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While I generally like technological innovations and the nice things they do for me, I have almost never been part of the first wave of people getting in on anything new. When I was a kid, I was behind everyone else on having things like a VCR or one of those portable cassette players that were all the rage before CDs took over. I was not an early adopter of CDs either. I was very late to the game on computers, too.
I am old enough to be in a generation of people for whom it seemed to be an actual decision whether or not to "get into computers." Sounds ridiculous now. When I was about 12, I had one of those cheap Radio Shack computers that so many kids got that year. It was basically a big calculator/typewriter-like contraption that was hooked up to a TV. It had almost no internal memory at all, and relied heavily upon cartridges that fit into a slot on the side of the thing (the programs actually resided on the cartridge--they did not load into the computer's memory; imagine nowadays if you wanted to use, say, Microsoft Word, you needed a physical disc spinning in an external drive the entire time). To save one's work, one would use a tape drive--literally a tape cassette recorder that plugged into it. To load your saved work back onto the computer, one would play the tape and it would squeal and whine for a while and eventually you'd have something to look at. The truth is, the Radio Shack computer was not easy to use, didn't really do much that was very interesting, and wasn't any fun. It was really much less interesting than an Atari videogame system. Somebody gave me a book of programs for it. I was expected to sit for hours at a time typing code into the damned thing, in hopes that it would cause some sort of primitive graphic event to manifest itself on the black and white TV screen. So I associated computers with programming them, and I didn't want to do that. It seemed boring and time consuming and I couldn't see what it could possibly have to do with my life. I don't think most other people were very interested in computer programming either. That's why we all have PCs and Macs now, and 99 percent of us know jack about how they work. And we're fine with that.
In general, my late-adopter mode has served me fairly well. By the time I realized that I needed to be a regular computer user (and not a typewriter or word processor user), they had evolved into a fairly modern and easy-to-use form. By the time I got online for the first time, the web already existed. It was not anywhere near as dynamic and rich as it is now. But it existed, and the internet was no longer just a mess of weird bulletin boards and mailing lists. I won't even be getting a Blu-ray player because I can see that convergence will soon make all discs obsolete. When I got my first cell phone, the devices and the networks for them were reasonably like they are now. Same with the social media stuff, which I have come to only recently. The verdict was pretty much in on what things like Twitter and Facebook and LiveJournal are for and how they work by the time I came to them. Easy.
So being late to the party has the upside of being able to miss out on a lot of the early growing pains of new things. On the other hand, I am more and more into finding new things that will improve how I work and live. A couple of things that I actually was an early adopter were in that category: I started doing online bill-pay over a decade ago and only now are most other people I know coming around on that; I joined Netflix as soon as I heard of it (screw going to Blockbuster! I haven't seen the inside of a video store more than once or twice during this millennium). So I look for things that will improve efficiency and make more time for things that I want to spend time on.
With that in mind, I am trying to figure out what Google Wave is about and assessing whether I will be an early adopter of it. It's in a preview phase right now, and one evidently needs to get invited to join it and test it. To listen to people talk on Twitter, pining for an invitation, in some cases almost begging someone to invite them into Google Wave, one would think it must be some sort of online El Dorado or Shangri-La. I have to admit that I was getting rather curious myself and started poking around for an invitation, and I eventually got one. I don't know what the etiquette is in this situation. I probably shouldn't say publicly who invited me. Maybe it's a secret. It is someone who occasionally reads this page, and so I will say "thank you" (you know who you are).
So it is an online Shangri-La? I really couldn't tell you yet, because I really don't quite understand what all it does. It has a steeper learning curve than something like Twitter or Facebook. That much I can say for sure. So what is it even? It appears to be a communications interface that has the capability of merging things like instant messaging, document sharing/collaboration and even some email functionality (like sharing docs or links) into a "wave," which is basically a live document with all these functions and possibilities within it. I've only had one real interaction with another user so far. This afternoon, I chatted for a couple minutes with my friend, the writer Cesar Torres. The window within which we chatted resembled more or less what you would expect from any instant messaging interface. But then it gets rather slick and fancy: communication is so instantaneous that you can see each other's messages as they are typed. Indeed, at one point Cesar was able to anticipate what I was probably going to say and he produced an answer before I was done saying it. This is very different than a normal IM operation or Twitter where you fully compose your message and then send it before anyone can see it. I'm not sure how much I dig this. I became very self-conscious of my sloppy typing when I realized that he was seeing my every keystroke as I made it. I suppose I can get used to it, but I am not a very good IM-er anyway, so I am not sure.
But that's not even the coolest thing anyway. This "wave" within which Cesar and I were chatting could have been used for a lot more stuff. For example, I could have passed a document over to him. If we had wanted to collaborate on an edit of said document, we could have done that right there in our wave. If some other people that we know had appeared online, we could have invited them to join us live. And the wave, when "done" or not in use, remains in existence, like a document, unless you delete it, so you can keep going back to it to add to it or review it or change it. But I still don't know what I think of all of this, despite how great it seems it could be. I need to learn a lot more about how to use it. For example, there exist a host of add-on apps that you can use to do things like send content from your wave to your blog or to Twitter, but I can't figure out how to activate any of them. Advice in the "help" directory seems kind of spotty. And I am generally fairly impatient and easily irritated when things don't do stuff for me the way I want them to. But I suspect that with a little more time, I will get the hang of it and discover some more uses for it. I feel it in my blood that there is some way that this Wave thing will be of great use in building the M-Brane empire. But I have no idea how yet. I'll report on this again some day.
I am old enough to be in a generation of people for whom it seemed to be an actual decision whether or not to "get into computers." Sounds ridiculous now. When I was about 12, I had one of those cheap Radio Shack computers that so many kids got that year. It was basically a big calculator/typewriter-like contraption that was hooked up to a TV. It had almost no internal memory at all, and relied heavily upon cartridges that fit into a slot on the side of the thing (the programs actually resided on the cartridge--they did not load into the computer's memory; imagine nowadays if you wanted to use, say, Microsoft Word, you needed a physical disc spinning in an external drive the entire time). To save one's work, one would use a tape drive--literally a tape cassette recorder that plugged into it. To load your saved work back onto the computer, one would play the tape and it would squeal and whine for a while and eventually you'd have something to look at. The truth is, the Radio Shack computer was not easy to use, didn't really do much that was very interesting, and wasn't any fun. It was really much less interesting than an Atari videogame system. Somebody gave me a book of programs for it. I was expected to sit for hours at a time typing code into the damned thing, in hopes that it would cause some sort of primitive graphic event to manifest itself on the black and white TV screen. So I associated computers with programming them, and I didn't want to do that. It seemed boring and time consuming and I couldn't see what it could possibly have to do with my life. I don't think most other people were very interested in computer programming either. That's why we all have PCs and Macs now, and 99 percent of us know jack about how they work. And we're fine with that.
In general, my late-adopter mode has served me fairly well. By the time I realized that I needed to be a regular computer user (and not a typewriter or word processor user), they had evolved into a fairly modern and easy-to-use form. By the time I got online for the first time, the web already existed. It was not anywhere near as dynamic and rich as it is now. But it existed, and the internet was no longer just a mess of weird bulletin boards and mailing lists. I won't even be getting a Blu-ray player because I can see that convergence will soon make all discs obsolete. When I got my first cell phone, the devices and the networks for them were reasonably like they are now. Same with the social media stuff, which I have come to only recently. The verdict was pretty much in on what things like Twitter and Facebook and LiveJournal are for and how they work by the time I came to them. Easy.
So being late to the party has the upside of being able to miss out on a lot of the early growing pains of new things. On the other hand, I am more and more into finding new things that will improve how I work and live. A couple of things that I actually was an early adopter were in that category: I started doing online bill-pay over a decade ago and only now are most other people I know coming around on that; I joined Netflix as soon as I heard of it (screw going to Blockbuster! I haven't seen the inside of a video store more than once or twice during this millennium). So I look for things that will improve efficiency and make more time for things that I want to spend time on.
With that in mind, I am trying to figure out what Google Wave is about and assessing whether I will be an early adopter of it. It's in a preview phase right now, and one evidently needs to get invited to join it and test it. To listen to people talk on Twitter, pining for an invitation, in some cases almost begging someone to invite them into Google Wave, one would think it must be some sort of online El Dorado or Shangri-La. I have to admit that I was getting rather curious myself and started poking around for an invitation, and I eventually got one. I don't know what the etiquette is in this situation. I probably shouldn't say publicly who invited me. Maybe it's a secret. It is someone who occasionally reads this page, and so I will say "thank you" (you know who you are).
So it is an online Shangri-La? I really couldn't tell you yet, because I really don't quite understand what all it does. It has a steeper learning curve than something like Twitter or Facebook. That much I can say for sure. So what is it even? It appears to be a communications interface that has the capability of merging things like instant messaging, document sharing/collaboration and even some email functionality (like sharing docs or links) into a "wave," which is basically a live document with all these functions and possibilities within it. I've only had one real interaction with another user so far. This afternoon, I chatted for a couple minutes with my friend, the writer Cesar Torres. The window within which we chatted resembled more or less what you would expect from any instant messaging interface. But then it gets rather slick and fancy: communication is so instantaneous that you can see each other's messages as they are typed. Indeed, at one point Cesar was able to anticipate what I was probably going to say and he produced an answer before I was done saying it. This is very different than a normal IM operation or Twitter where you fully compose your message and then send it before anyone can see it. I'm not sure how much I dig this. I became very self-conscious of my sloppy typing when I realized that he was seeing my every keystroke as I made it. I suppose I can get used to it, but I am not a very good IM-er anyway, so I am not sure.
But that's not even the coolest thing anyway. This "wave" within which Cesar and I were chatting could have been used for a lot more stuff. For example, I could have passed a document over to him. If we had wanted to collaborate on an edit of said document, we could have done that right there in our wave. If some other people that we know had appeared online, we could have invited them to join us live. And the wave, when "done" or not in use, remains in existence, like a document, unless you delete it, so you can keep going back to it to add to it or review it or change it. But I still don't know what I think of all of this, despite how great it seems it could be. I need to learn a lot more about how to use it. For example, there exist a host of add-on apps that you can use to do things like send content from your wave to your blog or to Twitter, but I can't figure out how to activate any of them. Advice in the "help" directory seems kind of spotty. And I am generally fairly impatient and easily irritated when things don't do stuff for me the way I want them to. But I suspect that with a little more time, I will get the hang of it and discover some more uses for it. I feel it in my blood that there is some way that this Wave thing will be of great use in building the M-Brane empire. But I have no idea how yet. I'll report on this again some day.
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