Chair: : Please welcome Stephanie, who is the Lead Product Manager for Google Wave and was previously the Lead Product Manager for a small app some people might know called Gmail. Over here, we have Lars. Please welcome Lars. Lars cofounded, I believe, Wave along with his brother Jens. They've graciously come here to demo, which is challenging enough, and to take your questions. Again, thank you very much.
Stephanie: First, I want to thank Lee. It was such a privilege to be invited here. He's been incredibly kind to us so thank you. I also want to thank all of you. I know we gave you Wave accounts and you're experimenting with it as a back channel for the conference. That's really invaluable for us. We look forward to talking to you after this presentation and seeing how it's going.
You might know us as the people who made this YouTube video. Has anyone seen it? Alright. As flattered as we are that almost 6 million people have watched this, it kind of creates a high bar for entertainment. I stayed up all last night trying to think about how to make this presentation fun for you guys. I'm going to run a few of my ideas by Lars.
The first thing, has anyone seen this site? It's called "Which is Easier to Understand than Wave.com?" It happily presents you two options, and you can vote. Why doesn't the audience help me; Google Wave or lipid solubility? Shout it out; Wave - easier to understand.
Lars: How about Wave with a healthcare reform bill? Wave. How about self-balancing binary search trees? Oh that's easier than Wave.
Stephanie: How about Google Wave or Sarah Palin? Shout it out. Palin.
Lars: If there are any bugs in Wave, it's because we spend all day playing this game.
Stephanie: Wave or a Microsoft Visio 2004? Alright, this is a good crowd. They're voting for us. If that wasn't funny enough, I thought maybe a lot of government people have been excited about Wave, especially for the playback feature. I thought it would be fun to take a famous document, like the Declaration of Independence, and try to imagine how it might have been created in Wave. That's hilarious right?
So, I have it here in playback. You can see I'm logged in as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams started a Wave with me. He's like "Oh, John by the grace of God, the King of England, Lord blah, blah..." and I said, "This doesn't seem very original. Don't get your wig in a fluff." They re-edit it and so on. If you can believe it, we made a full Declaration of Independence. It might have been in the wee hours of the morning leading up to our September 30th launch.
If that didn't work out, I think I had Halloween on Saturday. Who likes Halloween? Okay, that's a lot of people. So in our team in Sydney, Friday is already over; we had a big Halloween party. Our developer relations lead, Pamela, dressed up as a robot. If you can't tell, she made the first ever Google Wave robot which is called "Cartoony". It takes all the text in a blip and changes it into this huge cartoon. If you need Halloween ideas... and my very last thing - Lars hasn't actually read any of the press since May 28th. I thought - Lars, just look straight ahead.
Lars: I'm looking straight ahead.
Stephanie: I'm going to show you guys the best headlines that we could have possibly seen. I tell Lars how great the press is, and make him feel good.
Lars: Everyone loves Wave.
Stephanie: But in truth, we're going to try to answer a lot of the questions that are raised in this press today. I think you had one other idea.
Lars: I had my favorite video. You guys have to see this. You know that you've made it big on the Internet when you get to be played off against "Keyboard Cat".
Stephanie: Lars, this is where you do the dance.
Lars: Yeah, everyone look at me, don't look at the screen. [The Wave Dance] There are not a lot of people in the world that can have their demos as spectacularly fail in front of 4,000 people, and not break a sweat.
[Wave/Keyboard Cat Video]
Lars: She's right; we should have rehearsed this before coming this morning.
Stephanie: That's all we have. We're done with all of the hilarious intros. Just for fun, I put together a gadget where you can vote. If we do this presentation again, we'll only pick one of them. David Wang is going to link it from our Session Directory Wave, and go in there for some amount of fun. Just to go through the agenda of the real content, we are going to do a short demo, not an 82 minute demo but about a 5 or 6 minute demo because I don't think it's fair to assume that every single person in here has seen Wave. We certainly want you to know what it is. It's a new tool for communication and collaboration.
Then I'm going to say how the preview's going. On September 30th, we started rolling out Wave to users. I'll give you some user feedback, what we're hearing. And then Lars is going to answer some tough questions. These are things we got from you in the Wave, and also things users have said, or the press has said. Then we're going to do some really quick keyboard shortcuts because there are a few helpful tips we think will be useful as you start to use Wave, and then give a shout out to David Wang who is giving a talk after the break. I think I will hand it over to Lars.
Lars: Thank you Stephanie. Normally, we take about 80 minutes to do a demo, but we're going to try to do it in 6.5 minutes. I've tee'd up a Wave here for Stephanie while she was offline preparing for the hilarity. It says, "Hey Steph, help. We only have 6.5 minutes for the demo at eComm. It normally takes 80. What are we going to do? Lars" So now Stephanie comes online and she sees this Wave waiting for her. Just like an email, she can make a reply down at the bottom, like this - actually, you can say that. You've got a mic this time. You don't need any more sweat stains on your t-shirt. Okay. So the first benefit you can see of Wave is that you can switch seamlessly back and forward between email type of conversations and instant messaging type conversations.
I can go here and use the blue line at the bottom to make an insightful reply, "But, but, but" like this. As you have noticed if you've tried it at all, unlike the instant messaging clients we're used to, we actively show what the other person is typing, character by character. The primary reason we do this is to speed up the conversation. In general, you can predict how I'm going to end a sentence long before I'm done talking. That speeds things up a lot.
In Wave, you can add a message anywhere in the content. Stephanie is going to show you how to add a message inside mine. She double clicks the last word in a sentence and she gets this little toolbar that says "reply" and she hits reply. Now she is making what we call an "inline reply" and I can continue with another insightful panicky message like this. So instant messaging and email-type conversations can take place in the same tool.
The next thing I want to show you is how you can go back and edit a message after the fact, not just your own messages, but in fact, you can edit each other's messages as well, which has a very nice benefit that you can collaborate on content inside a Wave. I'm going to add our colleague David sitting over here, who will give the next talk, and then all of us - I'm going to hide Stephanie's inline reply here, and the three of us are going to edit this message together, to throw together a much too short demo script.
They say, "create a panicky Wave, make chatty jokes, maybe we should make a reply somewhere like this," so you can see that we can edit comfortably right next to each other. If you tried this, your first experience is very chaotic. But once you get used to it, you'll be surprised how much faster you can collaborate on putting together content when you get to do this live, character by character editing simultaneously.
Let's see what else is there? Let's show [00:08:57.20 ?] one open. I'm going to leave this Wave here. I'm going to close it and then David and Stephanie are going to continue typing while I'm not looking. A little while later, this could be 5 minutes, an hour, a day, a week; tell me when you are done.
Stephanie: We're done.
Lars: You'll see that already it's bald here because there is new material since I left, and when I come back in, the first thing I see is exactly what has changed since I was there last. The rule is whenever you open a Wave, you see new messages marked with a green bar at the left, and edited messages are marked up with this yellow and pink to see what has changed.
Let's see, where did we go in the script? What's the next thing? Let me show you playback. Imagine you come late to a Wave. It's reached a certain level of complexity and you want to see what happened. You click "playback" and you get to go through step-by-step when it was created. You see I started the Wave, I added Stephanie, I changed 7 to 6.5, she made a message there, I went there, then we started inline replies, and then you can see also the editing step right here. You can see the next one, then I added David, and so on.
Let's show you how to add images. I luckily have some entirely unrelated images sitting here on my desktop. All you have to do is grab them from your desktop and drag them into an open editor like this. You'll see how we automatically thumbnail them, send the thumbnails across to Stephanie's screen, upload them, and so on. Do you have any entirely unrelated messages yourself?
Stephanie: Yes, I will drop some ski photos in.
Lars: Stephanie has some ski photos and you'll see how quickly they appear. It's because we actually create the thumbnails on Stephanie's machine and send them across the wire before full pictures upload. I can grab this button down here and view everything as a slideshow. You'll see that I'm seeing both my own pictures here and Stephanie's pictures. Wave is a tool for collaborating on all kinds of content. We've showed you how to collaborate on text, but you can collaborate on photo albums. We'll show you later, how Wave's extensibility will let you collaborate in real time on pretty much anything. Here is Captain Athena; here is the hard life down in Sydney. We love showing that one. It's winter in the North. Back to the script. What's next?
Stephanie: Extensions
Lars: Extensions - I want to show you my favorite extension is a Sudoku game. Let me add this Sudoku game to this Wave here.
Stephanie: Maybe you should say what an extension is.
Lars: An extension is something that third parties can build using one of two APIs. One is one where you can build robots. I will show an example of that later. The other one here lets you add client-side code. We call these things gadgets. This is a Sudoku game. The way it works is that the programmer writes this game here and all I have to do is store this data of the game in the Wave, using an API we make available. The Wave platform automatically synchronizes it between all of the clients playing it. This was actually an existing gadget that an Israeli company called LabPixies had built where you could play alone against the clock, which is how Sudoku normally works. With just a few weeks of work, they put it inside a Wave, and now it was intended to be a collaborative effort, but somehow it became competitive along the way. You can see how we're all running around in here with our little squares, competing.
Stephanie: You guys in the audience are supposed to be helping me play Sudoku, David.
Lars: You're running around. Stephanie loves playing this, in particular, when I'm giving a presentation, because then she actually has a chance.
Stephanie: Lars, I'm going to insert a map to show them where our Sydney office is.
Lars: Excellent idea, since no one here in the North knows where Sydney is, Stephanie is going to add a map gadget here and you'll see in the same way; I'm not touching my keyboard, but anything Stephanie does on her screen automatically shows up on my screen. The programmers who did this, which was Pam you saw in the robot outfit earlier, doesn't have to do any of the hard work here of synchronizing, or even if Stephanie and I are editing a map at the same time. She doesn't have to do any of the hard work of resolving conflicts. The Wave platform does that automatically.
I want to show you the other types of extensions. I'm going to show you my favorite one we built, which is a robot that's on all your Waves that does spellchecking for you. Can you guys see what I'm typing here? This is my "favorite been soup" demo. "Can I have some..." it's hard to spell wrong in the right way. "It has bean so long." Here, I'm carefully spelling things wrong in a way that hits legal dictionary words. You'll see that our spellchecker knows that I meant "been" instead of "bean" here, and that I meant to have "bean soup" instead of "been soup".
There are two things I want to call out here; one is that our spellchecker is a classical example of the power of cloud computing. We have a huge language model that is constructed from the Web, sitting on several hundred machines in a big datacenter. We have a robot, which is a server-side piece of software, that interacts with a Wave just like a human. This robot can see what I'm typing live, just like Stephanie can, and it can take a collection of words I've typed and match them up against this enormous language model. It can use statistics to see that I've spelled something wrong, and then inject suggestions into the content. In fact, if Stephanie had been faster than me, she would have seen those suggestions as well, and she could have fixed those spelling errors for me.
Stephanie: That's all the time we have for our demo. You already ran over, and I'm going to move right into "how is it going". On May 28th, we started a developer preview. We gave out about 35,000 accounts in the sandbox. On September 30th we started what we call a "preview" and these are very very early days for Google Wave. You might even call it pre-beta. It's still buggy. It still crashes. It's not always reliable, and it's not feature complete. There are still a lot of things we're finishing. Why did we want to start this preview?
There are a few reasons. First, we've been using it on our own team for all of our document and communication work for almost a year and we found it invaluable. There was probably a period of time at the beginning, where we were getting up to speed and it was sort of hard to give up tools that we were used to, but over time we sort of migrated our world into Wave. We do design docs there. We chat there. We take meeting notes there. We plan boat trips there. It sort of has changed our work. When we go back to something like email now, especially Lars often makes mistakes.
Also, there is a broad set of things that Wave does and we think it's helpful to get it in the hands of users. Google has a philosophy of launch early and iterate. Users will help us figure out how to pick the right things to spend our scarce engineering resources on. The other thing is testing. When you have this much interest in a product, more than 2 million people signed up to get Google Wave accounts. To launch a new product like this, you have to make it scale. You can do all the load testing in the world, but there is nothing like real users to push your system and stress it in new ways, so we thought doing the preview and doing this slow growth would help us make the service robust. How is it going? Put on the user chart.
Lars: Can I just ask the control folks here, can we switch the monitor to Stephanie's computer? You can't do that, okay.
Stephanie: That's okay. This is a graph. We track things like 1-day active users, 7-day active users, 30-day active users, and how many people have ever logged in. Although we've told people we would send out 100 thousand invites, that was just the beginning. We send out invites every day that we're having a good day, so you can see on the left is September 30th. We have continual growth. We're at a couple hundred thousand seven-day active users now.
This graph is fun. The blue line is simultaneous user sessions, so how many people are online using Wave at the same time. You can see it goes up and up, and then flattens out, and then up and up, and then flattens out. That's the periods of us sending out invites. The orange-ish or yellow line is people accepting invites. You can see sometimes we had to stop sending out invites after that first kind of flat line. We had a user who put a 100 thousand character word into a Wave. Why? Why did he do that? We didn't test that. Some bad things happened. Then sometimes the blue line flattens out because we hit a scaling bug or we need more machines, and we fix it and we keep growing.
Where are the invites, or who did they go to? Everyone asks us that. We sort of seeded Wave with people we thought would be great ambassadors or help us get good users into Wave, which includes the first people on the external signup list, and the developers who had been in the sandbox. We also enabled Wave on some domains, so we think there are natural groups of collaborators in education and business. We have a Google Apps Suite of products and we enabled Wave on some domains. The controversial thing out there is that the people who were nominated by one of these seeds didn't get invites. They all want them and they don't have them yet. We're sort of working on the best algorithm to put the invite Wave back in peoples' accounts. This fact that the nominees didn't get invites creates something we call the "lonely waver" phenomenon, which means some people get in there and they don't have anyone to Wave with. We are certainly trying to scale as fast as humanly possible, and get Wave out there.
One thing we're proud of is that even though it's an English-only interface, people are using Wave all over the world. If you look on the left, that's where people are accessing Wave from. About 40% are from the U.S., which is the top, but you can see a vast number of countries that represent our user base. On the right, we can detect what languages people are typing in a Wave, and these are the top 12 after English, so you can see lots of different languages being typed into Wave. All of the ones with an asterisk, we have the spell detection that Lars just showed you. The quality varies in different languages, but we're using this preview to improve it, and lots of users typing.
Just because we're short on time, I'll quickly go through some user survey graphs. We did a survey of 1,000 of our early adopters and asked them questions about what they liked and didn't like about Google Wave; that's very important to us. They liked things like the visual appeal and security and want us to work on things like the speed and stability.
The top likes include the concept of a Wave, which is great because that's what the product is; "the ability to collaborate with others and all my communications and docs integrated". The dislikes or issues are "my friends and contacts aren't in there so I don't have people to Wave with" and that's exciting; if that's what people want, more people on Wave, that's a good thing. "I already have too many information sources" or "it's slow, buggy, it crashes" so the info source is something Lars is going to talk about later in the tough questions.
This is a lonely waver. So sad. There is something that happened in the sandbox that has been helping the lonely waver. Users found the ability to make a Wave public, and that's exactly how you guys have been participating in this session, kind of Waving, so if you can go to your account. Lars is typing with public. Any user can make any Wave public. As you can see, it's streaming down now. People are updating the Wave second-by-second. There are always different things in here.
At the beginning, it was "I'm from Alabama." "I'm from Thailand; I want to find people to Wave with." Then sometimes the discussions migrated into "I want to use Wave for research or journalism." Sometimes people talk about an issue of the day. We were actually in public Waves when Obama won his peace prize and instantly people were in there talking about it. You can see there are a lot of different languages. If Lars does a language restrict, for example, we can look for just public Waves from Chinese. This feature has really taken off and it's a way that people are finding each other. Now, we have to make a decision. We didn't intend for this to be the primary use case, but it's very popular. Do we want to do things now like try to rank your public Waves in a way that's meaningful to you?
One thing that is really exciting to us is seeing users helping each other inside of public Waves, so more experienced Wave users will be answering questions for newbies. There are even people writing documents, like manuals, like Wave's Greatest Hits. That's sort of a guide to Wave. That's an interesting phenomenon.
I want to share an interesting stat with you. Once public Waves took off, I thought maybe all our Waves were public Waves. We've done a lot of analysis and only half a percent of our Waves are public, so a lot of the early usage of Wave and what people were doing in there, is within small groups, or private Waves. About 8% of people have contributed to a public Wave, and 14% of people have touched a public Wave. Just out of curiosity, our longest Wave is 1,134 blips, and 772 is the maximum number of people who have contributed to a single blip. That's exciting for us, to have a lot of people in there. The largest Wave is about 100KB which is our enforced maximum, and 10% of people have tried attachments, primarily being photos. That's sort of where we are with the preview.
I want to turn this back over to Lars because we had this 5-month developer preview and we promoted these different APIs we talked about, both to extend Wave itself, and to be able to embed Waves anywhere on the Web where you want a rich UI for collaboration and communication. He's going to talk a bit about how that went.
Lars: If you have time, search on Google for Google Wave featured extensions and you'll see this page I'm showing you now. There are two things I want to go through quickly that excite us a lot. These are prototypes. This one is built by SAP. They built something I thought I would never see in my life. It's a business processing modeling tool that's sexy. They built this gadget here that you see behind me that lets users draw business processes. They already had a tool where you could draw these things and save them as a file and exchange them in the traditional way, but when they saw Wave, they took that same UI, put it inside Wave and suddenly this process of building business processes becomes real time collaborative. They put together this great video where they go through a scenario where three people get together and build this process here. They bring in a robot that checks the semantic process; they bring in a manager who plays back everything to check the work. In the end, they grab the product and they export it into this enormous software package that SAP has, that turns the graph into an actual website that interacts with SAP's users, or the users of the customer of SAP software. In the end, they put another gadget inside the same Wave that actually does real time monitoring of the performance of that website. You can both see the input to the website and the monitoring and you can go and fiddle with the graph, pull that handle again, go through the process, and very quickly see the result of your work.
The other thing I want to show you is a prototype of a Wave application built by Salesforce.com. They have a customer relations scenario where a Salesforce.com customer, a mobile phone company has a customer in turn that has some problem. The mobile phone company customer conjures up a support robot that comes from the mobile phone company. They can go and type - the robot is called "Buyah". The customer goes in and types in what they're looking for. The robot looks in a knowledge database what the answer might be, puts that in a gadget in a way that the user can interact with, and the user can either say yes, I've found my answer, or no, I need more help, in which case a robot adds a human support person. That human support person sees the Wave embedded in their Salesforce.com control panel and they can bring in more colleagues and collaborate on getting the user an answer. The entire flow is recorded in a single Wave that you can use later.
These are exactly the kind of things that we like to see built. We think that at least half of the appeal of Wave is that you can take existing work flows, and with relatively modest amount of work, not trivial amount of work, but you can make them real time collaborative and everything gets integrated into the same box.
Stephanie: We have to move on to tough questions. I hope Clint, if he's watching this video later, doesn't mind that I was working on slides yesterday for our tough questions and realized that he wrote an article for eWeek that had a lot of points I wanted to make, so I'm going to have Lars do - you have about 45 seconds on each of these, just so you know. The first question is about draft mode, live typing freaks some people out.
Lars: Yes, live type freaks people out. A lot of people react to live typing by saying it's the coolest thing ever. Other people react by saying they feel rather exposed and a bit unnerved by it. So, we've found that then after a while when you have your first "Wave moment", typically you're writing a question and you're carefully formulating it and then two people jump in the Wave and answer your question before you're even done typing. You can really see how it speeds up things.
Of course the other thing you notice is that everyone one else also can't type, which tends to make things easier to deal with. However, there are cases where you don't want this. We are perfectly aware of this. We are planning what we call a "draft mode" where you can choose whether you want other people to see your changes live or whether you want other people to see them only when you hit the "done" button. We haven't implemented it yet, in part because we down prioritized draft mode because we wanted people to really get a chance to see how useful live typing is before presenting them with a choice where people might pick the safer option before getting a chance to see the benefit of live typing.
Stephanie: The next one is Twitter. Are we trying to kill Twitter?
Lars: And the answer is no. For starters, if we killed Twitter my wife would kill me, which would be unfortunate, but I think it is sort of the downside to doing a big splashy demo before the tool gets out there. Then you start getting a lot of speculation. I think Twitter of course is known for being very real time, and Wave also quickly became known for being very real time and people thought we would be competing with each other. It's like saying because our interface is blue we're competing with all the other blue tools on the Internet. Obviously, what's happening is that increasingly everything on the Internet is becoming more, and more real time. Please don't try and use Wave like Twitter. You'll have a very bad experience. What we hope will happen is that Wave extensions will be part of the very large collections of Waves you can interact with Twitter. We hope that if Wave takes off it will actually help tools like Twitter proliferate more.
Stephanie: I think this question is about "I don't want another inbox. I already have too many."
Lars: Me too. Stop using email. I'm just kidding. Our second-most requested feature is integration with email and so on, so you can have all your stuff in a single inbox. The first most requested feature being more Wave accounts so you have people to Wave with. We are going to do a few things with email integration. We are going to make it so that you can receive a gentle email notification when something changes in your Wave, so you don't have to go check both inboxes all the time.
An actual full-fledged integration where income emails would turn into Wave and you could reply to them inside Wave - we put that on the back burner. We used to think it was going to be a really important part of Wave, and we actually built a prototype of this. We started dog-fooding Wave ourselves, earlier this year, with such a prototype running. We found it was a really bad experience because what happens is when you first adopt Wave, early on, all of the people you communicate with, or 95% of them, are email users. So all of the Waves you end up with are really just emails. You can't take advantage of the features of Wave because all of the other users on Wave are really just using email. We found the "real Waves" where the other users were completely drowned in this flood of email. We never even used it. It would take years and years before we could possibly give a good email experience as you could get in a more mature tool, like Gmail. We moved it to the back burner, but you could imagine once Wave has kind of had a chance to find its own feet and reach a critical mass in your communication lives, then we might kind of bring in email, just to close off this gap of having too many inboxes.
Stephanie: That's way more than a minute, so tighten up. Permissions, now everyone can do everything in Wave? is it going to stay that way?
Lars: It is not going to stay that way. We're planning three types of participants, one that can do anything, which is the current type; one that can only read a Wave; and one in the middle, who is only allowed to add content to a Wave, but they can only remove or edit their own content, not other peoples' content. You don't need permissions, so currently, as you've noticed, anyone can add you to a Wave, and that Wave shows up in your inbox. It gets noisy very quickly. We're going to make it more like a chat client, where someone needs permission before they get something to appear in your inbox. The way it will work is very simple. If you add me to a Wave, that Wave only shows up in my inbox if I've made you a contact inside of Wave. The act of making someone a contact, implicitly gives that person permission to put Waves in your inbox. If you add me to a Wave and I don't have you in my contacts, instead of the Wave, I'll just see a little notification that so-and-so wants to Wave with me, and then I can choose to ignore or add that person to my contacts and see the Wave.
Stephanie: I think we're going to make this the last question and then I'm going to put the keyboard shortcuts, for those people who want to be more power users, into the Session Directory Waves. The last question for Lars before we finish is, "The learning curve." A lot of people get in there and say it's hard to use, I don't know what to do.
Lars: Yes, and I think they're right. We were never trying to pursue simplicity on an absolute scale as a goal in itself when we built Wave. We believe the tools in our lives that really make us productive all have the property that they take a little bit of time to learn. If you have been in the meetings I've had with my manager over the past two and a half years, he always says, "Okay Lars, what keeps you up at night," my answer is always the same; it's the question of whether users will perceive the benefit of Wave as being big enough that they're willing to go through that learning curve. That's really the crux of whether Wave will be successful. Our initial preview here has been promising. We have a fairly high retention rate, and we can watch in these public Waves, in particular, how more experienced users help the newbies get up to speed and people seem to have a good time with that.
Stephanie: I just want to conclude; we're getting late-breaking news from our team because we're in the last few hours of trying to open up a Federation port. We didn't get to talk about Federation yet, but Wave was born with an open protocol. We hope other people put up Wave servers, and everyone will have a choice in which one they prefer. David is going to talk more about that after the break, and hopefully, if things go well, a port for people to actually test Federation will be open on the developer's sandbox later today. Thank you for your time.
Chair: : One speaker couldn't make the next session, so what we're going to do is slide things forwards. It does give us a few minutes for Q&A. Do we have any questions for our Wavers here?
Audience: Are you planning to integrate Google Talk?
Lars: Google Talk - plan is a bit too strong a word. It is one of our top requested features and I'll personally love to see it happen. You could imagine that every Wave automatically has a shared voice channel and if the other people on the Wave have the appropriate trust relationship with you, you could see whether they're on that voice channel. When you go there, you can jump on the voice channel and you can talk to each other, or even start what you might think of as a phone call by starting a Wave with someone who is online and jumping on that channel. In particular, for things like the Sudoku game, where you don't really have time to be chatting with text, or even the SAP gadget where you're collaborating on this drawing, it would be so much faster if you could also talk to the person.
Audience: Are you hoping that ultimately Google Wave is adopted by advertisers as a way of starting a conversation with individuals in a different form from the way they do now?
Lars: Yes, but then -
Stephanie: I just want to say I don't know if we have a lot of ideas - we're far from it, but one of my favorite ideas is the late nights on the team, we often order Pizza Hut and how cool would it be if I had a coupon from Pizza Hut, and then it also had a gadget where I could collaboratively pick the pizzas with other members on the team and just submit it, and suddenly the pizza arrives. When we have to collaborate on a shared delivery order, it's kind of a pain. I think we think there is a lot of potential there.
Lars: I was going to say that after a brief pause.
Audience: Thank you first of all. Fantastic stuff. One of the things that I am working on is mobile web, mobile communications. With no disrespect intended, but it looks like something that was designed by people that spend all their time in front of 30-inch screens. Have you done any thinking about how people would use this on a mobile phone, on a mobile device of any kind? It looks like way too much information presented on a small screen.
Lars: Yes, I completely agree and in fact even on a desktop screen, or any screen for that matter, there is a lot of information there and we'll probably tone it down even for larger screens. If you do have a high end mobile device like a 3gsi phone or a new Android, try going to wave.google.com and you'll see a screen that the browser is not supported, but there is a link in the bottom right where you can click through anyway. You'll see that we have actually done a fair bit of work presenting a mobile version of the interface. You can read Waves. The reason we put that screen up there is because it's still much too slow for us to claim those browsers are supported. That will give you a good idea. I think most mobile devices you won't be able to take part in the rich text, live collaboration, but you'll certainly be able to go and add a message to a Wave, which will be a good start.
Audience: One really simple question; why is the search construct within Wave not the Google search construct, which is already universally known, accepted, and used widely?
Lars: I'm not sure I understand what you mean by -
Audience: Tag, inbox, directory, colon, word, find, whatever is there, versus you simply go to a search box and type what you're looking for without have to use tag, directory, colon etc. That's not consumer. That's not easy.
Lars: Have you tried just going in your search box and typing what you're looking for?
Audience: [distant]
Lars: Gotcha, now I understand. Okay, we have work to do. I completely agree.
Stephanie: I would also say we've had a lot of debate about the search operators and probably had more discussions about how they relate to Gmail because in the Wave world, we weren't sure whether to leave people with the constructs they were familiar with, like from and to, or try to move them to something like participant, contributor, viewer, and things like that. We are certainly taking feedback from our users, and if they prefer sets of operators we don't have yet, we're going to keep iterating.
Audience: How do you envision the desktop Wave clients impacting the Wave community and I imagine because you're working on the Chrome OS and the Chrome browser - the de facto browser for Wave it seems, do you envision operating systems like OS X shipping Wave clients, just like there is an L.app there could be a Wave.app where it becomes that much of a standard for desktop productivity and the desktop clients could contribute even more richness to the experience.
Lars: I would love to see something like that happen. I think it will probably be a bit in the future. One thing you have to realize is that unlike mail, the content inside Wave is very webby. I think you could undoubtedly render a Wave in a non-web browser type client, but you would essentially have to embed a web browser. For example, all of the gadgets we showed could not be rendered without a web browser. I should also say we're working hard standardizing a server-to-server protocol, so that anyone can build their own Wave server. David will talk more about this in the next talk. We haven't done any work at all standardizing protocol between a client and a Wave server. Currently, that's completely fluid and won't change. Say a year or two from now, it would be nice if it was such that anyone could build a client and plug it into any server. It will take some time.
Chair: : Time for three short questions.
Audience: Very quickly, to you have a plan to implement philosophies for Google Wave, and by philosophy I mean the philosophy embodied in the book Getting Things Done, the philosophy that for this lecture format of how to speak, how to listen, which helps people think about the conference. As it is, I found this enormously distracting and not very helpful in this particular setting. Is there any method or means or thinking about that topic?
Lars: Yes, the direction we're going with the extensibility of Wave is to implement applications that implement a particular philosophy or particular work flow. Currently, Wave is just one application that is good in some context and not so good in other context. In the context of having live Waves happening during a conference, you probably want an entirely different view of the Waves that are happening. The idea is the APIs we're building will be powerful enough that other people could build such a thing. We won't possibly have enough time to build all the different ways you could use Wave.
Stephanie: I think this question is also a bit of Wave etiquettes, like how could you communicate with a bunch of people on a Wave, that there are certain protocols you might follow.
Lars: Right now, Wave - the word anarchy gets used a lot. Everyone can do everything; you see everything in real time. That's not always appropriate, so often you'll see people forming various etiquettes where they describe look this way, in fact some of the Waves we helped start for this conference here starts with a text description of how we'd like this particular Wave to be used. What we think we'll do, and this is sometime in the future, is to formalize this concept of etiquette.
For example, if you have a Wave where you like it to be kept fairly brief, not too much discussion inside it, everyone can edit the content to build a directory of Waves for each talk in a conference. You would be able to describe this etiquette in a way where the Wave client will understand it as well. If a user violates this etiquette, the UI will gently warn them, "The person who created this Wave asked that you don't use his Wave in this way." Then at least you would know if you were violating. We hope the best of both worlds where you still get the flexibility if the etiquette is no longer relevant, but you also get some support for maintaining that kind of thing.
Audience: When I look at an application that is going to have the impact that Wave is going to have in the next year, and I think about all the users in the world that have a very - billions of users with a very low Internet connectivity relative to the type of thing we're used to, I'm interested in your longer term view of an offline mode for it, whether that's important or not, what your architectural vision is for that. Is there anything you can say about that type of offline or very low connectivity, intermittent connectivity type usage?
Lars: Super important. The algorithms that underlie our current editing work equally well in a live setting and in an offline setting and anything in between, like a flaky connection, high latency type setting. In fact if you want, you can try disconnecting your client. Keep typing and reconnect, and you'll see the stuff you typed while you were disconnected will eventually show up over the other person's screen. You'll occasionally see that what comes in from other people is kind of junked because their connection is kind of flaky or your connection is flaky. What we haven't built yet, which we very much want to build, is a means for you to persist the changes you're making on your local machine when you're not connected. That's the full offline mode; you're in a plane, not going to have a connection for another half a day but you can start new Waves. You can make lots of replies to lots of Waves and then you can close your computer, go to sleep, and then when you wake up the next morning and plug it in, and all the things you've made seamlessly get merged into the Waves you've touched. That's where we're going to end up.
Audience: What about connecting cameras and streaming video, or will it blow-up the Waves?
Lars: I think there was a question about voice earlier. I'd love to see an integration with video conference type things. There is an extension by a company called Six Rounds where you can have some pretty fun two people video conferencing inside of Wave, but you can imagine you're on a Wave, notice someone else is on the Wave and you link up with a video connection, which helps with collaboration but also helps you just take a piece of the video you're creating and recording it and putting it inside the Wave for other people to see. That's the sort of thing we'd like to build. But it's so much easier for me to tell you that than to actually make it happen.
Stephanie: Let me finish up by saying that's one of the reasons we were so excited to come to this conference because we both think you're a group of people who can help us make Wave better and pick the right features, and also a set of people who might be interested in building these types of extensions that we won't get to for a very long time because we're just a small engineering team and we have a lot of work to do to make the whole product stable, scalable, and fast. We're really excited if you want to check out our APIs, if you want to talk to us at the break, it's code.google.com/apis/wave and we love talking about them.
Chair: I would like you to give a very warm thank you to Stephanie and Lars
Stephanie: Thank you.
Lars: Thank you.
