Charlau au pays des tirelires

The internet and technology are sometimes evolving in an asymetrical way. Add in the human factor, and yes, there’s some incomprehensible behaviours out there… There’s one I don’t understand. Audio and even video streaming has become a not so bleeding edge technology. It’s everywhere, it’s easy, we could do a lot with it. But why don’t we? Voice communication, for example. A lot of people don’t have external microphones or don’t know if they have any internal one on their computer. So we keep writing emails, using 140 character messages and typing little comments in Facebook. However, just a few words from a human being convey so much more than many 140 character messages! So let’s talk!

Welcome to Voicy. This is my humble attempt to answer the previous paragraph’s concerns. Google Wave seems a logical place to experiment in new ways of communication. Well, our voice is not exactly a new way – more like the oldest one – but to incorporate it in our daily internet usage, that would be new and that would be refreshing!

You can install the gadget as an extension. Doing so adds a little icon in the toolbar which you can click to get a new Voicy. So what’s a Voicy? At it’s core, it’s simply a voice recording tool, much like an old school answering machine. But with the wave factor and some imagination, we can add a twist or two to it. The application has 2 panels: recording of messages, playback of messages.

The playback panel has a dropdown list of all the recordings for that wave (actually, for that Voicy in that wave). That means we can have as many waves with Voicy’s as we wish, thus expanding the « answering machine » paradigm. I’ll get back to that in a bit. So this menu also shows the name of each user who left a message. So it’s not anonymous. That could be an option to add, but I’m more into sharing than hiding… (and in any case, using it in a non-public wave is probably the best idea, thus limiting the auditors to people we choose). However, there’s a privacy option only available to the host (the user who inserted the gadget): he can disable the « play » panel for everyone else. That makes it a lot more like an answering machine, where we could leave messages but not listen to other’s.

The recording panel is mostly an embed of Riffly’s Flash recording API. Like in every flash app using the microphone, you have to allow Flash access to your hardware. Then you can record/play/re-record and then save your message (up to 10 minutes long). Once it’s saved, the actual sound file resides on Riffly’s servers. All I’m storing separatelly from that is a list of userID/sound byte reference number pairs.

Usage ideas

I came upon this idea because I was looking for a way to share thougths and contemplations about a daily quote, with a group of friends. So for example, you could have with each day a new quote to reflect on, accompanied with a fresh Voicy to record and share your thoughts about it. Of course, since we’re in Wave, we can add written comments, links, images, etc. It could also be used for a new kind of brainstorming. Each participant is notified (and their list is updated) when someone else from the same open wave adds a comment. So it could then be a live/delayed experience which can be applied to many situations. In this sense, even though it is not a new way of communication per se, it’s context, usage and even limitations open new ways of experiencing human communication. If you have Google Wave accounts, I suggest you try it and let us know how you succeded into molding a new way of speech!

You can use these links to add the gadget to your waves (they are useless if you can’t access Google Wave yet). The first one is the path to the installer (the preffered option, since it leaves an icon in the toolbar for handy usage). Copy and paste it in the installer box. The other is the actual gadget url, in case you just want to insert it in one wave (by clicking in the puzzle icon in the toolbar). Please note that Google Waves is still new and in an early preview state, so if the gadget doesn’t seem to load, just go to a new wave and come back, and it should be fine.

http://wave-gadgets.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/voicy/manifest.xml
http://wave-gadgets.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/voicy/gadget.xml

PS: I have nothing against Twitter or Facebook, I’m a user of both! (oups, Facebook no more…). I just like to expand the horizon a bit…

Posted via email from CD