Re: Google Wave: A new type of "Ruby Quiz" ?

On 12/14/09, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So far, in my experience Google Wave has not worked very well.

Part of the problem is that it's a confusing muddle of email, and
wiki. They claim to have (underlying?) version control, but it's not
obvious other than the ability to 'replay' the history of the wave,
with no obvious way to recover a previous state.

A wave is really a document which in the wiki fashion, 'anyone can
edit', but I've found that users don't really understand that when
they edit a wave, they are affecting every wave participant's 'copy'
of the wave, since there really is only one copy.

I set up a wave for a couple of technical groups, one accrued some
interesting contents, until someone, thinking of it as 'email' decided
to clean things up by deleting everything HE had already read. Which
deleted it for everyone.

So I'm seeing a lot of people playing with wave with no clear picture
of how it is intended to be used (I'm including myself in this), and
Google hasn't as far as I can see given such a picture. I'm not
really sure that they have one themselves and that wave is still a big
social experiment to try to figure out what it really SHOULD be.
There are a few resources going out like Gina Trappani's book on wave,
but right now, it seems to be worse than the wild wild west, or the
unexplored sea. It's hard to know where the bandits and dragons are.

By the way, there are ways to have waves searchable by members of a
google group (e.g. the google group which follows ruby talk). You can
actually add the group as a participant using the groups email
address. Wave will seem to complain about it not being a wave
address, but it will work, and then members of the group can search
for the wave with the group: prefix to the search. (I'm doing this
from memory, so there might be some variations from what I just said,
but the function is, or at least was, there).

I read a description of the design of network protocols once which
noted that simple, to-the-point, successful protocols are succeeded by
ornate, overcomplicated, overdesigned protocols. Examples: slip was
followed by ppp, bootp by dhcp, rip by ospf/bgp/isis. (Actually, I
like both dhcp and ppp myself, and consider them improvements on what
came before.)

Clearly the same is true of other areas of technology. Gmail was a
very successful (or at any rate, popular) service for google, so they
said, "Ok, good. Now let's turn it up to 11."

.