[Nottingham] Wave

[Martin]

On 04/06/10 11:58, James Holland wrote:
> https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+o_rk1XJcA
> Here's a wave. Anyone can use it: you don't need an invitation any more.

My first glance quick impression of that is that it is a wiki-like forum
whereby you can insert content at any point in a thread. Versioning is
included so that you can scroll backwards and forwards through version
revisions to see how the thread developed.

I'm not sure how the versioning will make the thread any more readable.
It does give the obvious versioning advantages.

Interesting idea.


My thoughts are:

Nice new format but do we really wish to become dependant on Google for
/everything/ ?!

Note recently:

Google Is Ginormous: Why You Should Care
http://www.pcworld.com/article/197931/google_is_ginormous_why_you_should_care.html

Lawsuits Mount Over Google Wi-Fi Sniffing
http://www.pcworld.com/article/197985/lawsuits_mount_over_google_wifi_sniffing.html


And all my mail now goes VirginMedia -> Google -> VirginMedia -> and
then to myself. The spam levels have been drastically reduced, but do I
really want Google adding all my mail into their (Marketing) database?
How long before adverts get appended to all my mail?... (I'm soon to set
up my own email server to avoid Virgin and Google altogether.)


For anyone who already uses a threaded mail/news reader such as
Thunderbird (and others), with a maillist you /already/ have the "wave"
format but each post is displayed as an individual posting. The "wave"
structure is in the hierarchical thread tree in a separate display panel.

Hence, we can in effect have our own "wave" using the existing email
list system and writing an email client that gives a "wave view". For
the rich content, the mails just need to be in rtf or html.

However, if the "rich content" is linking to other external stuff, then
the "email wave" is vulnerable to those links becoming broken if the
external stuff that is referenced is no longer available. That can
easily be fixed by having the maillist server cache all external content
that is referenced and keeping the version referenced at the time a
posting is made. A further however: Is it legal to locally cache and
archive someone else's publicly available external content?


It would be neat to have our own 'wave' and (humour alert!) still be
compatible with those still in the "Victorian era". :-)

For myself, I find typing out an email to be far far faster than
grappling with a GUI on some website forum to do multiple clicks and to
have to type in a confined webform-text-box to then hope and pray
nothing is lost when I hit whatever web button...


That leaves the question of how to intelligently accommodate all the
variations on reply quoting!

Thoughts?


Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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