From The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave

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← Table of Contents Chapter 1: Meet Google Wave Chapter 2: Get Started with Wave →

Chapter 1 is an overview of what Google Wave is and what problems it solves. To dive straight into using Wave, skip ahead to Chapter 2, Get Started with Wave.

Google Wave is a web-based collaboration tool that helps groups of people grow documents out of conversations. Google created Wave to alleviate problems that have plagued email for over 40 years. In this chapter, you'll see how Wave combines features from several modern web applications into a single interface, and how Wave distinguishes itself from existing collaboration software. See the most common uses of Wave, how Wave got its name, and why you won't have to depend solely on Google to wave for long.

Come on in and meet Wave.

Contents

"What email would look like if it were invented today"

Google Wave is a group collaboration tool which makes it easy for several people to work together on a single document on the web. Google Wave combines some of the best features from modern web applications you already know and love—such as email, instant messenger, wiki's, and forums—into a single, hybrid interface. As such, it's difficult to describe what Google Wave is in only a few words. The Google Wave team bills Wave as "what email would look like if it were invented today." [1]

Why does email need a reinvention?

Relative to the lifespan of most technology, email is ancient. Invented over 40 years ago, email predates the internet as we know it—and in fact was a crucial tool in the creation of the internet. Despite its age, email hasn't evolved much since the 1960s. Electronic mail is based on the paradigm of postal mail, a system of passing messages back and forth between senders and recipients. Wave makes a bet: surely there must be a better way to send, receive, preserve, and grow shared communiqués than via email.

Email's Problems

Email is simple, wildly popular, and works well—or else it wouldn't have stayed in such widespread use as long as it has. But email has serious drawbacks when used to manage a conversation within a group.

Email propagates multiple copies and versions of messages. As soon as email is sent, the message's contents are locked in. You can only copy, paste, edit, and send on yet another copy of that message. As a result, email propagates copies of copies, storing each in a filing system of "boxes."

For Example: Kaylee types an email message, addresses it to Zoe, and sends it. A copy of that message stays in Kaylee's sent box, and another copy appears in Zoe's inbox. Zoe replies and optionally includes a copy of the original message in her response. A copy stays in her sent box, and yet another copy appears in Kaylee's inbox. Kaylee replies to Zoe's reply, adds a CC to Mal, and sends it. The Send button gets pushed only three times, yet seven copies of the same message appear in differing states and in different locations for three people.


There's no standard or easy way to embed rich content like maps, photo slide shows, or video clips in the body of an email. Email's answer for anything that's not text is "The Attachment" or rudimentary HTML. Whether it's a document, a photo, a video, a group survey, or a web page, email wasn't designed to incorporate interactivity or richness within the body of the message itself. You can attach a file or include a link to a web page inside an email message. However, long links can wrap and become unclickable, and they force the recipient to launch a web browser. Further, HTML email formatting isn't consistently supported across all email clients, and there are limitations to what you can include.

Clarification: While certain email clients like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook can render rich formatting with images and colors and display attached files inline, there's no consistency among all email clients. No one's email always looks the same.


To reply to a subsection of an email, you have to quote that section manually. To reply to a certain part of a message in an email thread, you have to manually quote that section and position your cursor below it to respond—but most people don't take the time. As a result, individual points buried inside an email's contents can get lost and remain unaddressed, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. Most people "top post" their email replies, which makes it difficult to see which information is associated with which points inside a message. Top-posting also makes conversations difficult to read in order.
For example: Kaylee sends Wash an email telling him about the engine upgrade project she's working on, then asks where the nearest place to stop for parts is, and how long it will take to get there. An email message is just a flat document, so it's not easy for Wash to respond to just the questions Kaylee has asked in a readable order. He could reply to her message and manually position his answers directly after her questions. But that's a lot of work—and many people don't do it.


It's not easy to privately respond to specific people within a group email. When you're engaged in a big group email thread, you might want to respond to a subset of the group privately. To do so via email, you have to compose yet another separate message, and manually edit the recipient list to make sure only the people you want to see the message are included on your private reply.

For example: Badger emails Kaylee, Wash, and Zoe requesting a cargo drop-off, and wants to know how much it will cost him. Zoe needs to ask the crew how they should negotiate payment privately. She can't reply to all on the original message because Badger will see it, so she has to manually edit the recipient list on a separate thread and create yet another copy of the conversation.


Since email's invention in the 1960s, the internet and then the World Wide Web were born, which gave everyone an instant electronic printing press. In the early days, web sites were just static documents that didn't change. As the web grew and the technology behind it progressed, web sites became interactive, ever-changing hosted applications, where you could store and update information, communicate with others, chat in real-time, and even check and send email. In a world where broadband is widely available and you can use blogs, Wikipedia, instant messenger, and hosted web applications that obviate the need for any software on your computer besides a web browser, email looks even more ancient.

While in practice Wave's purpose isn't a direct parallel to email's, understanding email's problems given the capabilities of the modern web is a good starting place for understanding what Wave can do.

Wave's Solution: Conversations as Live Documents

Rather than pass multiple copies of messages back and forth, Wave hosts a single copy of a conversation that all participants can edit and add to. Wave displays the latest version of the conversation to everyone in the group in real-time, even as it's changing. That means if Kaylee has the wave she sent Wash open on her computer, and Wash is typing his responses, Kaylee sees the wave change keystroke by keystroke.

Clarification: Capital "W" Wave refers to the whole product, Google Wave. Lowercase "w" wave refers to a hosted conversation that has one or more participants.


Wave treats an email conversation with multiple recipients and senders as a document with multiple editors and writers. If you can make the conversations-as-documents and documents-as-conversations leap along with Wave, the system makes 100% more sense.

Quote: "The goal of Google Wave is to collaborate INSIDE email rather than using email to ARRANGE to collaborate." —Wave user Marsh Gardiner[2]


In other, smaller ways, Wave addresses the rest of the problems with email listed in the previous section. Using Wave, all the participants in a conversation have the ability to:

  • Reply to a subset of a wave inline, as shown in Figure 1-2
  • Add rich interactive media like videos, images, maps, and polls in-wave
  • Play back and copy earlier versions of a wave, allowing you to revert to an older state of a given wave, or see how it changed over time
  • Embed a private conversation with a subset of the group in-wave, without creating a separate thread
Figure 1-2. In Wave, you can reply inline right beneath a certain part of the text with one click, and others can respond to your inline reply in that thread.

The following table sums up the differences between "The Email Way" and "The Wave Way."

Element The Email Way The Wave Way
People Sender or recipient Participant
Messages Copies Single, hosted conversation
Rich Content Attachments, links, HTML Inline gadgets
Quoting/Commenting Manual Forum-like threading
Privacy CC, BCC Inline, private threads

Wave is a big upgrade to email. But there are plenty of other real-time group collaboration tools out there, too. Let's see how Wave stacks up against them.

Wave vs. Existing Collaboration Tools

Chances are you're already doing the kind of online collaboration that you'd do in Wave using other products. What is it that Wave offers other solutions don't? Well, while Wave won't always be the right tool for the job, it does offer unique advantages over existing collaboration tools like email, instant messenger, wikis, or Google Docs.

For example, you'd choose to wave instead of email because you can have real-time, IM-like conversations inside Wave, and cut out the lag time of asynchronous email communication—you know, when you send an email and have to wait for your recipients to read, reply, and send one back. In Wave, if your recipient is online, you don't have to wait. In fact, your recipient can start typing before you stop.

In that respect, Wave sounds a whole lot like instant messenger. However, you might choose Wave over instant messenger because in Wave, you can edit the same text, images, captions as someone else is at the same time. During an instant messenger conversation you pass back and forth a series of single-author, uneditable messages. In Wave, anyone can edit any message (or blip, in Wave-speak). Imagine correcting someone else's typos or adding information to what they said during a chat.

Editing other people's work while chatting sounds a whole lot like using Google Docs. Google Docs does offer a chat feature with collaborators while you edit a spreadsheet or presentation, as shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. Google Docs offers collaborator chat inside its interface as well as live updates when more than one person edits a file. However, chat is split off into a separate sidebar—as if you were using Word on one side and IM on the other.

However, Google Docs is a web-based office suite, where the object is to create a flat file that gets printed or emailed to someone eventually. Wave is more like a real-time wiki, which creates documents meant to be linked and constantly revised, pages that contain multimedia and interactive gadgets.

Unlike most wikis and Google Docs, in Wave, you can insert image slide shows, YouTube videos, Google Maps, and countless other gadgets into a wave very easily. However, unlike Google Docs, Wave doesn't let you export the content you create there (yet, anyway).

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Wave is more like a real-time, workgroup Wikipedia than Google Docs, email, or instant messenger. The following table compares common collaboration tools to Wave, feature by feature.

Feature Email Instant Messenger Google Docs Wikis Forums Wave
A single, hosted copy of a conversation or document No Not usually Yes Yes Yes Yes
The ability to see when contacts are online No Yes Yes No No Yes
Instant messaging or chat, with no-refresh updates No Yes Yes No No Yes
Keystroke-by-keystroke live updates with multiple visible cursors No Some services No No No Yes
Simultaneous editing of one document by multiple collaborators No No Yes Yes No Yes
Edit rights to other participants' contributions No No Yes Yes No Yes
The ability to compare revisions No No Yes Yes No Yes
Interactive maps, videos, polls and other widgets Not really No Some Some No Yes
Inline replies and threaded conversations Manually No No No Some Yes
Ability to easily publish the conversation or document No No Yes Yes No Yes
User access permissions (read-only or edit) N/A N/A Yes Some N/A Yes
Ability to easily link documents to each other No No No Yes No Yes
Ability to export the finished document to a file No No Yes Manually No Using a bot, with limitations
Note: Comparing specific applications (like Google Wave and Google Docs) to types of software (like forums and instant messenger) is comparing apples and oranges. However, where one standout product doesn't fairly represent its entire genre, we generalized about what a type of software does and doesn't do out of the box. While this works for the purposes of a broad overview we hope this table provides, remember: you can install plug-ins and add-ons with many forums, wikis, email, and instant messenger applications to get features that are listed as lacking in this table.


As you can see, Wave offers a whole lot of features in one place. But how do you put Wave to good use in your workday?

What to Use Wave For

As a group collaboration tool, Wave's primary purpose is to reduce the inefficiencies of individuals duplicating the work of their teammates, enabling people to work together simultaneously. Just a few of the best ways to use this kind of live group co-editing are:

  • Taking meeting notes: Instead of one person taking meeting minutes, or everyone in the room taking their own individual notes, a group of people can edit a single wave during a meeting.
  • Group brainstorming: Likewise, instead of individuals brainstorming ideas separately and then comparing notes, using a single wave gives a group the opportunity to work together and riff on each other's ideas in real-time.
  • Multimedia chat sessions: Instant messenger doesn't usually allow chatters to include images, maps, and videos right inside their chat, and often there's no chat transcript stored in a single place for later reference, but Wave offers both.

This is just the beginning. Throughout this book, we'll point out examples and use cases for each Wave feature as we present it. To learn about in-depth practical use cases for Wave in work and in life, see Chapter 10, Wave in Action.

As you can see, Wave is an advanced tool for co-editing documents within a group. But for new users, Wave can be confusing and overwhelming.

Lost at Sea

Figure 1-4. At first, Wave's purposes or parallels are unclear.

Because Wave escapes a simple label and boasts so many advanced features, it can be confusing for new users. Parody web site EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com [3] jokes that heady topics like radiocarbon dating, neoclassical economics, and polymodal chromaticism are easier to understand than Wave. The joke rings true because the initial confusion about what Wave is and what to use it for is a nearly universal experience. The first waves you're bound to receive from your friends and co-workers, fresh on Wave, will say things like "I don't get it" and "This is weird," as shown in Figure 1-4.

There are a few good reasons for the initial confusion.

  • Conversation-as-document is a whole new paradigm with no existing precedent. For most computer users, editing a Microsoft Word document and instant messaging are two very different activities. Wave fundamentally conflates messaging and document editing, so there's no obvious existing parallel for what you do in Wave to what you do now. It's not quite email, and it's not quite writing a Word document. Wave is both and neither, which can make it difficult to understand or place into your existing workflow.
  • Conversation trees, or non-linear message threads, are chaotic. Forums, blog comments, email threads, and instant messaging sessions are usually linear conversations, where the newest message appears at the bottom (or top) of the list. You read them in one direction, one after the other. Wave's inline reply capability turns a conversation into a tree that can grow any number of branches. When wave participants add new information to a wave on different branches at different times, the non-linear nature of the discussion can be overwhelming.
  • Document versioning is foreign (to non-programmers). Software developers have been using file versioning tools like the one built into Wave for decades now. But most computer users don't version their files or use a feature like Wave's playback in any other context, so the need for it isn't obvious.
  • Wave isn't done yet, so it has gaping holes of missing functionality. Basic functionality that you'd expect from a messaging and document editing platform are currently missing in Wave, which makes it seem less useful than doing those things "the old way." For more on what's missing and what's to come, see Appendix B, What Wave Can't Do.


Quote: "It seems as more people try [Wave], they agree that it's like a Segway for email." —Technologist Anil Dash[4]


The confusing initial experience may thwart Wave's adoption. Wave's whiz-bang features are impressive, but may not be practical. Whether Wave actually gets adopted as widely as email or remains relegated to niche uses like the Segway remains to be seen.

The Story Behind Wave's Name

Figure 1-5. Error messages in the Wave preview refer to lines from the 2005 film, Serenity.

Google didn't choose Wave's name for the reason you might assume—as a play on the idea of surfing the web. Instead its engineers were paying homage to writer and director Joss Whedon's brief but well-loved science fiction TV series, Firefly (2002-2003),[5] and its follow-up film, Serenity (2005).[6] In the Firefly/Serenity universe, characters send textual communications by "wave." References to waves appear throughout the series and include lines such as "that's why I waved you," "just got a wave," "I can send him a wave," and "I read your wave." [7][8]

In Wave's preview release, two error messages draw from lines from the Serenity movie: "Everything's shiny, Cap'n. Not to fret!"[9][10] and "This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence, and may explode,"[11] as shown in Figure 1-5. During Wave's unveiling at the Google I/O conference in May of 2009, the demonstration script contained several subtle but clear references to Firefly and Serenity. [12]

In our own homage to both Firefly and the folks who built Wave, we'll use the Firefly universe's characters and situations to describe usage examples throughout the book.


Google is the First Wave Provider, But Not the Last

Figure 1-6. Most web applications are islands, with a single, centralized set of servers which a particular company provides and oversees. Every user logs onto that one provider's servers.
There's one other thing that makes Wave special: federation. Wave is designed so that any organization can set up a server, become a Wave provider, and enable their users to wave at people on other Wave providers without necessarily going through Google.

This distributed model differs from most other web applications, which usually have a single provider for all users. Google Docs, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter are each offered and hosted by a single company. In those systems, all of the user data lives in a central database, which is controlled by that one company.

For example, to use Facebook, you log into Facebook.com and all your information lives in the same database as every other Facebook user, as shown in Figure 1-6.


Waves, however, can exist on servers scattered across the internet which can communicate with each other,[13] as shown in Figure 1-7.

Figure 1-7. Thanks to Wave federation, any company or organization can set up a Wave server to host waves and interact with users on other Wave providers.

In the example network of Wave providers shown in Figure 1-7, the fictional mal@wave.serenity.com can wave at tracey@wave.londinium.com, even though they're using different providers. Sihnon, Londinium, and Serenity each control and administer their own Wave server and data, independent of Google.

At this early stage, Google is the only company that is a public Wave provider. However, if Wave gets adopted more widely, there may be many Wave providers communicating with each other independent of Google, much like there are millions of email servers across the internet who are not beholden to a single company.

As of writing, it is not yet possible to send waves between different servers using the Wave preview. However, server federation is a core part of the product's foundation and is on its way to fruition.[14]

Now that you know what Wave is and how it came about, it's time to Get Started with Wave.

References

  1. ↑ Google Wave Overview, 0:36, YouTube.com
  2. ↑ Marsh Gardiner, Twitter.com
  3. ↑ EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com
  4. ↑ Anil Dash, Twitter.com
  5. ↑ Firefly, 2002-2003, IMDB.com
  6. ↑ Serenity, 2005, IMDB.com
  7. ↑ Firefly Season 1, Episode 6, "Our Mrs. Reynolds," Twiztv.com
  8. ↑ Firefly Season 1, Episode 12, "The Message," Twiztv.com
  9. ↑ Serenity shooting script, Myths.com
  10. ↑ Google Wave Help: What do the error messages mean?, Google.com
  11. ↑ Memorable Quotes for Serenity, IMDB.com
  12. ↑ Google's new "Wave"; was the name actually inspired by Firefly?, Whedonesque.com
  13. ↑ Wave Federation Protocol Community Principles, WaveProtocol.org
  14. ↑ WaveSandbox.com: Federate This, Google Wave Developer Blog


← Table of Contents Chapter 1: Meet Google Wave Chapter 2: Get Started with Wave →
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