[TriLUG] Google Wave and the sound of crickets

[Justis Peters]

As Weave writes below, "a flurry of activity and then crickets..."  This 
is the same thing I'm hearing from everyone: flurry of activity (if 
you're lucky) and then crickets (everyone gets the crickets).

The primary problem is that nobody is in the habit of checking Google 
Wave and it doesn't come with a default "notifier", "system tray icon", 
or "toaster pop-up". There are a few third-party options out there, 
though. If you can convince a handful of your friends to install one of 
them, your little corner of Wave will at least be noisier than the 
crickets now and then.

The one that will most likely help people using Linux is the Firefox plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14973
http://thatsmith.com/2009/10/google-wave-add-on-for-firefox
http://lifehacker.com/5381297/google-wave-notifier-alerts-you-to-unread-waves

There are some Windows ones that integrate directly into the system 
tray. One of them even claims to work under wine. Getting this into the 
systray, though, will get your Windows friends to start speaking up over 
the crickets, too:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wave-notify/
http://wavenotifier.dantup.me.uk/
http://www.softwarebakery.com/frozencow/googlewavenotifier.html

The next thing you need is to think about what this platform might 
actually be useful for. Here's some of what it's ready for today:
+ The middle ground between email and IM: It does threaded conversation, 
like forums, but you can also see each other type in real time. You can 
work synchronously, asynchronously, or a little bit of both. You even 
get a slider bar for the history, so that you can see how the 
conversation developed while you were gone.
+ Collaborative document editing: It can handle more simultaneous users 
than Google Docs. You can insert threaded conversation right into the 
middle of the doc, discuss it until consensus emerges, replace the 
conversation with text everyone agrees on, and even use the slider bar 
to go back in history and see the discussion that preceded the 
consensus. When your group is done collaborating on it, you can copy it 
to a new wave, where the prior history is gone but the next group can 
create their own edits and history.
+ Collaborative solution hunts: Have you ever searched the web for a 
solution to a problem, found that there are 5000 search results, 30 
unique solutions, and a mountain of sifting before you're convinced you 
have the best solution? Try inviting 5 friends to help you in a wave. 
Paste the candidate solutions into the wave by URL. Discuss the pros and 
cons under each one. Narrow the field until you agree on which solutions 
fit best.
+ Collaborative note taking: If multiple people share the same Wave 
during a meeting or presentation, not everyone has to take notes on 
every point. When the meeting is over, the participants should have a 
well groomed document with most of the useful points they wanted to take 
away from the event.

There are hundreds of things that Wave may be useful for in the future, 
but the the ones above are a good start. Keep an eye on interesting 
developments around new wave "robots" and "gadgets". When it will get 
really exciting is when people start producing third party clients and 
start federating their own Wave servers into the system. The underlying 
protocols in this system are open standards and highly extensible. You 
can build some really interesting blends on private and public systems 
with this. If you're interested, dig into some of the white papers and 
academic stuff on the topic. The "secret sauce" is a concept called the 
"operational transformation". You might also be interested to know that 
the "blips" that it sends to represent an operational transformation go 
over XMPP.

How 'bout them crickets? Anybody want to start a wave about BBQ? Perhaps 
a debate about emacs vs. vi?

Kind regards,
Justis

Brian Weaver wrote:
> Yeah, that's the same kind of effect that I saw. Me and a few friends had a flurry of activity and then crickets...
>
> On Dec 8, 2009, at 8:04 AM, <OlsonE at aosa.army.mil> <OlsonE at aosa.army.mil> wrote:
>   
>> Not to sound noobish here, but to what extent is everyone using Google Wave for? I've got it, tons of friends on it... but once we got our invites and signed in it kinda died off...
>>