave. For starters it came from Google (a company I HATE with a passion). Second its in beta (oh well cant complain about that really. Orkut, Google's social networking cum Facebook copying wing has been in beta since I was a kid! :P). And third, I had the same old privacy concerns Google apps are renowned for gifting its users.Anyway, all concerns aside, I had to have a go at it! (After all everyone's talking about Wave these days!) And for once, I was pleasantly surprised. Google wave is really a novel concept. You communicate with your 'friends' (who also must have received a Google Wave invite) via 'waves' which are sort of notes/ideas. The best part of it is, you can chat here in 'real-time' and I mean 'real-time'! You can see the other person type the words as the chat goes on! Should suffice to say that this is bloody brilliant! I dont think there's anything like this anywhere on the web, and I firmly believe this is what net chats in the future will look like.
However, apart from the brilliance comes the reality of it all. At the moment Google Wave isnt for everyone. You can only log in if you are invited by Google or if you've been sent an invite (which are pretty hard to come by! These invites were selling for 70 bucks each on ebay the last time I checked! And thats $$$!). As a result you wont find many users to 'wave' with. Now that could basically spoil your experience. Fortunately I have found some buddies to chat with on wave! But still it isnt as exciting as facebook or twitter simply coz I cant see any of my friends here! :( Also it can be pretty buggy at times, I was repeatedly asked to refresh my Google Wave page for apparently no reason whatsoever. In other words its more of concept right now than a real web application.
But I firmly believe Google Wave is here to stay. The concept is likely to be replicated by many other social networking sites.
If you have received an invite, dont waste it, give Wave a try! As they say...RIDE THE WAVE!
>> "The best part of it is, you can chat here in ‘real-time’ and I mean ‘real-time’! You can see the other person type the words as the chat goes on! Should suffice to say that this is bloody brilliant! I dont think there’s anything like this anywhere on the web, and I firmly believe this is what net chats in the future will look like."
ReplyDeleteReal time Collaborative text editing has been in place for years now..examples include SynchroEdit, JotSpot, MobWrite and many others.. (Google is currently buying these out one by one :D)
And I really didn't find it that great a feature.. (How does it help to mess up what the other guy has written).. I dont see where this is going to be helpful.. (apart from that, that it feels kiddishly cool to be doing simultaneous editing). Its pretty slow too.
The characters appear very slowly on the screen and they have just taken too much trouble against the "advantage" that it looks funny to see the characters unfold one by one.
And yeah.. its bloody brilliant.. the first ever instant messenger "talk",that came as a unix application had the character by character posting feature (i guess it released in 1980s).. that does away with the "Brilliance" part of google. All that remains is the (*yawn*) "Boring"..
BTW, i am one of those "Google haters" (as you wud have guessed by now :P)
I agree, Google wave is kind of boring. I got an invite a few months ago. I logged in to see what the whole hype was all about and i was underwhelmed.
ReplyDeleteBut I do not hate google, they are just being a company which nurtures a monopolistic ambition. I mean every true capitalist does. I find some of their products fantastic. Gmail for instance, that is what all email systems should be like. I may be a bit biased since i earn a few hundred thousand INRs a month, thanks to google. And I shouldnot be complaining.
But it is really alarming to have one giant corporation with monopolistic ambitions, controlling so much data and having so much influence. As somebody famous once said, Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.