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

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. 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 which talks to the Journal/Author Name Estimator service. 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]. 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 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 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, there was a FriendFeed discussion, and there should be video available at some point.