From: Rick DeNatale Date: 2009-12-15T00:05:29+09:00 Subject: Re: Google Wave: A new type of "Ruby Quiz" ? On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Aldric Giacomoni wrote: > Google Wave is, according to Google, "the new email". It combines email, > their idea of working together on same documents, and versioning > control. It has lots of potential. So far, in my experience Google Wave has not worked very well. Part of the problem is that it's a confusing muddle of email, and wiki. They claim to have (underlying?) version control, but it's not obvious other than the ability to 'replay' the history of the wave, with no obvious way to recover a previous state. A wave is really a document which in the wiki fashion, 'anyone can edit', but I've found that users don't really understand that when they edit a wave, they are affecting every wave participant's 'copy' of the wave, since there really is only one copy. I set up a wave for a couple of technical groups, one accrued some interesting contents, until someone, thinking of it as 'email' decided to clean things up by deleting everything HE had already read. Which deleted it for everyone. So I'm seeing a lot of people playing with wave with no clear picture of how it is intended to be used (I'm including myself in this), and Google hasn't as far as I can see given such a picture. I'm not really sure that they have one themselves and that wave is still a big social experiment to try to figure out what it really SHOULD be. There are a few resources going out like Gina Trappani's book on wave, but right now, it seems to be worse than the wild wild west, or the unexplored sea. It's hard to know where the bandits and dragons are. By the way, there are ways to have waves searchable by members of a google group (e.g. the google group which follows ruby talk). You can actually add the group as a participant using the groups email address. Wave will seem to complain about it not being a wave address, but it will work, and then members of the group can search for the wave with the group: prefix to the search. (I'm doing this from memory, so there might be some variations from what I just said, but the function is, or at least was, there). -- Rick DeNatale Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale