On Oct 15, 2009, at 3:03 PM, Max Battcher wrote:
Jo Anne wrote:
OK, Guys, what the heck is Google Wave? Is it like what Twits do
with
Tweets? I know what a beta test is, but a Google Wave? "Speak
slowly and
directly into the microphone, please".
It depends on who you ask and how much hype they've ingested,
digested, and are prepared to spew back at you...
Basically, Google Wave is an attempt at a convergence of... well,
everything that is communication, actually. It tries to converge the
immediacy of IM or Twitter with the long term storage and general
richness of email or forum conversations or Word documents.
It has the possibility of becoming "One Inbox to Rule Them All", but
that invokes a lot of assumptions that may not necessarily be true
nor become true.
So far, I remain a skeptic of the project: considering how hard it
is to explain the system I wonder if it is too complex to easily
gain mainstream acceptance/usage.
You can watch the long video (and it is long) trying to explain the
thing at the Wave website:
http://wave.google.com
I haven't chimed in on Wave or the more general subject of cloud
computing yet, since I haven't used it yet (which, in some people's
judgment, makes me ineligible to comment, although I consider that a
questionable argument), but my misgivings about it are generally
related to the same question of how valid the underlying assumptions
are, as well as the overall reliability of the servers the storage
lives on.
(It seems to me that a lot of the hype around the cloud computing
concept is really thin on details of infrastructure, storage
reliability/redundancy and backup maintenance, privacy protection, and
a whole range of other unanswered questions I've had about it. And
for people who seem so eager to have me store my personal data on
their servers, a lot of those unanswered questions are show stoppers
for me.)
The true paradox of democracy is that it is vulnerable to defeat from
within -- Me
_______________________________________________
http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
