Google Wave
Uncategorized — By Dmitry Podolsky on June 1, 2009 at 12:19 pm
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Everybody (Terence Tao for one) seems to be excited about forthcoming Google Wave, and so am I. Here is the video demonstrating some of the product’s features:
I think, we are yet to see whether Google Wave is to become ultimate science collaboration tool (I signed up on their site – and hope they’ll get me into beta testing). My current opinion is that Google Wave provides you functionality similar to forums rather than wikis: in collaboration projects, I’ve found that messages tend to group into project categories, not conversations – since it is also good to see also conversations which ended up long time ago, not just recent ones, if the topic of the conversation is the same. And of course, I would love if a collaboration platform naturally would support TeX formulae (embed them as fugures, MathML or in some other – not terribly ugly – way) 
(nobody among big players seems to be interested to satisfy needs of little egghead nerds – scientists)
I fell in love with two features of GWave so far: the possibility to embed waves on arbitrary webpages and the way it shows updates in a document you are collaborating on (25-30 min from the beginning of the video).
Also, did you notice that GWave interface resembles somewhat the one of Microsoft Outlook 2007? 
Update: As Terence Tao explains,
Apparently a LaTeX renderer is already being developed as an API extension to Google Wave.
His screenshot looks impressive enough.
4 Comments
Due to Wave’s open nature, we (scientists) will be able to add TeX support ourselves. Although, given the amount of PhDs on Google’s payroll, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an internal project that does just this (e.g. in Google Labs).
In a sense, it should be as hard as to add TeX support for a wordpress blog. If one wants to convert TeX to images, this should be done on the server side (and it is quite a resource hog), while writing Tex-to-MathML plugin is too complicated task – up to the point that one cannot write it just by himself, I think.
I’ve not had a chance to take a look at this yet – but your general comments about integrating math and other things are good. The key for us in HEP (experiment) isn’t math so much as plots – that should be dirt easy to get us away from these @&#&@ email messages that contian links rather than the plots themselves.
It seems they actually already have a very nice support for embedding images – check out the video
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