Cameron Neylon

Yesterday, along with [Chris Thorpe](http://blog.jaggeree.com/) and [Ian
Mulvany](http://network.nature.com/people/ianmulvany/profile) I was
involved in what I imagine might be the first of a series of demos of
[Wave](http://wave.google.com) as it could apply to scientists and
researchers more generally. You can see the [backup video I
made](http://www.viddler.com/explore/CameronNeylon/videos/8/) in case we
had no network on Viddler. I've not really done a demo like that live
before so it was a bit difficult to tell how it was going from the
inside but although much of the tweetage was apparently underwhelmed the
direct feedback afterwards was very positive and perceptive.

I think we struggled to get across an idea of what Wave is, which
confused a significant proportion of the audience, particularly those
who weren't already aware of it or who didn't have a pre-conceived idea
of what it might do for them. My impression was that those in the
audience who were technically oriented were excited by what they saw. If
I was to do a demo again I would focus more on telling a story about
writing a paper -- really give people a context for what is going on.
One problem with Wave is that it is easy to end up with a document
littered with chat blips and I think this confused an audience more used
to thinking about documents.

The other problem is perhaps that a bunch of things "just working" is
underwhelming when people are used to the idea of powerful applications
that they do their work in. Developers get the idea that this is all
happening and working in a generic environment, not a special purpose
built one, and that is exciting. Users just expect things to work or
they're not interested. Especially scientists. And it would be fair to
say that the robots we demonstrated, mostly the work of a few hours or a
few days, aren't incredibly impressive on the surface. In addition, when
it is working at its best the success of Wave is that it can make it
look easy, if not yet polished. Because it looks easy people then assume
it is so its not worth getting excited about. The point is not that it
is possible to automatically mark up text, pull in data, and then
process it. It is that you can do this effectively in your email inbox
with unrelated tools, that are pretty easy to build, or at least adapt.
But we also clearly need some flashier demos for scientists.

Ian pulled off a great coup in my view by linking up the output of one
Robot to a visualization provided by another. Ian has written a [robot
called Janey](http://github.com/IanMulvany/janey-robot/) which talks to
the [Journal/Author Name Estimator
service](http://biosemantics.org/jane/). It can either suggest what
journal to send a paper to based on the abstract or suggest other
articles of interest. Ian had configured the Robot the night before so
it could also get the co-authorship graph for a set of papers and put
that into a new blip in the form of a list of edges (or co-authorships).

The clever bit was that Ian had found another Robot, written by someone
entirely different that visualizes connection graphs. Ian set the blip
that Janey was writing to to be one that the Graph robot was watching
and the *automatically pulled data* was *automatically visualized* \[see
a [screencast
here](http://www.viddler.com/explore/CameronNeylon/videos/9/)\]. Two
Robots written by different people for different purposes can easily be
hooked up together and just work. I'm not even sure whether Ian had had
a chance to test it or not prior to the demo...but it looked easy, why
wouldn't people expect two data processing tools to work seamlessly
together? I mean, it should just work.

The idea of a Wave as a data processing workflow was implicit in what I
have written previously but Ian's demo, and a later conversation with
[Alan Cann](http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/) really sharpened
that up in my mind. Alan was asking about different visual
representations of a wave. The current client essentially uses the
visual metaphor of an email system. One of the points for me that came
from the demo is that it will probably be necessary to write specific
clients that make sense for specific tasks. Alan asked about the idea of
a [Yahoo Pipes](http://pipes.yahoo.com) type of interface. This suggests
a different way of thinking about Wave, instead of a set of text or
media elements, it becomes a way to wire up Robots, automated
connections to webservices. Essentially with a set of Robots and an
appropriate visual client you could build a visual programming engine, a
web service interface, or indeed a visual workflow editing environment.

The Wave client has to walk a very fine line between presenting a view
of the Wave that the target user can understand and working with and the
risk of constraining the users thinking about what can be done. The
amazing thing about Wave as a framework is that these things are not
only do-able but often very easy. The challenge is actually thinking
laterally enough to even ask the question in the first place. The great
thing about a public demo is that the challenges you get from the
audience make you look at things in different ways.

*Allyson Lister [blogged the
session](http://themindwobbles.wordpress.com/2009/08/22/google-wave-just-another-ripple-or-science-communication-tsunami/),
there was a [FriendFeed
discussion](http://friendfeed.com/solondon/73a42338/google-wave-just-another-ripple-or-science),
and there should be video available at some point.*


Yesterday, along with Chris Thorpe and Ian Mulvany I was involved in what I imagine might be the first of a series of demos of Wave as it could apply to scientists and researchers more generally. You can see the backup video I made in case we had no network on Viddler.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Reflecting on a Wave: The Demo at Science Online London 2009