I’ve done substantial development and architectural design work over the last 30 years in a variety of the areas that Wave covers, including email and wiki servers, source control systems and networked document editing.
I find the Wave architecture to be an important and substantial integration of email, wiki, texting, forums (e.g. FreeRepublic), media sharing and shared document editing.
Google has the people, corporate size, reputation, and culture needed to deliver something like this successfully. They have the permission and distribution structures of Wave well thought out. They will almost surely provide an outstanding platform base for an interesting variety of add-ons meeting special purpose needs from other developers. I expect Wave to be well received by the younger generation as an integrated platform for their online lives, independent of whatever desktop, laptop, palmtop or cell phone they are using at the moment.
I am very impressed. I expect Wave to substantially exceed Google Maps in usage, and perhaps even exceed Google search in a few years.
Major new applications such as this take a few years to reach their dominance, so it will be a while before I know if my enthusiasm is misguided or not.
I appreciate that Wave is open source, and that others, not just Google, will be able to setup their own Wave servers. Google is not trying primarily to capitalize on its strong server infrastructure and potential monopoly control of this application space to gain direct profits or market control. Once again, they are building better roads, so that they can sell bill board advertising targeting those driving on their roads.
Ten years from now, old fangled forum software such as we run on FreeRepublic (currently the finest forum software on the planet, in my experience - thanks Jim and John!) will start to feel obsolete to those who have adapted to the Wave. Similarly for several other application categories such as email, texting, twitter and online picture, audio and video sharing.
Ten years from now, old fangled forum software such as we run on FreeRepublic (currently the finest forum software on the planet, in my experience - thanks Jim and John!) will start to feel obsolete to those who have adapted to the Wave. Similarly for several other application categories such as email, texting, twitter and online picture, audio and video sharing.
I too was impressed. Seems like it is a powerful tool for collaboration such as we do on FR. So potentially of interest to John and Jim, I would think.But I also think that the same collaborative potential would be applicable to education - hence, of potential interest to home schoolers.
I also am interested in the use speech processing, and they demonstrated not only spell check, an old technology by now, but context checking for homonyms which are inherently a problem for speech processing. This technology might help speech processing turn the corner.