An hour in the sky: Google Wave, Sound Cloud.

Posted on December 1, 2009
Filed Under Collective Intelligence, Computing & Software Systems | 2 Comments

Quickie post, as I am trying to curb my stay-up-late habits:

Because I live under a rock, the first I’d ever heard of ‘Google Wave‘ was when my friend Hazera told me to jump on it. Only she couldn’t exactly invite me, because, well… there were no invites to be had. So I did something I had never done before: I actually begged google (signed up to ask for an account, and promised to provide feedback). I didn’t think my number would come up in this particular lottery, but today I got an email saying that I was now officially a waver (ooooh!!).

I have to say off the bat: it’s not at all bloody obvious what you’re supposed to do with a “wave”. I was on there for like 5 minutes thinking, erm… now what? The sea of possibilities is prolly too vast. But I quelled the luddite within and clicked around a bit.

The wave itself.

Essentially a place where everyone plonks down their artefacts. One would hope that all the artefacts in question are relevant to the unfolding story/plan/event/conversation whatever it is that drew these people together in the first place, but you get the idea. It’s a glorified inbox. Don’t tell google I said that! But seriously, that’s what it is. They even use the same language (‘inbox’) in the user interface (gotta gently-gently ppl away from the paradigms they’re already used to, after all).

The ‘playback’ control

So the idea is that you can get (see) a blow-by-blow account of everything that’s happened on a wave before you jump in. I tried this feature, and it’s good at giving you the gist of what has happened. My only complaint is that the scrubber / play buttons violate some law of user interface design. I really did expect to just hit ‘play’, sit back, and watch the events unfold, kinda like telly. But no, I had to “next” my way through all the slides. It’s quite granular too, so for even a fledgling ‘wave’ such as ours, it took a while. Really irritating… I hope they incorporate auto-playback. (Listen to me whingeing about a tool I’m sure I couldn’t even have written a single line of code for).

Gadgets

At this stage of Wave’s evolution, the most obvious thing to noodle with is the gadgets.  Which begs the question:  why is the gadgets button so well-hidden? You can only get to it (it seems) when you’re replying to a msg in the wave. It makes sense after the fact, but not when you’re tearing your hair out looking for it.

When you’ve found it the glee evaporates when you’re asked to enter a gadget url. A WHAT?! They aren’t built-in gadgets?! And then you remember that this is google (who has forseen the ghastly shadow of a fixed set of gadgets that they’d have to be responsible for, and thought much, much better of it)… and in any case isn’t this the future of application dev?  All things SHALL be widgetized and created by a third party.  Anyhow. It doesn’t exactly tell you where you can get gadgets. More googling then, until this url got fessed up to my browser.

Sound Cloud

The wave widget is basically an xml file which describes the widget to the Wave Server. Sound Cloud (wave widget here, main website there) was the first ever wave widget I found and decided to try. I signed up on the main SC site, and will fess up my tracks at another time (likely on the artinuum, not here). But the site seems to be a great idea for sharing music files, and I can see it being an awesome tool for aiding collaborations between musicians.

Anyhow. Back to Wave: within seconds of pasting the sound cloud url of the test file I uploaded, sweet, sweet API magic rendered the friendly waveform graphic for my mp3 file, and added the necessary playback controls within the wave gadget.

Summary

For someone like me, there has to be an obvious use for these tools. Out of these two ‘cloud’ applications, I can easily see myself using Sound Cloud. Wave however needs some definition (and I rather think Google is hoping the first cohort of guinea pigs will help crystallize their idea further). Having said that:  If I’m right and it’s “email 3 point oh“, then I get it, and it would be the kind of thing I use everyday and depend on without noticing. If it’s something else, then I admit to not knowing what the hell Google Wave is about. But it’s early days yet… so far, I’m intruigued and want to keep playing with it. And I haven’t even touched the wave API yet, or stuff like the ability to run your own Wave Server.

One thing both apps do well is that they make the handling/sharing/transfer of digital media files easier. This is, to me, the first rung of the ladder for utility computing / cloud computing from an end-user’s perspective. Everything else gets built on top of that…

And I’m SUPER-THANKFUL that both tools focus on functionality first, and social media later/last. I’m sure that the “social” facet of both tools will grow, and rightly so, but at least it’s been put in its right place from the get go.

Tenuously Linked (blame my tagging):

• neuroscene : virtual worlds and social media
• Thoughts on Enterprise Social Media : Part III
• Thoughts on Enterprise Social Media : Part II
• Thoughts on Enterprise Social Media : Part I
• virulent clouds: crimeware-as-a-service

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