The Geekorium

When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and “future direction” stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.

But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!

Wave Users - Hints and Tips

First and foremost, you cannot go past the Official Google Wave Blog - written by Googlers with news information and tips. If you only subscribe to one other site (ahem), this should be it. It’s kind of a no-brainer though so lets move on to some less obvious sites.

The Shiny Wave by David Cook takes a look at useful waves, gadgets and bots as well as the latest important technological developments that could impact Google Wave. Once a month he profiles the work of a talented Wave developer, and generally keeps a close eye on the Wave development community.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave Alright, this isn’t a site to follow so much as a book, but it’s written by the enormously talented Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. The site includes the entire book for you to read for free, or you can get it in PDF or full colour print versions for a very small fee. If you’re just getting started in Google Wave, there really is no other site you need to get your head around it.

Google Wave Information by Pooja Srinivas (a Googler) is a compilation of Wave guides Pooja has written. The focus is on brand new users who might find something like the Complete Guide (above) too complicated. It also covers some unusual and fun use cases for Wave.

Waving At You by Russell Tripp is where Russell puts all his tips and information on Google Wave to “ease the learning curve” as he puts it. Waving At You and Russell’s Twitter account are where I found a lot of my favourite Wave resources. His tips are simple, but always excellent.

Waverz uses waves themselves to create the articles. Using the wavearchive@appspot.com bot, an archived html copy of a wave is made (at http://archive.waverz.com). You can then embed this archive in a page using some simple javascript (or php or python on the back end). Beyond this technical marvel though is an insightful site written by a number of Wavers including one of my fave wavers Jon Blossom and Dragon Silicon, who’s work I’ve only just discovered while writing this article.

Google Wave Possibilities by Tim Brown is another excellent source of Wave news. Tim is a “Wave Watcher”

• a group of Wave helpers - and for good reason. His site is full of helpful information (like how to get started with particular bots), and Google Wave news.

Wave on Business is focussed on how businesses might use Google Wave. The site incorporates presentations, use case scenarios and information on collaboration.

Google Wave Book by Andrés Ferraté is a companion site to the books Getting Started with Google Wave and Google Wave: Up and Running. It is more than just a catalogue for the books though, and contains insightful posts with tips and ideas.

Riding the Wave by Prasun Nair has Wave news, but mixes in some news about other communications technology such as telephones. The posts cover Wave news and information on its future direction.

Google Wave Info. The latest news and information about Google Wave by an anonymous author. Some useful information.

Wave Developers

These sites are run by Wave developers for Wave developers and contain a mix of the technical and informative. If you would like to dive in to the nuts and bolts of Google Wave, these are a few of the best!

The Google Wave Developer Blog is the official blog for Google Wave developers. It’s full of tips and guides and helpful information for developers who are just starting out with Wave and for Wave gurus too.

Google Wave Samples Gallery is the go-to place for new robots and gadgets as they come out. Primarily a teaching resource, the extensions here are tagged with how well they will teach you the concepts behind developing for Google Wave. An excellent source of useful bots too!

On Top of the Wave by Kiwibcn is a site run by a team of developers to showcase their experiences developing for Google Wave. One of their most popular posts is how to Develop your first wave robot in Java and clearly demonstrates their knowledge and their ability to teach.

Wave.to by @waveDOTto is the home of the developers of the excellent Mr-Ray extension, plus many more. These guys clearly know their stuff, and they are passionate about sharing it with the developer community and the public.

With Waves are a team of four developers who have created a number of popular extensions including Amazon and eBay bots that insert product listings into waves when you mention them. They have also released their Extension Generator that they use internally to build their own robots. That’s generous!

Mastering Wave by Daniel Graversen follows the process of developing for Google Wave, as well as highlighting important Wave news and tips. This site is one of the first Wave sites I subscribed to.

Process Wave is written by seven software engineering students, and follows their process of developing from Invity, a group management bot, to a collaborative modelling tool integrating the open source ORYX software into Wave.

Go Wave hasn’t been updated for little while now, but has some good information about Robots, Gadgets and Embedding.

Google Wave Sites by Region

The following Wave sites are written for specific communities and are often in another language. This should not be a problem. I speak nothing but English, but thanks to modern internet translation software have no trouble reading and participating in these sites. If you subscribe to these sites in Google Reader you can use the built in translation function and you should have no troubles whatsoever.

Spanish

WAVEsfera by David Alviz. David was an enthusiastic commenter here on First Waves, so I followed him back to WAVEsfera and discovered his site was in Spanish. Realising I was missing out on some excellent tutorials and news I subscribed as soon as I remembered that Google Reader does instant translation! I’m glad I did

• David updates almost twice daily (!) and is an endless font of knowledge and excitement over Wave. Without David, I’d probably be missing out on all the other excellent non-English wave resources below.

German

Google Wave Surfer by Thomas Friebel has news and information with particular focus on the Wave experience and how it is changing over time. The site also includes a forum for users to share their wave experiences.

Wave Inside by Sascha Ahlers has shorter updates than Google Wave Surfer, but they are no less informative. A good resource for quick news.

French

Google Wave France is maintained by three authors who explore Wave use cases and report updates and changes as they happen.

Russian

Google Wave Russia by Vadim Barsukov has some in-depth articles from Q&A sessions with Lars “Google Wave” Rassmussen. Some of the content appears to be English articles translated to Russian, but there is some original content too.

Everything else

Of course, this list is not meant to be complete. There are authors I’ve not met, site’s I’ve not found and tweets I’ve not seen. There are sites like Smarterware or Read Write Web that often cover Wave news, but aren’t dedicated to covering Wave. As I come across articles like this, I’ll add them to my “Further Wave Reading” list over on the left. I also re-tweet interesting Wave articles from @firstwaves on Twitter. If you really want to be in the loop, follow my Twitter list of Wave Geniuses too!

I’ve also left off a lot of good resources and people that can be found on Google Wave itself, as that will take another post entirely. <a href=“https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+from+First+Waves&r=nunn.joshua@googlewave.com” title=“Contact Josh via Google Wave”>Ping me if you’d like to chat, and I’m sure I can help you find some great people, and useful resources.

If you know of some great Google Wave resources I haven’t covered, please let me know in the comments below!

Introduction

Google Wave is a product that’s trying to do something massive to the way we communicate online. Its stated goal is to be what email might look like if it were invented today. A number of other services are labeled as competitors to Google Wave, including the recently updated Google Docs (which is too new for me to comment on in this article), but I wanted to take a look at which of these services are real competition. Below are the services who show the most promise at becoming the next generation of online communication.

Microsoft Sharepoint

Microsoft Sharepoint is a suite of content management tools to maintain and collaborate on documents. While it was never sold as a replacement to email, it was held up as one of the products Google Wave was meant to compete against. But as Steve Gaitten of Bamboo Nation points out, Wave competes with Outlook, not Sharepoint.

It might be possible for Microsoft to transform Outlook in some significant way that expands it beyond email into some sort of super email client. It might even integrate it into Sharepoint a lot further. The truth is, email is Google Wave’s biggest competition. It might be outdated and rough, but it’s the most popular form of communication on the internet. If anything stands a chance at beating Wave, it’s the service that Wave is trying to beat. If email innovation can keep up with user demand, it might just remain the top dog for another 40 years. If Outlook can maintain the large slice of the pie it has, while innovating on top of email it could still be competing into the future.

Novell Pulse

This is exactly the kind of “competition” Google was hoping for when they built Wave. As I’ve said before, Wave’s only hope of replacing email is federation. Only by giving users the choice of Wave provider will users find one that works for them. Novell Pulse might even become a more loved Wave client, and I think that would actually make Google happy. Personally, I’m eagerly awaiting a Pulse preview account.

SAP Streamwork

This tool was touted as a Google Wave competitor while in Beta (with the code name 12Sprints or Constellation).

The tool turns out to be a collaboration space for making decisions. It’s not a complete replacement for email, but I’m not sure that was ever their intention. Streamwork allows a team to collaborate and add gadgets to enhance the process.

“It was clear we needed to work together,” Meyer said. “We’re excited about what they’re doing, they’re excited about what we’re doing.” Users will be able to share content between the two platforms, he said. - David Meyer, reported by Computer World

It will be interesting to see what sort of integration they build into it.

Shareflow and Toqbox

Much like Streamwork, these tools are not marketed as email replacements, but were both touted as Google Wave competitors. What they do is allow users to collaborate on documents in real-time. If these sorts of services were better integrated into email (perhaps using GMail’s new oAuth tools) they might be more likely candidates. Otherwise they are really only competing with Google Docs and others of that kind.

ccBetty, Syphir, Etacts, Xobni, Rapportive et al.

Products such as ccBetty and the others mentioned enhance email. They exist to remove the holes in email by providing additional information, embedded media, faster searching, or simplified discussion. Some work on GMail, others on Outlook, others work outside any email service by CC-ing a special address onto each email you wish to turn into a discussion. The problem with all of these tools as competition for Wave is that the email protocol just doesn’t take these sorts of tools into consideration, so they’re limited by how many services the developers can write for. That is, each service might support Outlook or GMail, but not all the other smaller players in the marketplace. Where Google Wave has this model beat is by including extension support from day one, allowing developers to enhance Wave in whatever ways they can imagine. Any service that federates with Google Wave will also support these extensions, making it a truly open, extensible experience.

EtherPad

This collaboration tool gets its own special crossed out spot because it was one of the strongest, simplest competitors in the collaboration space, but was bought by Google! The developers have obviously since been put to work on Google Docs, as evidenced by the announcement of the recent update.

Facebook.

This one scares me a little. In some ways, Google Wave is the anti-Facebook. Where Wave is built on open technology, uses an open protocol and federates with other services, Facebook is a “walled garden” and keeps users inside their service. Both systems let developers make extensions and apps that use the platform, and Facebook seems to be slowly inching towards including some of the collaboration features that have been missing so far. Facebook has a huge user base, and could easily become some sort of defacto go-to communication platform for the masses. Currently though there are no obvious moves to open up the platform further, making it unlikely to catch on in business, where email still rules.

Twitter (+ Buzz and other Social Public Messaging)

Currently, none of the services in their current form pose a threat to email - they’re too limited with their 140 character limits and lack of in-line collaboration. But Twitter (or a more open version of it at least) is the product I think has the most real chance of beating Google Wave at becoming the communication platform of the future.

A distributed network (integrated with Twitter of course) that updates in real-time, with an API could have many people needing their email less and less. Once you can get updates from your favourite companies and all your friends are on the service, why would you need it? Throw in an extension or two, enhanced private messaging, and you have a very compelling product that could steal users away from email. The platform is so new, no one really knows where it could go in the future, and I suspect it will give Google Wave and traditional email a run for their money. It could be Twitter, or Buzz, Status.Net or a new player we’ve never heard of, but the idea has the strongest traction of any I’ve seen.

Something completely new

So those are my thoughts about Google Wave’s true competition. Of course, a company could come out of the blue with a product so completely new and exciting it amasses a huge audience that completely abandons email. This is the least likely of all I think, as I’ve stated before I think Wave is our best chance at replacing email wholesale. Alternatively, email will be killed by slow changes to the next generation of social communication. The chances of it happening are dependant on the whims of companies who are trying to make a buck, not replace email so I’m not holding my breath. Email will be replaced by something federated, open, extensible and easy to use. I’ve taken my best shot at predicting what it could be.

What are your thoughts? Is Google Wave our best hope, or is there something even more obvious that could take email’s place?

I love the potential of Google Wave, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sometimes frustrated with it. Here’s my list of stuff I’d like to see sooner rather than later.

1. A way to “subscribe” to people/searches: Lisa Miller writes Our Patch (the First Wavezine) on Google Wave [<a href=“https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&ltmpl=standard”>“our patch” wave search]. John Blossom write useful waves about Wave [<a href=“https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F%3Fpli%3D1&ltmpl=standard”>wave search for John Blossom]. I’d like to “subscribe” to these searches and have them tell me when new items are published by these people. The presence of “archive” and “mark as read” options when you make a search suggests it should eventually tell you when the search has updated, but it’s not implemented yet. Instead, users are making their own indexes (for example -<a href=“https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=wave&passive=true&nui=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwave.google.com%2Fwave%2F&ltmpl=standard”> Our Patch)
   And while we’re on searches - a “quick add” option to turn a search into a shortcut.

2. Spam and abuse management: Spam and destruction seem out of control sometimes on wave. We know the team are building spam and user management, but it’s a bit slow going at the moment.

3. Federation: At time of writing, federation (connecting one Wave server to another) is only supported in the developer sandbox and not in the public wave preview. It’d be nice to know that when Novell Pulse is released, they’ll both talk from day one.

4. Moderation tools: Creators should have the choice to lock their initial blip from editing if that is what they desire. Some blips are purely informative and don’t need to be edited by all and sundry. This is perhaps antithetical to the way the creators intended Wave to be used, but users will do as they want with a tool, and it’s up to developers to support them.

5. Google Apps support for all users: I don’t like using nunn.joshua@googlewave.com. I’d much rather use my domain email as I have with email for the last 5 years.

6. Better contact management: Currently contacts appear in Google Contacts under their Google email addresses. Why not add their names automatically, put them in a “Wave” group, and add a link to their home page pulled from their Google Profile (and don’t try to tell me Google doesn’t know that much about them…)

So that’s my list of “missing features” that are necessary ASAP. What do you think Wave is missing right now?

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilovememphis/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

It’s Old

Why it’s bad:

Email was invented 40 years ago to deal with a very different set of communication problems. The web didn’t exist, and email was a simple way to get text from one place to another. Think black screens with green writing and geeks talking to geeks across America. Now we have Twitter, Facebook, and whole new ways to communicate, but our basic building block is email. Everything useful eventually finds an implementation in email, but it’s ill-suited for the task. Sure it’s universal, but just sending images was an afterthought!

How Google Wave can help:

It’s built on the latest proven internet technologies. It’s built from the ground up to handle rich media of all different types but still retains some of the things that worked for email in the beginning, like addresses using the @ symbol to send messages to the right place.

It’s Slow

Why it’s bad:

When you send a message to someone, you hope they’ll get it before you need a response, so savvy users know to pick up the phone if they need an answer quickly. In some cases you might have IM available, but what if you need to send a document? You’d check that they’re on in IM then switch to email when they respond. How convoluted is that? Or worse, you call them and ask if you can send them a document. Not very efficient is it?

How Wave can help:

Wave tells you when a user in your contacts is online. You can “ping” them to ask if they can chat, then send them the document all from the one interface. Then you can get feedback in real-time

It’s Wasteful

Why it’s bad:

Email creates a message and sends a copy to the recipient. Then they reply, and the sender replies back and so on and so forth until there are multiple copies of the message, often with earlier messages still attached taking up space and using resources. When Aunt Helga sends her holiday snaps to everyone in her address book, every photo gets stored on every mail server that receives it, accumulating gigabytes of data all around the world in mail servers.

How Wave can help:

The Federation protocol requires the originator to “host” the message for the rest of the recipients. So when Aunt Helga sends a Wave full of pictures, the message is accessed right from her own provider, so it’s only stored once. This multiplies a bit when other Wave providers are involved, but not as much as the potential email has for wasting space.

It’s Difficult to Follow

Why it’s bad:

Imagine our mythical Aunt Helga again if you will. She’s planning a trip to France with her daughter Julia, so they email their ideas back and forth about the sites they might see when they get there and who they might sponge off. After about 10 emails, Helga wants to make a list of all these places, but has to wade back through them all to find each mention of a place-name. How inefficient! Tragically she misses a couple because she doesn’t recognise the names. Then Julia asks if she can bring her friend Tracy and they have to start all over again to make sure they cover the places Tracy wants to visit too! Not to mention the new conversations they must start with their French relatives to ask for a place to stay and to find the best sights to see while they are there.

How Wave can help:

Helga starts a wave and adds Julia. When Julia asks where they’ll go, they begin a blip right there to brainstorm ideas, while they discuss other aspects of the trip further down the wave. When Julia realises she wants Tracy to come she adds her directly, and Tracy can see exactly what they’ve come up with so far, and can even play back the wave to follow the discussion. She can also edit the “places to see” blip to add her own ideas. Finally, once Helga has contacted the French relatives separately to ask them nicely if the three can stay with them, she adds them to the ongoing wave to give suggestions and ideas right there in that same blip!

It’s Full of Spam

Why it’s bad:

Do I need to answer this? The problem with email is that anyone with your address can send you something. Of course, this has allowed email to grow into the juggernaut it is, because it’s just so damn easy to send information to people. However it means that anyone with your address can send you any old rubbish, and (at least before today’s exceptional spam filtering) it will pop up right in your inbox with all your legitimate mail.

How Wave can help:

Google Wave also has a spam and abuse problem at the moment. However I believe there are a number of ways Wave could begin to tackle spam, which warranted another post.

It’s Insecure

Why it’s bad:

As touched on in the Spam section above, email is trivial to spoof. Anyone can send email as anyone else. Some email providers offer some protection against this, but like almost every modern feature of email this was an added afterthought, and can not be presumed of every email client and system. Additionally, you might log in securely (using an https:// address) to your email, but unless you go out of your way to enable it your mail is generally not sent and stored securely. Email providers do what they can to secure it, but insecurity is built in!

How Wave can help:

We’ve already seen that waves are tied to the originating Wave providers, preventing spoofing. As an intrinsic part of this security, all wave communication is encrypted from end to end, meaning someone watching the data being sent between wave clients will not see anything useful.

It’s Limiting

Why it’s bad:

With the technology of the internet getting faster, smarter and more secure, people are finding new and unique ways to use it. It’s common to have two, three or more places where we must go to check for news and messages. Numerous attempts have been made to unify these streams of data into one super-inbox, but none have really caught on.
Email is still the dominant form of messaging, and most new services end up providing some sort of email gateway to their service. For instance, Facebook users can now reply to messages and posts via their email, and third parties let you follow and reply to Twitter users through your email. These solutions are usually tacked on as an afterthought. Email was not intended for many of the roles we shoehorn it into.

How Wave can help:

Wave is being built from the ground up to be customisable and extensible. The Wave API allows for the creation of Robots and Gadgets that each have a defined role in customising a user’s wave experience. Robots can be used to change the behaviour of waves (by importing Twitter notifications for instance). Gadgets can enhance the interface to add tools and options not available before (a voting gadget or similar). I can imagine eventually plugging in the sites and notifications I want using my choice of Bots and Gadgets. Such options are only limited by the imagination of developers.

These and more are the reason I’m excited about the future of Google Wave and the Wave Protocol. I can’t wait for the day I’m using Google Wave or something like it instead of my clunky antiquated email system.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/lovati/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Wave team have said very little about how they will address the spam problem, but from some clues and hints in the interface and what they have said, I can take a couple of guesses about how they could start to tackle it.

1. First up, Wave will ensure messages are signed and verified from the source. Currently email can be forged and made to look like a legitimate email coming from a trusted source. The Wave Protocol specifically addresses this, making it impossible for anyone to “spoof” another address without access to that user’s account.

2. Email currently makes it very easy to send millions of messages with little to no cost involved for the sender - they send and delete and don’t need to save copies of them, and the recipient is forced to deal with the accumulated data. The Wave Protocol however, requires the sender to host the wave and keep a copy for future reference. Spammers will no doubt find ways to send and then remove their waves, but if a host no longer hosts the wave, that could be a reliable indication that the sender was a spammer.

3. Finally, the few times the developers have been asked about spam they’ve mentioned a possible white-list system. White-listing involves choosing who can send you messages and blocking everyone else. People worry that this will stop legitimate communication, say from long lost friends, getting through. But already built into the interface is a “Requests” link that Wave says are “Waves for users not in your contacts list”. This could allow anyone to contact you, but you’d know at a glance that they weren’t from people you knew and trusted, and could more easily add them to your contacts, or mark them as spam.

I believe a combination of these three factors will go some way to addressing the spam problem. By tying everyone to a Wave server it’s not as economical to spam using waves. By not allowing completely anonymous communication, reported spammers can be more easily shut down, and by white-listing users we can identify potential spam at a snap. The Wave team will hopefully come up with even more solutions to implement and I’ll be interested to see how it develops.

Emaily is a bot that sends an email alert for every new blip in a specified wave.

If your main inbox is your email inbox then this bot could be an important part of your wave testing, at least until Wave catches on with more of your personal network. Instead of keeping Wave open all day, have this bot send you a ping when anyone updates the important waves.

One day though I hope to see the flow reversed, and email will flow in and out of Wave instead.

Emaily [Wave Sample Gallery]