Monday, June 29, 2009

Episode 16 - Google Wave of Mutilation

It has been a while for sure. Ken, Robin and I often got together on the weekend during the last few months, but it was usually to talk about and watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Well, much to the delight of Josh from Israel, the hockey season is over, and we are back with an exciting new topic. Man what a lame sentence... Anyway, in episode 16 we talked about the new Google Wave initiative, that is explained here.

Robin and Ken did their homework and explained it to me. Wave seems to be a mashup of a wiki, all of your social networking and social media stuff, google docs, and email. Oh and twitter... This may replace email, but we were all quite skeptical.

Both Ken and Robin are not twitter people, though, I am. They claim not to have enough time in the day for all of this social networking, damn it I say, make time!

We discussed communication tools that have changed the world, such as printing presses, the telegraph, the phone etc. Robin feels this wave thing is just the phone coming back at us with more content, and he is opposed to phones. I am with him on this.

Both Robin and I remembered the ABC tv after school special called, The Wave from about 1981 or so. It was creepy..

We ended by talking about how many times we had met Prime Ministers, Premiers or the Queen. Both Robin and I figure she is not our leader, as we did not have a chance to vote against her. Ken believes this makes us traitors...

Shout outs to Jim from Fort Worth, and Josh and Esther from Israel. Thanks for the feedback guys.

Enjoy episode 16

5 comments:

Krash Coarse said...

woohoo! Something to follow BOL on the train ride home! Thanks guys!

Rachel said...

Aren't the Borg totally linked constantly in real time? (Resistance is futile...)

Ryan Gray said...

If I recall correctly, when the Web browser first appeared, most people viewed it as primarily an aggregator of some of the existing protocols like FTP into a GUI, and not thought of as much for the then new HTML. As a result It was seen as not so revolutionary by most because "all it was doing" was combining things that already existed into one interface. Now we know that it was the HTML browsing that was the game changer - not the integration of the legacy protocols. I see many similarities with Google Wave. Also, remember that people didn't think RSS was worth much at first since it was "just" XML.

Dave Brodbeck said...

@Ryan, nice points. I think you may be on to something here. Perhaps the difference though is that when the browser appeared there were many fewer people online. I am not sure how that may change the equation really...

Ryan Gray said...

@Dave, yes, certainly the number of people on the Web changes things. It creates a larger inertia. Certainly anything that is going to replace email either has to be so incredibly better, that people just switch, or it has to be very backward-compatible to the installed base so the mass can slowly migrate.