Rencontre Avec Google Wave

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

Revision as of 04:04, 13 November 2009

Le Chapitre 1 est une vue d'ensemble de ce qu'est Google Wave et à quoi il peut bien servir. Pour plonger directement dans l'utilisation de Wave, passez au chapitre 2, Démarer avec Wave.

Google Wave est un nouvel outil de communication en ligne qui permet à des groupes de personnes d'éditer et de discuter sur des documents simultanément sur le web. L'équipe Google Wave est partie sur le postulat "à quoi ressembleraient les emails s'ils avaient été inventés aujourd'hui".[1] Cependant, du fait que Wave est surtout un outil collaboratif d'édition de documents, la métaphore simpliste des emails peut tromper les nouveaux utilisateurs. La première utilisation de Wave peut donner l'impression d'un outil chaotique et confus, mais les utilisations possibles de Wave sont nombreuses. Installez vous et venez à la rencontre de Wave.

Contents [hide]

   * 1 Modernizing Email
         o 1.1 Email's Problems
         o 1.2 Wave's Solution: Conversations as Live Documents
   * 2 Wave's Downfall: A Universally Confusing Initial User Experience
   * 3 Potential Wave Use Cases
   * 4 The Story Behind Wave's Name
   * 5 Federated and Open Source: How Wave is Not Proprietary to Google
   * 6 References

Mordernisation de l'Email

Si on compare à l'évolution de la plupart des technologies, l'email est ancien. Inventé il y a plus de 40 ans, l'email précède l'internet tel que nous le connaissons — en fait, il est l'un des outils les plus importants dans la création de l'Internet. Malgré son âge, l'email n'a que peu évolué depuis les années 60. Le courrier électronique est basé sur le paradigme du courrier postal, un système permettant de transférer des messages entre des expéditeurs et des destinataires. Wave est un pari : celui qu'il doit y avoir un meilleur moyen d'envoyer, de recevoir, de préserver et de faire grossir des communications partagées que l'email.

Email's Problems Video 1-1. A fan describes how Wave improves on a common email workflow.

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 using it 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. It can only be copied, pasted, and sent on. 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, cc's: Wash, and sends it. The Send button gets pushed only three times, yet seven copies of the same message appear in differing states for three people—each copy a dead version of another. Email propagates copies of copies, storing each in a rudimentary filing system of "boxes." Email was designed as a system of notification, not collaboration. Given that email was designed to imitate "snail mail"—where the ultimate destination was either the circular file or a filing cabinet—letters sent via email seemed destined for cold storage, not the cauldron of innovative workspaces. 

   * 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." 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 could include a link to a web page inside an email message, but sometimes those break or become unclickable, and they force the recipient to launch a web browser. While some email clients like Gmail or Microsoft Outlook can display rich message formatting with images and colors, or display attached files inline, there's no consistency. No one's email always looks the same. 

   * To reply to a subsection of an email, you have to quote that section manually. 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 each question Kaylee has asked in a readable order. He could reply to her message and manually copy and paste just her questions and position his answers directly after them. But that's a lot of work—and most people don't do it. Often questions and individual points that need addressing via email get lost because there's no easy way to reply to a specific section of a message. 

   * It's not easy to privately respond to specific people within a group email. When the group finally does stop for parts, Badger emails them asking for a cargo drop-off. Zoe wants to ask the crew how they should negotiate payment. She can't reply to all because Badger will see it, so she has to manually edit the recipient list on the private email and create yet another copy of the message. 

Since email's invention in the 1960s, the internet and then the World Wide Web was 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 Google 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 starter framework for understanding what Google Wave can do. Wave's Solution: Conversations as Live Documents

Rather than pass back and forth multiple copies of messages, Google 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.

Google 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, Google Wave addresses the rest of the problems with email listed above. Using Google Wave, all the participants in a conversation have the ability to:

   * Reply to a subset of a wave inline
   * Add rich interactive media like videos, images, maps, and polls in-wave
   * Play back and copy earlier versions of a wave, so that you can revert to an older state of a given wave, or see how it changed over time 

In theory, Wave is a big upgrade to email and document collaboration tools. The following table sums up the difference between "The Email Way" and "The Wave Way." 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 sounds great in theory, right? In practice, Wave introduces complexities that put off new users. Wave's Downfall: A Universally Confusing Initial User Experience Figure 1-1. At first, Wave's purposes or parallels are unclear.

Google Wave's biggest downfall is how overwhelming it can be for new users when they try it out. 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 Wave confusion 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."

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. Google 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. Google 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 all 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. Google 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 and feel unnatural.
   * Document versioning is foreign (to non-programmers). Software developers have been using file versioning tools like the one built into Google 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 huge 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 A, 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 Wave experience may thwart its 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 use like the Segway remains to be seen. But plenty of people want in on the Wave preview, prepared with plenty of ideas about how they'll use it. Potential Wave Use Cases

During Wave's invite-only preview, in a contest at Lifehacker.com, several interested users vied for invitations by describing how they planned to use Wave in their lives and work.[5] Because it's so early in Wave's release, these are only potential use cases for Google Wave, not real-world scenarios, but all of them demonstrate a need for a real-time collaborative tool like Wave.

High school junior Sean said:

   In my AP European History class, my fellow students and I are always struggling to keep up with taking notes. After each class we all email each other the notes that we took, and it's always up to us to compile all of the important info, and figure out the validity, etc. With Google Wave, we could have one master notebook, where we could verify all the info, highlight what will probably be the most important for the international exam, and just improve the process of studying completely.

A consultant for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA, wrote in:

   My group is supporting H1N1 vaccine distribution, including planning, shipping, and communication. We have a team here in Atlanta, Department of Health and Human Services people in DC, and the distributor, based in Dallas. Also, the team in Atlanta is spread over 4 campuses. We use email, intranet, shared drives, etc. to collaborate. We meet CONSTANTLY, leading to lots of meeting recaps, duplicated work, and wasted time. As the situation changes (doses manufactured, quarantined, distributed, people infected, etc.), we are constantly updating plans and tracking numbers for reporting. Documents are stored in shared drives. Updates are sent via email. Wave would allow much easier tracking of changes to our documentation and communications. Before anything goes out the door, it has to be checked by 3-4 people after being worked on by another 3-4. If we could all work simultaneously on a message, it would greatly cut our time and thus get messages out to the public (or even to HHS, the distributor, or the manufacturers) much, much faster.

A Traffic Management Coordinator at the Philadelphia International Airport Control Tower said:

   My job is to reduce departure delays and to maintain an efficient flow of air traffic into and out of the [airport]. Currently we utilize a Google Spreadsheet to share real-time departure and weather issues, airport construction updates, and snow removal operations with the airlines and other interested parties. I'm excited at the prospect of being able to embed real-time weather radar gadgets to provide users an up-to-the-minute graphical look at the weather. We currently use the chat feature on Google Spreadsheets but it appears that the more robust communication capabilities in Wave would greatly enhance our communication with the airlines. The ability to review conversations and data will help us to further reduce delays at Philadelphia International Airport. This will result in a savings of time for passengers, reduced fuel and operating costs for the airlines, and fewer complaints from both.

A reporter who covers government and politics at The Arizona Republic, an Arizona newspaper, said:

   Google Wave will be enormously useful to reporters collaborating on stories. Currently a colleague and I are working on a story involving safety issues at Arizona prisons. This involves a lot of digging through records, interviewing people and transcribing the tapes, and writing up what we've found. Because we work in different offices, it can be hard to keep track of where each of us is in our reporting. Wave could help us organize our reporting and collaborate on the writing by making the process transparent in real time. With a couple more invitations, editors could follow our progress and insert questions into our stories. Lastly, there's great potential here for crowdsourcing. We could start waves seeking public input on our stories, and incorporate those questions and answers into our reporting. Because we could supplement our questions with documents and a variety of links, I see the potential for crowdsourcing much greater on Wave than it is (so far, anyway) on Twitter and Facebook.

Caregiver Mike said:

   I am looking after an elderly lady named Liz. She is well at the moment but does suffer from spells of confusion and forgetfulness. Liz is a widow but has a large and caring family. Unfortunately they are spread all around the country (none live within a two hours' drive) and have families and jobs of their own... At the moment I send out a weekly group email detailing what's happened to Liz over the days of the previous week. The family then replies with any questions or suggestions, etc. Even with Gmail conversations, answering and replying to six responses and further ongoing replies back and forth becomes confusing and very time-consuming. Wave could greatly improve our communications. I would open a new wave at the beginning of each week, inviting all the family to it, and add content on an ongoing current basis. This would mean the family would be far more up to date than they are currently and their responses and queries would be spread out (and inline), far more manageable and more current. Also due to Wave playback, when someone has been away, catch up would be simple.

Bride-to-be Tiffany said:

   I am coordinating my wedding with a dozen or so friends/family and various vendors, from all over the country. I live in Texas, the wedding (and my mother) is in Florida, my maid of honor lives in Massachusetts, you get the idea. Currently, we use the telephone and email to exchange ideas, sometimes Skype if we're lucky enough to be on at the same time. I also have a notebook where I paste pictures of inspiration, jot down links, sketch ideas that I will hold up to my webcam or snap a photo of the page to show others. Seriously. Wave would improve wedding planning SO MUCH. We can all share ideas and see who has jumped in on what jobs in what order. We can use plug-ins to embed venues, caterers, dresses. I can embed a Wave in my wedding blog, which I link to on theknot.com, a wedding planning site that connects you to all sorts of local and national wedding resources. We can Wave simultaneously, which will save us from typing a long response, only for someone else to send something else faster that changes what we just spent time writing (don't you hate it when that happens?). You know how the bride, her bridesmaids, and her mother all get when they start brainstorming and delegating. Imagine if we were all in the same room. It would get rowdy. This way, with Google Wave, it will be organized, documented, and editable. It will also be a great way for my fiancee to track our progress and see whose ideas are whose and approve or disapprove at will. It will make the perfect planning tool for the perfect wedding.

The Story Behind Wave's Name Figure 1-2. 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. Its engineers were paying homage to writer and director Joss Whedon's brief but well-loved science fiction TV series, Firefly (2002-2003),[6] and its follow-up film, Serenity (2005).[7] 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." [8][9]

In Google Wave's preview release, two different error messages draw from lines from the Serenity movie: "Everything's shiny, Cap'n. Not to fret!"[10][11] and "This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence, and may explode."[12] 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. [13]

In our own homage to both Firefly and the folks who built Wave, we'll use the Firefly universe as our go-to when discussing examples throughout the book. However, Google Wave's Firefly references are an in-joke. Wave will be best known for its attempt to upgrade email.

Federated and Open Source: How Wave is Not Proprietary to Google

No one owns email. The email protocol was developed not by a corporation with a singular interest but by the IETF,[14] an open standards organization made up of volunteers representing many companies and organizations. Therefore, the idea of moving your messages to Google Wave might feel like you're giving the search giant a monopoly on your communication. But even though it's continually referred to as "Google Wave" instead of just "Wave," Wave is not proprietary to Google. Like email, Wave consists of several parts: a protocol, a server, and a client. The protocol itself is an open standard, created by but not beholden to Google, and free to all software developers to make products that utilize it.

Therefore, if Wave usage catches on, more Wave server and client software from many different companies and organizations may become available in the future—like web browsers and email programs did. The Wave protocol is federated and does not centralize all information on Google's servers;[15] like email, users on different Wave servers hosted at different companies will be able to communicate with each other using Wave, independent of Google.

In Wave's preview release, it is not yet possible to send waves between different servers. However, the server federation is a core part of the product's foundation and will definitely come to fruition.

Now that you know the impetus for Wave's development, 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. ↑ Google Wave's Best Use Cases, Lifehacker.com
  6. ↑ Firefly, 2002-2003, IMDB.com
  7. ↑ Serenity, 2005, IMDB.com
  8. ↑ Firefly Season 1, Episode 6, "Our Mrs. Reynolds", Twiztv.com
  9. ↑ Firefly Season 1, Episode 12, "The Message", Twiztv.com
 10. ↑ Serenity shooting script, Myths.com
 11. ↑ Google Wave Help: What do the error messages mean?, Google.com
 12. ↑ Memorable Quotes for Serenity, IMDB.com
 13. ↑ Google's new "Wave"; was the name actually inspired by Firefly?, Whedonesque.com
 14. ↑ About the IETF, IETF.org
 15. ↑ Wave Federation Protocol Community Principles, WaveProtocol.org