Google Wave Free Association
So Google’s announcement of Wave seems like a big deal. Rather than the typical deep and thoughtful post, which I’m sure others have done, some random thoughts:
- from what I can tell, unlike much of Google’s current application infrastructure (GMail and Docs), the code will be open source; this would be really big
- also unlike the current apps, Wave is distributed; this is also a really big deal
- the collaborative document-editing seems wicked cool, and goes a fair bit beyond Docs
- I absolutely cringe when I hear the phrase
rich text
in 2009, particularly when Google has so failed to get the basics of structured documents right in Docs - OTOH, HTML 5 provides some room for them to improve this if they put their mind to it
- would really love if the extension mechanism was rich enough to allow integration of citations (say a Zotero extension; though perhaps something more distributed), and flexible enough to do it right (which by definition means not based on bibtex)
- This has potentially big, though as yet unclear, implications for higher education, and for the sort of work that happens these days in LMSs.
