Google Waves at TechStuff

and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poulette, and I'm an editor here at how stuff Works dot com, and sitting across from me as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, Well all right then, So why why why are you waving at me? Oh? That can all be explained with a little listener mail. List listener mail comes from Lee. Note read in monotone. Oh wait, that's that's a stage direction. Hang on, he doesn't take direction while I can tell you this from my experience. Hi,

Google released Google Wave. What is it? Please answer? Love always, Lee from Bowling Brook, Illinois. PS. I listened to every podcast. You are the highlight of my week. Oh I'm sorry, that wasn't quite monotone. Thanks Lee. Uh, I'm glad that we're the highlight. Also kind of sad about that. But let's talk about Google Wave then. Now, this is something that we can actually talk about from experience, because Chris and I have been playing with Google Wave for almost

an entire day. You've been playing with it longer than I have. This is true. I got my invite um about a little less than a week ago, actually only a few days ago. Yeah, yeah, I got mine this morning. Right, I've got I've got like three days on Chris as far as the Google Wave experience. But let's let's uh, let's take in the way back machine, wave back machine, the wave back Hey, yeah, let's go into the wave back machine. Let's go someplace tropical, Liz take us away.

Oh this is nice. It's much better than you know, the studio where I can hear the fan on the computer going. I'm much preferred like the the tweets of the the the twitter twittering birds, the sea birds, and the the sound of the waves laughing the shore. It's amazing soundscaping that Liz is down here, isn't it. It is amazing. So before we get lost in this tweeting is sort of communication. Yeah, we don't want to stay here too long because we'll probably get burned because Chris

and I are both rather pale, sickly tech geeks. So let's let's talk about you know, you know what beach were on? Right? What are we on? Australia's beach? They only have the one, the only No, I'm kidding all the way around, so we're on the reason why I say Australia is because it was a team of Google folks from Australia who developed Google Wave and they unveiled this development development. You know what it's that it's that twenty hour flight to Australia that's doing it to me.

They unveiled this at the Google's Io Developer event back in the spring of two thousand nine. Really, yes, and it was that short time ago. Yeah, it seems like it was a long long time ago, does it. Yeah, it was, no, it was just we've been talking about Wave for so long. Now. Well, we saw the we saw the preview for it, and it was very impressive to us. Um. The preview is a ninety eighty minute, eighty minute long presentation that that this team gave and

it wasn't without its hiccups. The first thing we should say about Google Wave is that it's a tool that is in the preview stage. It's not even in beta, beta, beta. For such a long time, I was going to make that same comment, Yeah, no, no, no, that's good Google back in the way back machine. No no no, no, no no, we're still on the beach um. So yeah, Google, Google is all about the beta phase of testing, right but this is in the preview stage and it's a tool

that was pretty impressive. I think it took a while for the audience to really get into it, but as the team began to unveil the different features of Google Wave, people were really starting to get excited. And the reason why they were unveiling it at the Developers Conference is it's not just a a replacement for email or instant messaging or anything like that. It's a platform for applications. So in a way, they're kind of um reinventing the

way people could communicate over the web. Now it's in its most rudimentary stage right now. At the Developers Conference, they went ahead and gave everyone who went to the Developers Conference and invite into Google Wave to to check out the preview. Hey, last year, you brought me back a little compass this year, Yeah, last year I went to the Developers Conference. This year of I just couldn't do it. I was going to E three. I knew that I had I had a ton of other stuff

going on. I couldn't make it to the conference. Rights, Right, they were ending out invites to the most amazing tool that Google has come up with in a really long time, or what appeared to be according to the video. Right. So Chris and I we we kind of we tried to pull our weight, you know. We tried to pull some strings and grease some palms and go to some back alleys and talk to some shady Google people and

get ourselves some invites. And that failed miserably. Yeah, they started asking us Wave questions like, hey, guys, how does Wave? Where can we go? Yeah, we had a lot of people asking us these questions, and we honestly couldn't answer them because we had no access to Wave whatsoever. Well, then Google made an announcement back at the end of September that on September it was going to open up one hundred thousand invitations to Google Wave and the way

that you would get an invite. They had been accept accepting applications pretty much all summer long. You could go to Google's uh the Google Wave website, and it would have a little form you'd fill out. We fill out your information, include your your email account or whatever her Google account, and fill out some other little bits like say, if you were willing to test for bugs, and if you saw bugs, if you would report in that kind

of stuff. Then I had a section for notes, and they suggested that you'd be creative, so I sent in an epic poem. Um yeah, My first line was singing me oh muse, and then I put an iambic pentameter my request to be in Google Wave. Apparently that was not impressive enough, because I did not get one of those invites. The apparently not. So what was my saving grace was that one of the listeners that we have, one of my Twitter followers and a listener of tech stuff,

didn get accepted into the the initial round. And Google Wave is a communication tool, so you have to have at least two people running Google a Wave to really be able to use it, otherwise you're just you know, it's I blogged about this recently and I mentioned that if you don't have two people, it's as if you have an email program and you're the only person in the world who has the email program, So you can't send you can't do anything with it. You know, you can't.

You could write messages, but you can't send it to anyone. Right. Well, what Google did was they gave the people that in that first round a limited number of invitations to send out to other people. Right, So this way you could guarantee that you would have one or two other people at least with whom you could start conversations. Um, I believe it was eight invites. They called them nominations, so

you can nominate people to get Google Wave. Uh, it was not immediate the nomination and who you would make. You could make a nomination, but it would not immediately invite someone into Google Wave. You still had to wait because I got the nomination or I was told that I was nominated, and then it took almost an entire week before I actually got the official invite to get into Google Wave. Yeah. As a matter of fact, as

of this morning, it's still the same way. Yeah. See, I didn't even get nominations, So before any of our listeners right in and beg me for nominations. Let me tell you I don't have any. Because I was I was nominated, I did not get my own set up. So the economy finally gain of him the nod and so it was a Thursday night when I got the nomination. I went ahead and felt out the info and then I started to try I played with Wave a little bit,

and it's a bizarre tool. If it's hard to explain it, it kind of it's kind of a combination of email, instant messaging, collaborative software, and an application platform. Actually, I think if you're a UH, someone who has used other Google products in the past, it won't be completely foreign to you because it has elements. As far as I'm concerned, it has elements of Gmail UH and that you know

how Gmail threads conversations together, that's part of it. And then the collaborative UH networking and being able to work on the same project at the same time. Google Docs has that UM, but it sort of smashes them all together with an UH an element of I am a little Google Chat. Yeah. So I mean the difference is an email is like a static message. It is a

static message it's not like that. It is that you send an email to somebody else, they can they might be able to edit it, but they can only edit it themselves on that machine. So if you ask five questions, if you if I send an email with five questions to Jonathan, he can answer all five of those questions

and and reply to me. But if he sends, if I send him a message on Google Wave, he can answer each one of those questions in real time, and we can actually have a conversation about that one message. Rather than sending message after message. We have one message that is being pass that is being worked on simultaneously by the two of us. And more so, if you have multiple people, Let's say that you're trying to communicate

with five people. You send out the same list of questions to five people, You're gonna get five emails back with their each person's answers. Right, So now you've got Now you've got and and yeah, you don't have everyone's answers in one place until you transfer it Google Wave. You could invite those five people into a wave with you list of five questions. Each person could reply on his or her own time, and then you have one

place with all the answers. So it's a centralized communication device. Um, you do see updates in real time. So if if Chris were in a wave, that he and I were in together, and a wave is just think of a wave as a conversation. So let's say that Chris has opened up a wave. For example, this morning, we were creating a rundown for tex Stuff Live. So let's say that Chris has got an idea for a story for tech stuff Live and he types out the title. I log into Google Wave. I see that Chris is working

on a wave and that he's invited me. I go into that wave. I can actually see as he's typing. I'll see the letters appear on the screen in real time. Yep. So I can then see like, oh I hate that story. I can reply immediately and say, look, let's not waste our time on that. That's that's story is old and no one's interested. And then Chris will go and eat a gallon of butter pecan ice cream and cry in

the corner. This is pretty much what we call Tuesday morning. Yeah. Um, and if Jonathan happens to not be watching, uh you know, he doesn't have Google Wave open, then when he comes back from uh, you know, going to get his twelfth cup of coffee in the morning, and he can come back to his desk, open Google Wave and he'll see all of the changes that I've made to our wave message highlighted, so he'll know specifically what changes I've made. You know, he doesn't have to go through and away

a minute. Was that and there before? No? No, yeah that, No, he doesn't have to worry about that stuff. It's gonna be readily apparent to him. And if you have multiple people in a wave at the same time all typing, each person's uh contributions will be marked with a little icon that has their Google Wave name on it. Okay, so let's say there's three people all typing in a

Google Wave at the same time. If you were to take a break and stop typing to look and see what other people are typing, you'd see that your buddy Alex is typing one message maybe you know, two replies up, and your brother, your your you know, buddy Bob, he's typing something a little further down, and then you would see both being updated in real time. Um. And it's nice that it's labeled because that way you can see

who labeled what, who who contributed what. It still seems pretty chaotic, so the team included another feature that's pretty useful called playback. Yes, playback lets you look at a Google wave and view it in in various iterations. So each time someone's coming and made a change, you can go to that point and see what the wave looked like before the changes were made and what looked like after the changes were made, So that way you can

review edits. So let's say that Let's say that you have not been in wave for a while, and you've got two friends who have been in this wave. You're all discussing something important, like you you've got a big party coming up and you're planning it with these two other people, and while you were offline, they had a discussion, edited things and then moved on from there. You log in and you see the edits, but you don't see

any of the discussion. You can use the playback to go back and look through and see if there was something important that you missed. So that was a good feature to add in there. It does. It does take you step by step through the process. You can see everything that has been done to that document. Yeah, Um, there is another bit of mash up involved in the Google Wave that I didn't speaking of Google products that that I didn't mention. And that's a blogger you might

be saying, blogger, how does that factor into anything? Well, it's got a little bit of a content management system to it also sort of a CMS. Uh, and you can add links to the document. You know, that's not really that revolutionary, um, but you can also use these tools to to add maps or videos or all kinds of other things to the wave. And and not only that, you can actually embed waves into a blog, which is really cool because you can actually put it on a

web page. And if you are part of the one of the waivers in this group, um, you can actually see real time changes on a blog as you would in Wave. That's what's supposed to happen. What's cool is that if someone were to say, look at your blog and leave you a comment, you can see the comment appear in real time on Wave. You could respond in Wave and have it show up on the blog. So it becomes kind of a blog management tool that sense um. And yeah, the some of the other gadgets that you

can add into Google Wave are pretty cool. There's some pretty simple ones. There's one that's a yes, no, maybe pole. So let's say that you create a wave with like twelve people and you're trying to see who would be available on a certain day for a party. And you send out a wave of saying, I'm looking at you know, October thirty for a Halloween party. Who's available? You put

in the yes, no, maybe. Each person just clicks whichever response um applies to the him or herself, and then you'll see like if if, like you know, seven people click yes, and you can see which of the seven people click yes. Everyone can see it actually, and uh, I mean it's it's a built in gadget. It's already there. You don't have to design it yourself, so you can just drop it in there and and does all the

the organizing for you. And you can change your answer at any time, so you don't like, if you've clicked on yes and you meant no, that's not a big deal. You can just click on no and it'll swap you over to the other column and that's fine. But there are plenty of other gadgets. There's the map gadget, so you can create used Google maps and look at. You can create a map, interactive map with a whole bunch

of people. So you can do that for anything from just giving people directions to a location to maybe doing a scavenger hunt if you want it. I mean, there limitless applications really, it's just limited by your own imagination and the people with who you and the people who are on Wave. I was totally going to make that point, which will probably be just like three or four other people you actually know in your life at least. Yeah. Yeah, once it opens up wider will be much more useful.

But there are a lot of other uh well, there are a few other applications that are available now. What I'm excited to see is what comes available in the future. Because it's such an open platform, you could create a kind of a a miniaturized Worldwide Web around a specific topic like imagine that you just want to discuss with your friends, very specifically a show you want to go to and you want to try and convince some people. Some people know the band that you want to go see,

some people don't. So in this wave where you're inviting people to go, you include a map to the venue, to include um links to the venue's website, so people can get a look at what the venue looks like inside, you know, look at pictures. You could you can upload pictures to the wet wave so people could look at a slide show of pictures. Um. You could embed video of the band. Let's say the band's got a YouTube video.

You could embed that YouTube video in the wave so people could listen and see what it looks like before committing to to going or not going. It's and it's such a centralized way of doing it. You don't have to use eight different tools, right, you know, So it makes makes it much easier to do that kind of thing. And like I said, we're using it now. At least we used it today to create a rundown for tech Stuff Live um and it worked pretty well. Yeah, it did.

I think it would get confusing if you were working with maybe five or six other people all at the same time, But with just the two of us, it was easily manageable. Yeah. Yeah, do you want to talk about robots, Sure, talk about robots. Um. The Google Wave team has enabled the possibility that robots can also help you. Yeah, like data and uh, yes, and not so much. You used an android a droid and they're all robots anyway,

we're not actually talking about that type of robot. Robots basically are sort of like the bots that you see on chat or in chat rooms. UM. You can actually have a robot that's in h involved in the wave with you, with other people, and so it basically functions like a script like you can have it if you start doing certain things in the wave and the robot is part of that, it might automatically go ahead and take care of some things that you would normally do yourself.

So it's basically like a series of scripts. UM. But you know it can UM. It can allow you to look for certain topics and waves that you're you're trying to look for, and it can UH. There's actually an

automatic translation UH system, which is really cool. If you have somebody, say in Germany and someone in I don't know, China, and they want to work with one another on the wave, UH, they can talk in their native languages without having to learn a new language, and Google will use its translation tools to automatically translate that for them into something vaguely

resembling their native language. You'll actually see both both threats, so you'll see the original language that the person is typing in and then you'll see the translation as well. So like, for instance, I'm saying that I'm talking about the Palm Prex with my friend in Germany, and I don't happen to know that palm pre and German is shot and flugan flag and we wolf in China. Uh, Google knows, and so Google, you know, I'll type in palm prex, but it'll come out as HTCG one right

shot and fluid and flag. Yes I'm kidding, I'm kidding, but yeah, yeah, I said that was one of the functions. Yeah, that was one of the most impressive functions that I saw. And a lot of these are on the video if you really I mean again, the video is like an

hour and twenty minutes long, but it's it's worth watching. Yeah, yeah, well they Uh, the startup the little um Waves that I got from Google as starters had some some stuff on YouTube, so I'm assuming that that can actually be viewed by other people than are just on Wave, So there's probably quite a few demo videos that are available there actually. Um I included a YouTube demo video of Wave on one of my blog entries back when Wave

was first announced. Actually, I think Marshall did too, so I think we double dipped into the Google Wave pool. To speak you you like that, there's a little bit of a pun. Um. I'm really excited to see where this goes. Right now. I think it's got amazing potential but very limited use. And again most of that is because it's just it's there's not enough people on it to really test it now. It's in preview, they're still building out the infrastructure. It's not ready for widespread release,

so I can't. I can't argue with their decision. It's just frustrating because you could. I can see so many potential uses for this, and I'm just dying to get to that point. Um. What I'm worried about is that Google will either lose interest in the project or they'll redirect them into some sort of other project and this will never come to fruition. I okay, you don't have to worry about that. Well, no, because I don't work for Google. I can't. I'm not the one who makes

those decisions. It's not what I meant. There's so much buzz right now about Google Wave. I would not even remotely worry about Google Wave falling off the face of the earth. Um. But I would say, you know, it is funny because there there is so much buzz and it's all Google Wave is a game changer stuff and um and in some ways I think it is because there are so many other collaborative applications that are available, um, all over the web from all sorts of little providers

and and some of them are bigger. Uh. And Google Wave has some functionality that honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually derived from some of those other Google tools. But um, you know, I don't think it's going anywhere. But I also don't think it's for everybody. I mean I think, you know, they were showing things that you could do with it that are not business related, like you could have a party and invite people to a party and through in that. Yes, no, maybe gadget

you know, it's sort of like evite. Yeah, but you know, I don't know that I would necessarily need to use it for stuff, uh, you know, with just casual email with my friends. I think if they worked in some of the functionality into other things like Gmail, then it would make sense and I wouldn't be surprised to see it go that way, because when you think about the Gmail threading feature, you know, sending blips back and forth. Blips,

by the way, are little pieces of of wave. The blips are the little bits of information that you can send in a wave. But um, but yeah, I just don't I just don't know. It's something that I feel like I could use normally as part of my daily routine at work, but I don't know that I would use it casually. So it you're I think you're I think you're right. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of things they do with the A P I and some of the other applications you can build into it

to to get other functionality into it. But that's probably a good thing right now, since it's in preview, we really don't need to be using it for everything anyway. It's also nice, if nothing else, it could set the groundwork for future applications from not just Google, but from everyone. We're already good. We could we could totally see a week you know, not to not to go like overblown and totally exaggerated out of hand or whatever, but I could be convinced that this is a glimpse into what

the next generation of the web will be like. You know, I think I think that's it, But I think it's going to be a subtle thing. It's just gonna be something that creeps in and yeah, and this is something where it's I'm not saying that Google Wave is exactly what the Web's gonna look like in in you know,

five or ten years or whatever. I'm just saying that the things that I'm starting to see in Google Wave, I would not be surprised if that if those features became more common in the web experience in the future. And I think that the reason why Google Wave is getting so much attention is because these features by themselves are already in other applications. It's just that they're in one place and that's attractive and people go, oh, well, when you put all this stuff together, you know, you

can do all these things with it. And so look how much we got to talk about this and we've only been using it together for one day. Yeah, I've I've I've had waves with Chris Um, Tom Merritt and Jason Hawill have seen it, a couple of people I know in your life and some listeners, and that is it? So again, our experience is quite limited, because I mean

that's the preview is very limited. But uh out seriously, that this is the last time we'll be mentioning way, I'm sure, well, but I hope that that more than satisfies all the people who have written in and asked about waves, because there's nothing else I can talk about about it. I'm done. Yeah, I mean, if you're wondering what it looks like, it's not even really all that different from an email. No, it's not. You've got your contact, you got your inbox, and you can see what's in

the message. Something he doesn't strike up when you open the application or anything. It's the functionality more than the look. For me, it's even just the potential. It's not even the functionality. It's the potential of the tool. Now, whether it goes anywhere, we'll have to wait and see, oh will I'm just I'm trying not to build up my own expectations, much less our listeners. All right, All right, well, um, uh that exhausts me if not the subject this is true,

I'm still getting over swine flu um. The let's move onto a little listener mail, and this listener mail comes from Mike. Mike says, I really enjoyed your podcast concerning privacy and Facebook. I also share your hatred of quizzes and apps. When I heard about the light dot Facebook dot com, I fell in love. Perhaps I mentioned on

the podcast will be helpful for others, Thanks Mike. So yeah, we've got light dot facebook dot com, which is sort of a stripped down version of Facebook bloodc status updates, but takes away a lot of the other features that that can clutter up your Facebook feed. There are potential downfalls to light dot facebook dot com, as our own beloved Chris Palette discovered when he blogged about it. Do you want to talk about that for a second, Chris, No, I don't, but I will anyway. No, No, No, it's um.

It's it's funny because there was there's there was a group of people and one geographic area in the world, UM, which apparently was a very specific part of India oddly enough, and maybe a little bit of Pakistan possibly. So yeah, we can't really tell yet. It's kind of hard to tell. And um for a while, for whatever reason, they they wrote in UM. I got probably a few dozen comments

on the blog post. I wrote about you know Facebook light. Um, and uh, it was just really strange because everybody they were stuck. They couldn't get out of it. They couldn't go back to regular Facebook. And I thought, well, it's strange. Just go back to regular Facebook, you know, type the R A L L again. No it didn't work. Clear out your cookies, No, that didn't work. And everything I suggested. I was so frustrated because I wanted to help so badly and nothing I was doing, Uh what what you know,

none of the suggestions I was making this helpful. This wasn't a client side issue. Now that yeah, there was. There was something about that particular geographic area where they could not get too regular Facebook, and they all wanted the apps and all the other you know whistles, and they just wanted to check out what light the Facebook light looked like. And then they got stuck with Facebook

Light and they couldn't get out. Actually I think they got I don't know this for a fact, but from what they were saying, I think they got switched over and couldn't get out like they actually they didn't even necessarily try it. They just got switched to it. That's

the way it appeared. And somebody posted on the Facebook forums that I might be able to help, and so I got a whole bunch of people saying, change my Facebook back, and I had to explain to them that I don't work for Facebook and how stuff Works dot m is not part of Facebook and vice versa, and that didn't really appease people. I had a lot of people still asking me to change their Facebook back, and then suddenly the comments went away, So I assume that

it's fixed. But yeah, that's uh. If you are I know all about Facebook Light, if you're at it, you can try Facebook Light and it is nice actually, if you're if you're just looking to see what everybody is saying, your your your contacts, it's very nice because it's very streamlined and very simple and you don't have to look at all the applications and the quizzes and all that other stuff. But if you want all that stuff, then you're not gonna be happy with it. So, yeah, something

is broken. We can't fix it. Yes, that that that's the model of this podcast. Feel feel free to write us at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, but again not with tech support questions because we probably won't be able to help you. Now, if you want to learn more about Google Wave, you're gonna have to wait because we don't have an article on that yet.

But we have lots of other articles about Google at how stuff works dot com, so you should go read those while you're waiting for us to get enough info to write a full article on how Google Wave works. Yes, and in the meantime, we hope you enjoyed this podcast, Come back visit us again. We'll talk to you again

really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you