Google Wave

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 5:33 pm

I hate to ask this, but does anyone have a spare invite, pretty pretty please? And even if you don't have one, please share your impressions.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 5:39 pm

Gitp has a thread for this as well, along with people begging for invites, I should hopefully get an invite soon(ish) and can share my impressions, but unfortunately will not have invites that I can send. YOu have to be given access by google in order to get invites, so at this precise moment, you're better off signing up yourself than having me sign up to try and invite you.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 5:49 pm

Actually, I signed up almost a month ago, opted to report bugs in the damn thing and wrote them a "zomg you're awesome" message. No luck yet )=

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:13 pm

Starmaker wrote:Actually, I signed up almost a month ago, opted to report bugs in the damn thing and wrote them a "zomg you're awesome" message. No luck yet )=

as someone said on Gitp, "a month? you've got a long wait ahead of you..."

but still better than me, I haven't signed up, so I'd get mine about a month after you, in all likelyhood.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Wed Nov 25, 2009 7:15 pm

I've got 1 I'll give ya Starmaker if you're not in yet, and 3 more I'll give up to whoever asks first (and isn't on ignore, as I won't see your requests and probably don't like you enough to give you stuff anyway).

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Nov 25, 2009 7:36 pm

I certainly want to get into google wave. Better Early than late.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Wed Nov 25, 2009 9:40 pm

I'd like one.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Nov 25, 2009 10:25 pm

So how's Google Wave working out for you jais?

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Wed Nov 25, 2009 10:46 pm

it's... interesting. There are things about it I like much more than forums, particularly the way that you can reply to anything in the history and it gets attached as an inline message (useful for dealing with tangents). It's all real time for now (the draft option to write in private and post when completed hasn't been instituted) so you get to watch people write in their blocks while you're writing in yours. Or even go edit theirs with them. Which is bizarre and refreshing and generally saves me explanatory posts and space later on. And the tools that you can stick in your posts have a lot of potential. The ones now are pretty basic, Yes/No/Maybe counters, one-on-one drop in video chat, drawing tools, die rollers, etc.

But it definitely needs polish. You can't lock people out of your posts yet, so anyone can edit anything. There's an edit history of sorts, but it's sorta clunky because of the ability to edit the same thing at the same time as 50 other people (so it works like a rewind button and not as a list) and you sorta have to work to figure out who did what. So it works for pbp games, but you have to lay some editing ground rules. The real time bit of it also takes some getting used to. It's not uncommon for me to write something while someone else is writing something a panel or 3 up, and wind up scrapping mine entirely because it's no longer relevant. Which is a great space saver as there aren't extraneous bits of text all over the place, but it requires a minor thought shift from post-reply-post of other things. It's also laggy for me, for reasons I can't pin down (stupid cloud services).

You could also use it as a document collaboration setup, and they recommend it as such, but I don't see any benefit to using this over Google Documents for personal stuff or MS / other office suite collaboration tools in an enterprise environment. A wave run parallel to it that tracked thoughts on the matter might be helpful, but there are already more fully featured document / spreadsheet / presentation tools available.

Starmaker's already gotten an invite, so I've got two left now (after Kaelik and Cynic get theirs) if anyone's interested.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 2:13 am

still have one last invite Tarkis?

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:39 am

it needs MS word intergration, then I would actually have a use for it.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:55 am

If there's anyone still in need of a nomination, PM me.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:59 am

cthulhu wrote:it needs MS word intergration, then I would actually have a use for it.

Being someone who hasn't used it yet, why wouldn't Google Docs work?

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 2:47 pm

I thought I was on google wave for some reason, but it is actually a "google site". My friend recently put together this thing with links to various RPGs we play that have text dumps (mostly of old rpg quotes and pbem posts), and then a calendar where we can schedule our next rpg sessions. It is still building but he laid the infrastructure for it I guess.

https://sites.google.com/

I dunno how different it is from the wave thingy.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 9:11 pm

That was quick, already got my invite in my email.

so, can someone tell me what the hell I'm looking at?

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 10:58 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:
cthulhu wrote:it needs MS word intergration, then I would actually have a use for it.
Being someone who hasn't used it yet, why wouldn't Google Docs work?

Because in the land of paychecks, suits and the government, the number of people who use google docs for anything = 0.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 10:59 pm

cthulhu wrote:
Prak_Anima wrote:
cthulhu wrote:it needs MS word intergration, then I would actually have a use for it.
Being someone who hasn't used it yet, why wouldn't Google Docs work?
Because in the land of paychecks, suits and the government, the number of people who use google docs for anything = 0.

Makes sense then.

Might change in the future, but it makes sense.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 11:01 pm

No. Offshore hosted applications are actually illegal to use, because the government isn't allowed to give information to overseas operations.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 11:34 pm

huh. Didn't know anything about that, including that Google was offshore...

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 11:43 pm

I am Australian.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Nov 26, 2009 11:45 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:huh. Didn't know anything about that, including that Google was offshore...

Much of Google is not offshore. But cloud nets always have the potential to hold data in offshore locations. It's cloud computing, they don't even tell you where the data is going. And for any project that's supposed to be official for anything, that kind of distributed hippie shit is unacceptable.

-Username17

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Nov 27, 2009 1:27 am

That would be a problem even if Google did have an Australian data centre, yes.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Fri Nov 27, 2009 2:40 am

Also, there's not alot of money to pay to lobby to use open source, anyhow.

-Crissa

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Fri Nov 27, 2009 3:03 am

Government in Australia uses *nix systems extensively. Very few departments are .net/MS shops in the backend. The biggest are all *nix.

Only low security desktops are windows.