Google's "Wave" Blurs Chat, Email, Collaboration Software

superglaze writes "Google has unveiled a distributed, P2P-based collaboration and conversation platform called Wave. Developers are being invited to join an open source project that has been formed to create a Google Wave Federation Protocol, which will underlie the system. Anyone will be able to create a 'wave,' which is a type of hosted conversation, Google has said. Waves will essentially incorporate real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared communications space. Developers can also work on embedding waves into websites, or creating multimedia robots and gadgets that can be incorporated within the Google Wave client." Jamie points out this more informative link.

Re:first

[GreyLurk]

From my reading, they're requiring TLS on the XMPP stream, which pretty well covers encryption.

Re:Public warning

[Blice]

The first "client" is actually a web app. A pretty one, at that.

Screenshot here~ [blogspot.com]

Re:first

[sam.thorogood]

TLS sounds about right. The protocol also provides a verification protocol (see http://waveprotocol.org/ [waveprotocol.org]), so actions performed by any participant in a hosted conversation can always be verified by other participants in that hosted conversation, regardless of their provider. What this means for you: encryption (TLS), and your contributions can't be tampered with.

Re:Public warning

[just_another_sean]

It will be in beta for 5 years. So you have no grounds to complain about anything for a long long time.

Not necessarily [slashdot.org]!

Re:Photophlow

[diegocgteleline.es]

Well, no, it is completely different, other than having avatars and thumbnails. photophlow are flickr photos with a javascript chat. Wave are XML documents which are kept in sync via collaborative editing "protocols", and those documents can be text conversations, maps, videos, gadgets or any other thin.

Re:Firefly

[SanityInAnarchy]

Here: http://www.fireflywiki.org/Firefly/CortexLexicon

Scroll down to "wave".

Re:Windows Only?

[Zarel]

They always release their software for Windows first. Will this be the same? I wonder...

Considering Wave is an online service, it would be pretty difficult for them to make it Windows-only. None of Google's other Web pages are Windows-only.

Re:html 5 and encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously mods this was sarcastic, not informative ...

Re:Ugh

[nine-times]

By setting up your own you're destroying the networking aspect.

A private site for friends will never have the pull of a world-wide LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE site.

Er... no. You could set up social networking standards and protocols that would allow various sites to enable their users to build profiles which could then be shared in a manner very similar to facebook. You'd want some kind of common authentication (OpenID) if you don't want all the profiles to be public. If anything, I'd say that by keeping a private little proprietary system, they're limiting the networking aspect.

They want all of your data, and this is just another tool for them to get at it.

...except that it sounds like they're making it all pretty open. From TFA, "The code will be open source, and developers intending to build on the platform are being given access to APIs, according to a post on the official Google blog."

So you can build your own implementation, and the whole thing is going to be P2P, so Google won't necessarily have access to your data unless you're specifically using their server.

the layout shown is hideous and provides nothing but total information overload.

Well first, I don't agree that it's so awful. Second, it's pre-release and not even a public beta. Third, it's going to be open source so you can skin it or completely rewrite the interface.

Sounds good to me.