Google announced a project called google wave a while back to rethink the whole idea of Email and IM etc… I think it would be good to start thinking about how the ubuntu community can use this new technology when it comes out. For anyone who hasn’t looked at the demo here is the website and there is a video presentation on it http://wave.google.com/
Its quite interesting and its going to be open source too. Im just mentioning it to hopefully get some talk started because I think we should always be thinking about ways in which we can improve. Its not out yet but will be out this year sometime according to the website. Anyhow food for thought.
Regards
Shane_Fagan
Could this be the solution to our irc problem? A giant wave?
It’s good that they want to open the source code, but why do they always hold back for ages. I guess this is the nature of “commercial” open source. Imagine if Linus didn’t post his kernel code until he felt it was perfect for everyone. There certainly would not have been anywhere near the same level of development initially or in the years the followed.
Pingback: Google Wave Ubuntu? « Shane Fagan's Blog
For starters I imagine it’ll supplant Gobby as a collaborative text editor.
It should get deep integration with launchpad, wikis etc. If it were to mostly replace email(lists), wikis, irc, comments then it would certainly streamline the communication for the whole of Ubuntu community quite a lot and make it more accessable. Everything wouldn’t be such a dump anymore because everything could be changed and automated, integrated, shared and searched. But it takes a bit of vision to see that. But eventually we will get there. It would just be better to start early than late.
I think inertia will hold Wave back. Just watch what the naysayers will say.
Pingback: Google Wave Ubuntu? « Shane Fagan's Blog
Oh, and forums too.
This is going to be really good. Wave is an extension to XMPP, and the specification is open. Perhaps we’ll see some Gnome/KDE clients for Wave. A draft of the specs is available at http://www.waveprotocol.org/
I agree. I was extremely impressed by the presentation video of Google Wave (watched the full 120 minutes of it) and I immediately realized that Google Wave would be extremely useful for the Ubuntu community.
There’s already quite a lot of proposals over at brainstorm: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/20063/
What should be more interesting to a free software community is the Moksha platform, which aims to provide the same real-time integration of other best-of-breed free software:
http://moksha.fedorahosted.org/
Combined with git, SMTP/IMAP support and/or Jabber/IRC, obby, and other well-understood open protocols, you’d get the same functionality without having to leverage a non-open service. Yes, Google plans to open source this… someday. But Moksha has been open since its development started last year (AGPL, yessir!), and we’re using it in Fedora successfully to power the Fedora Community portal.
Tom: you will certainly get lots of backlash if you want to _replace_ the existing communication systems with one new system. But if you rather offered Google Wave _in_parallel_ to the existing systems, people could compare and switch between bleeding edge and old-stable until they are comfortable. If Wave is then good enough, people might switch; but if it sucks, it’s not a problem.
Well, maybe hype will drown out sane decisions. Just watch what the yaysayers are saying.
I think that it wouldnt be such an extreme transition. It does have similar functionality to email and isnt such a stretch to use it instead of email. That and the document collaboration that they show in the video could streamline making new ubuntu-docs pages.