• Wave vs. e-mail
  • E-mail is like snail mail. Each “e-mail” is sent to a person.
  • Wave is like a “conversation”–GMail’s thread view was a precursor. Every wave is a shared object hosted somewhere. When each viewer looks at the wave, they can leave their replies, and then the next user to see the Wave can see the original, the comments, and then add their own… more like bulletin boards.
• Usage scenarios
  • Responding when the other person is offline (more like traditional e-mail)
    • You can reply to particular pieces of a wave (e.g. a question asked mid-message), rather than just one big reply to the entire wave. Each reply to each piece looks a little more like a comment on that section of the wave, rather than a full response.
    • Each of these comments can turn into a thread, where other people reply to your reply.
  • Responding when the other person is online:
    • It actually turns into a character-by-character chat. IM merged with e-mail.
  • Adding a new person to the wave
    • With e-mail, you would forward the whole chain of messages and replies to the new person. With Wave, you just invite them and they can view everything–not just whatever was forwarded to them. Also, if someone goes back to a previous message in the thread to forward it, reply to it, or make changes to it, the new person can’t be accidentally left off the delivery list.
    • The person can see the original message and then click step-by-step through each comment, etc. using the “Playback” feature.
      
    • There is also always the option for a “private reply” to a particular person which everyone else can’t see.
  • Attachments
    • Drag & Drop pictures into the wave: adds thumbnails to everyone else’s screen long before the pictures are done uploading
    • Can instantly turn the entire wave into a group photo album with a beautiful “slideshow” feature
    • Very easy to extract all/some images from a wave and creating a new wave with them
• Embeddable
  • Like Maps, which can be embedded into an existing web page, waves can also be embedded
  • “Gadgets” that are connected to a particular web site show up as a “Participant” you can invite to view that wave, which instantly shares that wave to the web site
    • And! The entire wave–the ability to respond to it, etc. are posted to your site. So comments on the web site are shared back to the wave, and responses to the wave are shared back to the web site: LIVE.
    • Any blog you comment on shows up in your wave client; this way, following threads on blogs you like can all be pulled into your Wave client.
      
  • Social Networks
    • You can create a new wave as a post in your favorite social network, and share it with friends who aren’t even Wave users (as long as they’re on that social network), where they can use all of the features of Wave
      
  • Only one version of the wave exists
    • So even if you’ve posted it anywhere else, those other embeds (your blog, social network, etc.), will instantly reflect any edits from anywhere else
• Collaborative Authoring (using Edit Button)
  • After taking notes, do you put in a doc or a wiki, or e-mail them out?
    • With Wave, you can do both. Real-time collab like Google Docs
  • Every time you visit the wave, you see the current version with anything that’s changed highlighted for you to review. Remember, you can step through the whole thing edit by edit using “Playback”.
  • It’s all still a wave–but if you choose to think of the original as “document-like”, you can edit it.
    • Example: You could choose to fix someone’s spelling errors on an e-mail.
  • Can at any point export the current version of the wave to a new wave, text document, etc.
    • But, you can still make changes to the original and repost to the new wave
    • Different teams can be working on different sections of the original and at any point publish just their part of the output/exported wave
• Organization
  • Folders
  • Saved Searches
  • Tags
    • Shared by everyone (if you tag it, everyone else gets the same tag)
      
  • Use waves to organize other waves
    • You can make waves with lists of links to other waves, etc.
    • Easy to do! Just pick up a wave from the search panel and drop it into your new links wave
    • Point to one wave in another, like a wiki
• Productivity examples
  • Scheduling a movie with friends
    • Polls on what movie to see (Yes/No/Maybe gadget lets everyone easily clicky each)
• Extensions
  • Extensions can live inside of a wave: just click install button from that wave
  • Bloggy
    • One they’ve written already. Auto posts the wave to the blog
      
  • Games!
    • Collaborative or competitive
      • Chess
      • Sudoku
    • You can use “playback” to watch the entire game!
  • Maps
    • Maps embed easily in a wave and update easily (other people can watch you zoom in and out, switch to satellite, etc. in the wave)
      
    • You can add markers to the maps
    • Draw on maps with polygon tool
  • Spell check (Spelly)
    • Checks not just against a dictionary, but also against a huge language database.
      • “Can I have some been soup” knows that it’s wrong. “You are to kind” knows that it’s wrong
  • Link detector (Linky)
    • live updating: Most things, when they detect a link, convert it to a permanent link. Instead, linky suggests and then unsuggests as you keep typing
      
    • Videos: embeds the youtube, etc. video straight into the wave (can everyone watch it together? maybe?)
  • Search while within Wave to find links (Searchy)
    • Popup a small google search window and get images or links from Google; it puts the link or image straight into the wave
  • Twitter
    • “Twave” is a wave of tweets
    • Signin to your twitter account in that wave
    • That wave shows your twitter feed (tweets from everyone else, so just like the twitter.com feed)
    • You can respond to twitter posts in wave, and it actually tweets your response
    • You can make a new twave that includes all of the results with a certain search result
  • Use Wave API to use Waves in existing workflows (Buggy)
    • Connects with issue trackers: githost, bugtracker, etc.
  • Auto-translation (Rosy)
    • character-by-character live translation! AH!

Fancy Features

• Live update
  • Search results update very, very quickly (less than a second)
• Polls (Polly)
  • Put forms in waves: sends out a new question wave to each person, which report back to the admin wave
  • You can create forms collaboratively
  • Auto-generates a results section in the admin wave
• Federation
  • Even though Waves can be on different servers, it’s just as quick/live across two different servers (i.e. lots of people will be on Google’s Wave server, but some people will be on their own company’s Wave server: it’ll still work fine)
    • Even though public portions of the wave are shared between servers, private replies don’t ever leave your server
• Responds really well to upping font sizes, resizing certain sections, etc. (doesn’t feel so much like a web app, more like an actual app)
  

My Concerns

• Bringing all of your online communications into one inbox could get very cluttered–Inbox Zero is hard enough as it is

Dorky quotes (presenters are apparently Firefly fans)

• Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal (Firefly)
  
• “Shiny” (Firefly)
  
• Initech (Office Space)