Google Wave could and should replace email, IM, and wikis
Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 1:47PM I'm not prone to hyperbole. My reaction to most of the "hot" technoligies of the past few years, like Twitter and Facebook, was "meh" (even though I do use both). 10 years as an entrepeneur and computer scientist, much of it in the midst of one buzz-fuelled tech bubble or another, makes you rather cynical about anything that claims to be the next big thing.
With that said, I'm ready to break the habit of a lifetime and say that Google Wave will be the next big thing.
What is it? Imagine a single tool that elegantly combines the roles of email, instant messaging, and wikis. Once Google Wave becomes widely available, you'd need to be crazy to want to use any of these three things, Google Wave is just so much more powerful.
Now imagine that this tool could be easily extended to support things as diverse as a spell checker, a real-time language translator, integration with 3rd-party tools like Twitter, or a voting application. These extentions can be installed and used with a single click, and shared with other people through Google Wave itself.
Now imagine that the whole thing is an open protocol, based on open source code, just like email. It looks like Google will be perfectly happy for anyone else to run their own Google Wave servers, perhaps completely independent of Google. But these services, while independent, will be able to communicate with each other, just as Gmail communicates happily with Yahoo Mail.
In many ways Google Wave is a natural evolution of the kind of rich-web applications that most people were exposed to for the first time with Gmail. But, whereas Gmail is a (more or less) stand-alone system, Google Wave is a whole operating system, allowing third parties to, with relative ease, extend it in ways even its creators probably won't imagine.
Google Wave is built on the Google Web Toolkit. GWT allows you to write normal Java code, which is then compiled to Javascript and run in a browser. This is useful because Java has much better tool support than Javascript, and is a much more sensible language (Javascript was hacked together by some guy at Netscape years ago as an afterthought, its an awful programming language).
Google Wave relies on the XMPP protocol. This is an open source instant-messaging protocol, also known as "Jabber". Its used by Google Talk, and supported by many instant messaging applications, including Apple's iChat. I'm not very familiar with it, but I hear that its not the most pleasant protocol to work with. Fortunately, it sounds like Google Wave hides that ugliness from developers.
At this point the best way to get a feel for Google Wave is to watch their recent presentation (you'll need to ignore the slightly annoying sales-pitchy tone and the very annoying soliciting of applause every 30 seconds):
Reader Comments (13)
Thanks for the kind words in your article!
Google Wave is NOT based on the XMPP protocol, it has it's own protocol built with concurrent editing control technology, not available in any other realtime messaging system currenty. Please check out waveprotocol.org for more details (I am a Google Wave core engineer).
Hi Dhanji, thanks for your comment!
I'm a little confused though, from the protocol spec:
Am I misunderstanding something here?
Clarification: Yes, the transport *between* waveservers (i.e. federation) is based on XMPP, but not Wave itself.
lovely writeup - makes me even more excited about it!
Thinking of Wave in terms of "replacing" such as GMAIL (or even email, itself) is just silly. Not every Internet communication needs to be (or even should be) as would be in Wave. Traditional email, at the very least, should (and likely will) never go away. Of this, I think there should be little fear or doubt.
Now, that doesn't mean there won't be a place -- and a potent one, indeed -- in our lives for such as Wave and its ineluctable variants. It, too, will be useful, under the right circumstances. In fact, from my admittedly only-cursory analysis of it to date, I'm thinking that what actually MAY be "replaced" by Wave, as a practical matter, is traditional "chat," as we now know it (though traditional chat, mark my words, will continue to be around for years and years, too, no matter how good Wave ultimately gets).
Regardless, one thing about which we should all be clear in our minds is that we're not talking about the mere replacing of anything, here. Wave, for better or worse, seems very nearly of the nature of paradigm shift... and far be it from me to suggest that that's, necessarily, a bad thing, here.
It does, however, come with pitfalls about which we should all be watchful, if not actually downright concerned. For example, though it's now coming out in articles (and/or rebuttals to such as I am posting here) that it's likely to be user-configurable, initial writings about Wave touted the ability (and represented it as essential to Wave's very way of operating) of all persons in a "wave" (or a thread) to be able to see, in real time, all others' keystrokes, as they type.
Let me repeat the salient words of that, here: AS. THEY. TYPE.
Think about that, please, for just a moment. It's a far larger problem than, perhaps, it initially seems. Like how sausage is made (or, as some joke, like how laws are passed), some things in life may better be left something of a mystery to those who ultimately consume (or are regulated by) them; and, most importantly, solely at the creator's option.
The ultimate impact and meaning to the reader of anything written would be inordinately influenced by said reader's having been a witness to its creation. If one is a thoughtful writer who doesn't just blurt out every wayward thing which flits through one's brain, then one is going to pause to think while one types, and back-up and delete and re-type, and whatever else behind-the-scenes activity goes into what ends-up being the finished written product. If the reader were able to witness what the writer merely paused before writing; or actually did write, but then thought better of and either removed or changed to something else, then the bell of what the reader saw along the way cannot be un-rung; and the reader's ultimate interpretation and understanding of the final written result will be indelibly affected in ways (even if not immediately obvious) more likely than not to be inherently bad for all concerned.
Now, if it's true, as some who challenge such as my assertions, here, are now saying, that the ability of others to view one's keystrokes as one makes them is (or at least will be) user-configurable in the version of Wave which is finally released to the end-user wild, then my concern, at least on this particular privacy-related point, is happily ameliorated.
However, of larger philosophical concern to me is that the creators of Wave apparently believed, even if only briefly, that something as basic as this issue would not be important. What, then (if anything), does that mean we should also be wary of in the realm of personal privacy protections, just generally, for users of this new and groundbreaking product? For what else should we be watching which may, ultimately, negatively impact us because of fundamental, and at least initially seemingly harmless, privacy encroachments...
...encroachments which may not even be recognizable as encroachments to Wave's creators because, perhaps, of their nationality and upbringing (nothing negative, mind you, intended by that wording, I assure).
One potentially troubling impact (at least from the standpoint of Americans, in my opinion) of globalization (which, incidentaly, I'm not fundamentally against, despite how what I'm about to write may make it seem) is how the sensibilities of those non-Americans who create things which all others on the planet end-up using can unintentionally contravene that which Americans hold perhaps nearer and dearer to their hearts than do non-American others. Those who grew up and still live in countries where such things as privacy and freedom of speech are not as absolute and paramount as in the US may or may not necessarily value such rights to the same degree as do Americans; and it sometimes shows in their work.
It has not escaped my notice that the two brothers -- brilliant though they are -- who created and continue to develop Wave were neither born and raised in, nor now live in, the US... and so I fear (and I may be completely wrong about this, I realize... but absent, at this point, any reason not to, I am nevertheless fearing that they) may not place as much of a premium on the notion of absolute privacy (if desired by the end-user of Wave) as do Americans.
Or, who knows, maybe they do. I don't know them, and it's unfair of me to presume, I suppose (or even to suppose, I presume). One way or the other, though, it should be at least a concern to all that the default behavior of Wave seems so inherently and joltingly privacy-denuding.
So, then, again, begged is the question: Of what else (if anything), in Wave, should we who hold inviolate our privacy be wary?
To appeal to (at least thinking) Americans, the makers of Wave need to take steps to ensure that if the end-user wants to protect his/her absolute privacy while using this admittedly exciting and paradigm-shifting new product, it can, via easy configuration settings, be satisfactorily and incontrovertibly achieved at all possible levels, and in all possible ways. Moreover, as it is developed, the makers of Wave might need to realize that they may, because of their nationality and upbringing, not necessarily even recognize what all of those levels and ways might be; and the Americans (or even the non-Americans who at least fully grasp the American viewpoint regarding all this) who work on the development of Wave should ensure that no privacy holes such as I'm discussing here remain anywhere in it when it's finally and fully released into the end-user wild.
Or so it is my opinion... my two cents worth, as it were...
...which my ex-wife, for example, among others, has been known to quickly attest tends to be about all it's usually worth.
__________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California
gregg[at]greggdeselms.com
i love it when a response is longer than the actual post.
Hi Ian,
I saw your post on StackOverflow.com about using Google Wave for code review and found it very interesting. I had the same idea, and developed a rough draft of how it would look like. I haven't started implementing it yet (for one, because I don't have a sandbox account) but, if you're interested, it could be a joint project for us to work at in the future maybe? :)
The initial specs are here: http://helderribeiro.net/?p=130. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Cheers,
Helder
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I hope you do not mind if I posted a link on digg
Great article you got here. It would be great to read more about this matter.
Google Wave? where is it now? Google Wave that would centralise all web apps on social networking is not an idea. We don't want Google to control everyting even on open source.
What does wiki has to do with all that?
Very nice presentation ! i liked their way of elaboration and yes I do agree that google wave will change our lives and our online activities as well.
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