You can use Google Wave to replace your instant messaging, emailing and
collaborative editing applications, but that is not its real power. What makes
Wave interesting is that it merges all its features and capabilities into a
single object - the wave.
The real advantage of wave is that you do not need
to maintain separate instant messaging, mail and collaborative editing sessions,
and do no longer need to copy and paste or otherwise juggle information between
these various conversations, but can now do things The Wavy Way; engage or inform
contacts by adding them as participants to a wave.
By the way, I am deliberately ignoring the security issues of giving all parties involved equal access to a wave, to not distract from the idea of doing thing the wavy way. However, I will note that sharing waves isn’t necessarily an all all-or-nothing approach; in Wave, the basic unit of access control isn’t the wave, but the wavelets contained within a wave.
The wavy way to do genealogy is a genealogy wave.
Another advantage of waves that The Wavy Way pointed out is that you do not have to choose between plain text in the body and rich text text in an attachment, but can use rich text in the wave body.
Now, it is wavy to look at an fully marked-up ahnenlist and use Wave’s playback feature to see what additions and corrections another party made, but it is not very wavy yet.
The wavy way to do genealogy is a genealogy wave. You make a geneawave by adding a genealogy extension to a wave.
There are no genealogy extensions for Wave yet, but it is not hard to understand how beneficial these could be.
For example, a family sheet gadget can present a family overview, highlight
missing fields and perform some basic valid date and consistency checks.
A slightly more complex gadget would allow the user to work with the
genealogy in various formats, including the traditional tree format.
A robot might suggest adding your niece as a participant when you add her to
the family tree.
As you consider such extension ideas, it is only natural to wonder how far removed such gadgets are from being a basic genealogy applications.
A basic genealogy application, one that merely captures names, dates and relationships, is not very hard to write. There are quite a few simple genealogy apps that do not do much more than that on FaceBook. None of these apps are good enough for serious genealogist, as these apps were not designed with genealogists in mind, but aimed at involving as all FaceBook users (and get rich by serving them adds).
The FaceBook genealogy apps are quite popular and Google Wave is a social platform not entirely unlike FaceBook. Wave even supports the same OpenSocial standard for social platform applications that many FaceBook competitors such MySpace and Ning support. So, it is reasonable to expect that we will soon see some of the same applications on Genealogy Wise (ning) and Google Wave.
One reason we often mail ahnenlists to distant family members is that we cannot assume that they have a genealogy application installed. How different the FaceBook situation is. There is no need to install anything. You just pick a FaceBook and start using it. As you add your family members, they are invited to join in. When they accept that invitation, they start using the same application without ever installing anything.
When you try to use a FaceBook app for the first time, you will get dialog
that notes that Allowing FaceBook app access will let it access your
Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that it
requires to work.. Choosing the Allow button is often referred to as
installation of the FaceBook app, but it is really only a matter of permissions.
The real issue with that permission is privacy, the FaceBook approach is that the app gets very broad
access to all your content, even content it really does not need.
Wave extensions do not require local installation and do not require permission to access all your content either. On FaceBook, an app live inside FaceBook, and has access to your entire profile and all its content. In contrast, a Wave gadget does not live in Wave, but within the wave you added it to. The gadget does not see your other waves.
In Wave, you invite someone to join in your genealogy building by adding them as a participant to the wave. All wave participants have access to the genealogy gadgets inside that wave, which they can start using immediately. There is no need to install anything, nor need to grant the gadget broad permissions. Thus, Wave genealogy gadgets may prove to be even more viral than FaceBook genealogy apps.
In a viral application category, the first mover enjoys a significant
advantage; it already has thousands of users inviting yet other users when the second
application is introduced.
Therefore, the vendors that are offering FaceBook genealogy apps now are
probably already working feverishly to produce a Wave variant, in a race to have the first viral
genealogy application on the new platform.
There will probably be multiple genealogy gadgets by the time Google Wave goes public. The early versions of these gadgets are likely to be very similar to the FaceBook apps, but being first on the platform is not the only key to success.
A more important one is how well the app blends into Wave and manages to make uses of its unique features. It will be interesting to see which vendors will manage to adapt to the Wave conventions and take advantage of the possibilities that the Wave platform offers them.
Replaced ahnentafel
with ahnenlist
.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.