Google's next big thing - Google Wave

probe

Google Wave: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

thebman

Cool. I guess this is going to work with things like Google Friend Connect.

Looks very like Gmail though.

Okay the video explains it better

I'm not sure how prevalent this problem that they have solved is. I can think of a few examples though so I guess if it occurs that often in my workplace then it probably does everywhere.

pvt.joker

rubbish

mick.fr

Pretty pathetic to see Google and the others copying each other with "almost new" products and serving us with products that actually do not really answer real life problems or are just a pure copy of other excellent products which have been around for more than 10 years.

I think Google employees should get out of their kitchen and give up Mars and Kitkat chocolate bars to actually produce something constructive and useful.

probe

I think some people are missing the point. Google is making available a set of open source tools for organisations and individuals to create their own social networking services - which will take advantage of features in HTML5 and other technologies to create inter-connectible social networking systems. When email came out first, you couldn't send an email from brand X email system and brand Y email system. They were all walled gardens.

To a large extent social networking sites are walled gardens today - each working to non-standards, in isolation, and it is very difficult to move from one to another service without manually copying all the content.

Today you can send email to virtually anybody else in the world and can set up your own email server if you wish. By opening up the social networking concept, and providing open source tools for developers to work on, the sky is the limit in terms of how the concept will develop over time.

All the existing social networking sites to a smaller or greater extent are re-inventing the wheel, and putting their own slant on it. Wheel reinvention is usually a waste of time.

Ireland loves re-inventing the wheel in so many areas of life - which costs a fortune and usually ends up with a sub-standard product/service. Take motorways - Ireland's motorway network was built without motorway service areas or toll booths that take bank cards - unlike motorway systems in any other European country.

To use the same analogy, Google is basically saying we will provide the motorway service area component and card payment component (in software terms) free for anyone to download. So if you are building a new motorway (for social network) you take our components off the shelf free, and put your own enhancements on the system you deliver. You might decide that it would be just as well add high speed railway lines along the same path as the motorway to save infrastructure costs - and why not add in long distance high tension electricity lines as well. In software terms you would develop the high speed railway line system and make it available on an open source license basis - in the same way as google is making the other infrastrcuture elements. Someone else will download your "invention" and add some other features, and in quick time the entire "public transport" infrastructure would become very developed and efficient (assuming it was just a piece of software running on a server, like social networking is).

The entire google search engine infrastructure most people use every day is running on open source software - a large part of which was contributed by open source developers - who are invariably passionate about what they do and good at it.

The opposite approach is the Microsoft, proprietary approach. They have made a mess of search, and many other online services they tried to develop. Their latest search offering is bing.com.... Years behind.... :-(