Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave by Ars Technica | Hacker News Reader

Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave by Ars Technica

arstechnica.com

20 pointsabraham13 comments

Each top-level conversation contains groups of messages that are sort of like subthreads. The conversations are referred to as "waves" and the subthreads are called "wavelets". Individual messages, which are called "blips", are the smallest discrete conversational unit of a wave. The distinction between Wave the service and "wave" the conversational unit is significant, so keep an eye on the capitalization.

Why the jargon? These terms do not relate to anything anyone is familiar with in any different context. This seems unnecessary.

I genuinely hope that http://xkcd.com/483/ (Fiction Rule of Thumb) doesn't apply to Google Wave.

Sorry for the pedantry, but doesn't expecting the terms to relate to things in a different context go against the very nature of jargon?

Jargon is "technical terminology unique to a particular subject." [wiktionary.org]

I imagine that when one is discussing OTs and how they relate to the federation protocol, these terms would be very useful. Sure, you could talk about nodes and edges in a graph, but there are many graphs of many types in any large system. These terms refer to specific kinds of nodes in a very specific kind of graph.

I haven't been following the Wave hype, but by the end of the rather verbose first page I still had no real idea what Wave is supposed to be or why I'd want to use it.

Best I can tell it's some mish-mash of email/IM/docs - which frankly sounds horrifying.

As I understand it Wave core principle is actually simple. When you do email, the fundamental unit of communication is the email. In Wave, the fundamental unit of communication is the conversation.

Unlike physical mail, most emails don't stand alone. They are part of a conversation. Conversations can get quite complicated. In mailing lists, they often get very long, effectively taking the shape of an HN thread.

Now, plain email is a mish-mash of message/IM/docs. We already use it these ways. Wave, by being very permissive, make these tasks easier. Single messages aren't harder, ML-like conversations have an enforced structure (easier to follow), and the collaborative editing thing just emerge from the possibility of modifying the entire conversation.

I see Wave like I see Lisp: a simple and consistent core, which allow many possibilities.

I was in the same situation and then I watched the video, which explains Wave quite well. Seriously, watch the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw

Seems really over complicated to me, and I can't understand what problem it's trying to solve really. The scope seems to be ridiculously broad.

Guess we'll see if people start using it or not, but it seems like there's a fair learning curve before you even understand what it is and why it exists.

> Wave is designed to facilitate real-time concurrent messaging, meaning that content appears to all users immediately and multiple users can edit and submit content at the same time.

One of the things I like about email is that it is not real-time.

Real-time just means that you can start ignoring it immediately, instead of waiting whole seconds for it to arrive in your inbox first.

If you have someone typing away on the other end and they know you're there, that's IM, and that's ok in some situations, but not in others.

You can hide the fact that you're editing a reply until you send it, so it can act more like email, if you like.

This is actually a pretty good overview of wave, hitting all the high points well.

Reading this comment, I knew it had to be Ryan Paul (since it's not a Mac article).

It's kind of awesome how many of their great writers still code from time to time, so they really get it.

so.. any chance for an invite? :p

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