[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Lars Aronsson]

Judson Dunn wrote:

> I can't sell my luddite co-workers on the idea of a blog, or a 
> wiki, but this is more obviously approachable. For more normal 
> web users, there are obviously a lot of advanced uses as well.

Google Wave combines many concepts, such as mail discussion 
threads, Twitter-like short message discussions, instant 
messaging, wiki-like edit history and an animated playback.
The idea of showing diffs since the user last viewed the same 
wave, is very similar to Flagged revisions.

My guess is that this mix is too advanced for most users and will 
be a hard sell, almost like an automobile with a joystick (like an 
airplane) instead of a steering wheel.

As a stand-alone server on a developer team intranet server, this 
might be useful, perhaps a competitor to MediaWiki+Bugzilla or 
Trac.  But the server-to-server federation protocol is useful only 
when many others run compatible servers, and that could take a 
long time.  Google can of course let GMail and Blogger run this 
protocol, but that doesn't mean all existing users will start to 
understand "wave" conversations.  Instead, old-school e-mail 
conversations might take place over this new protocol.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se