Google Open Sources Wave Protocol Implementation 183
eldavojohn writes "Certainly one of the most important steps in adopting a protocol is a working open source example of it. Well, google has open sourced an implementation of the wave protocol for those of you curious about Google's new collaboration and conversation platform. It's been reviewed, skewered and called 'Anti-Web' but now's your chance to see a Java implementation of it. The article lists it as still rapidly evolving so it might not be prudent to buy into it yet. Any thumbs up or thumbs down from actual users of the new protocol?"
Oh, well, if there's a Java implementation (Score:4, Funny)
It clearly can't be anti-web.
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Yay for open sourcing (Score:2)
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What is The Wave's motto?
Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action!
Google chose a very fitting name. [thewave.tk]
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I assume you've tried signing up [google.com]? You should be able to develop something however if you want to get a peek.
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That takes a while. I'm still waiting for mine, since I thought they would actually read the proposals, instead of just slowly giving out accounts first-come-first-serve, and so wasn't part of the initial rush.
Single Google Wave Users = Meh (Score:2)
Unlike something like Google Mail, offering a single user access to the Google Wave experimental servers just doesn't make sense at all. This is a collaborative tool. The magic is in working on waves with others.
The people at Google are pretty smart. I've been following Wave progress in the news and on blogs, but so far no one has answered this question.
Re:Single Google Wave Users = Meh (Score:5, Funny)
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There a several thousand developers who have sandbox accounts so there are opportunities for shared editing, asking other people to try your test robot extensions, etc.
Also, you get 2 accounts with an invite: 'regular' and 'test'.
Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
More like: Requires graphical interface. Won't run on my hand-rolled 64-bit 2.6.31-rc4-git2 kernel. Lame.
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Heh :D
Joking aside though, I loved the demo of the curses interface :)
Interfaces??? (Score:2)
What, it requires a user interface? Screw it if it can't run on my elevator controller chip! Who needs printf anyways?!
(I can't believe I'm making C standardization (in-)jokes... I should go out more often)
Also obligatory... (Score:2)
yes, but does it run on Linux?
the announcement (Score:3, Informative)
OK, now what does it do? (Score:2, Redundant)
I realize that this is Slashdot and a certain amount of technical knowledge is assumed, but I don't necessarily keep tabs on every little thing Google says or does. So would someone care to explain, even very briefly, what the hell the Wave protocol is for? Even a few words in a sentence in the summary would have been appreciated.
Re:OK, now what does it do? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_wave#Product [wikipedia.org]
That wasn't so hard, now was it?
Re:OK, now what does it do? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave_Federation_Protocol [wikipedia.org] ?
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this [google.com]
Re:OK, now what does it do? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've read reviews of it as real time collaboration. Think of it as private e-mail, IM, and document collaboration all in one system.
Re:OK, now what does it do? (Score:4, Informative)
Many people have responded to your post with links, but I know people are really, really, really lazy. So Google Wave is kind of a nifty new communications paradigm designed to replace e-mail, IM, IRC, and other collaboration tools. The basic idea is to create communications centered around a conversation with as many participants as needed, rather than trying to take a two way communication like a letter and expand it to sort of work for more people.
If you're the only person in the conversation (or wave) online, it works like e-mail. As soon as a second person is online at the same time, it works like IM. It is sort of timestamp version controlled so you can rewind conversations and see how the conversation branched and you can embed the conversations in generic Web pages. It's extensible so you can add additional communications to it, and they've added a way to post images and host them as photo galleries.
In short it's new, but similar in ways to IM and e-mail and it's fairly cool, but watching a video makes more sense than reading a lengthy explanation.
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I was gonna say it's like mail, usenet, facebook and cvs all rolled into one.
Re:OK, now what does it do? (Score:4, Informative)
It defines a protocol that allows servers to publish documents with threaded conversations, and allow users on different servers to edit those documents and append to the threaded conversations in real-time. It also defines an API that lets developers extend the kind of media that can be placed in the documents, and make documents interactive with the user or other services. It also uses a messaging semantic based on operational transformation, that allows users to browse the complete editing history of any document or thread, and allows agents observing a document to resolve their local state by reading a document as a stream of deltas (it's more complicated than this, but I have yet to wrap my head around OTs completely).
People say it's like email because it lets you do messaging in non-real-time, and has threaded conversations, and documents and media attachments, and it's an open standard. People say it's like IM because conversations are posted to threads in real-time, keystroke-by-keystroke. People say it's like Google Docs (or other such things) because it allows collaborative editing of documents, except this lets you edit the document contemporaneous with other people, since the server protocol merges all updates to the document keystroke-by-keystroke.
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Whatever you do, don't read this
http://sites.google.com/a/waveprotocol.org/wave-protocol/draft-protocol-spec [google.com]
I tried reading it and its like the South Park episode with the Marklar, only replace Marklar with Wave as the only Noun/Verb in the language.
Its an adressible service like email or newsgroups, users have usernames @ domains and can subscribe to or send content to lists/groups.
It has a collaborative aspect, parts RSS feed/Twitter/Wiki and I think it will be easier to understand when there is more cont
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Malkovich, Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich....MALKOVICH!!!
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Reminds me of Croquet (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to be a different approach to the same problem, with Croquet using distributed synchronization of computation rather than synchronized distribution of updates.
It's too early, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that every web developer that misses this out, will pay it hard.
Experts say that true innovations are hard to detect. I would say, keep an eye on this, or you will regret it.
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Experts say that true innovations are hard to detect.
What a bizarre statement. Who are these experts? What is their area of expertise? When did they say this? Are you just trying to use vague language to give extra gravity to your statement?
I would contend that innovation is relatively easy to detect, while innovation that will make a lot of money is hard to detect.
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I've recently attended to a Soft skills workshop on Innovation. So I would say that there are experts that study innovation over the years. When I say detect I mean not just happen to be in front of an innovative idea, but to actually detect it as a game-changing, so yeas, they are rarely to be adopted.
Money? (Score:2)
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Anyone know how on earth Google expects to make money off of this thing? It looks amazing, but how do you make money off of this if it's open sourced, free, and took a ton of development time to build (and presumably support in the future)?
Obviously they plan to make money the same way they do with GMail. They'll offer a free in the cloud service to normal users and either provide ads alongside the client and/or robotically harvest the conversations to better target online ads to their users. They might even sell corporate Wave hosting services to corporations or sell servers with it pre-installed and ready to go to corporations.
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Anyone know how on earth Google expects to make money off of this thing? It looks amazing, but how do you make money off of this if it's open sourced, free, and took a ton of development time to build (and presumably support in the future)?
Well, look at DNS and SMTP and HTTP... Those are open, documented, universally available protocols. Anyone can implement them. I don't know how much anybody made simply by inventing SMTP... But plenty of people have cashed in on it since then.
Some people rent hosted mailservers... Other people sell the server software... Other folks sell support for free mailserver software... And then there's all sorts of add-on things like spam filtering and web front-ends and email clients and everything else...
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Make no mistake, whoever is in charge of ad marketing in Google is a pure genius.
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Its technology that (when released as open source) has the potential to revolutionize and commoditize collaboration, opening up a huge market for a well positioned service provider with a reputation for providing online services and a global network of data centers to provide services to small-to-medium sized businesses that don't have their own datacenters, and to enterprises that would prefer to outsource collaboration, while providin
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Personal opinion. (Score:2)
First of all, anyone who has not yet seen the video of the presentation, I recommend you to do that [google.com].
I'm usually the first guy who worries about privacy when using Google's systems and I do not buy easily into new fads. However this time I think Google is on the right track.
I can easily think of tens and tens of use cases for the waves. You can aggregate news, RSS, e-mail, IM, twitter, blogs, forums and comments all into one place and not have to worry about having to open up five different clients and find
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Wave will become popular, because it is independent of Google. Every company, every ISP and even every small group of people who might not even want their waves to leave their LAN can set up their own wave server.
I'd say Wave and Jabber are in similar situations in this regard. Both are open (even sharing the same protocol partly) and people do run their own Jabber servers, but as with Jabber there are already entrenched server vendors and service providers for communication and that's a lot of momentum to overcome. I'd like to think that major vendors like Microsoft, Apple, Sun, AOL, and Yahoo will all jump on the Wave bandwagon and expand their existing clients and services to use it interoperably with Google and
Jabber vs Wave (Score:2)
I'd say Wave and Jabber are in similar situations in this regard. Both are open (even sharing the same protocol partly) and people do run their own Jabber servers, but as with Jabber there are already entrenched server vendors and service providers for communication and that's a lot of momentum to overcome
Jabber is a nice open IM protocol. So it's interoperable, but other than that what big advantages does it have over Skype, MSN, etc? Wave OTH is a totally new concept and, if people like it, and if the entrenched players do not provide it, they will lose users pretty fast. Also you can easily implement a wave robot that basically acts as a proxy to wave for your IM of choice (so long as the IM protocol is public or has been successfully reverse engineered)
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Jabber is a nice open IM protocol. So it's interoperable, but other than that what big advantages does it have over Skype, MSN, etc?
As you mention jabber is open and interoperable which addresses the biggest problem people have with IM today. But you can make the same argument with regard to Wave. Why not just use your existing and already in use e-mail, IM, and photo services in conjunction? I think Wave does bring some compelling features to the table, but I don't think compelling features are enough in our current walled garden climate.
...if people like it, and if the entrenched players do not provide it, they will lose users pretty fast.
How? If it isn't not pre-installed and easy to use from the default setup on people's computers an
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Facebook/myspace/twitter/etc are not pre-installed, and they seem to be doing ok for themselves.
I hate this move-the-client-into-the-browser as much as the next person, but part of the reason that Wave could work (for normal everyday user-types) is that it works in webbrowsers.
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"Jabber is a nice open IM protocol. So it's interoperable, but other than that what big advantages does it have over Skype, MSN, etc? "
It is open, documented, decentralised, future ready, extensible. Ask the companies and people shaping the future of internet (Internet2) why they have chosen it as the default IM protocol to rely on.
Google Wave could be something really nice but Google really have to clean up their "we want to own all your data", "you use our software freely but here are the terms which are
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Google Wave could be something really nice but Google really have to clean up their "we want to own all your data", "you use our software freely but here are the terms which are privacy breaking" image which has really reached beyond "high tech tinfoil hat" community to general public.
Umm, Google open sourced the protocol and client. What more do you want? You will soon be able to run Google Wave on your own server with your own client and never touch anything Google runs. I don't see the problem.
I didn't like their "we sudo software update every 2 hours or don't install google earth" attitude. Oh really? I replied " Get the hell out of my machine." with rm -rf
Why don't you run Google Earth for you amusement but limit it so it can't sudo update, ala ACLs, sandboxing , SELinux, VM, etc? It seems like OS's should make this easier, but it is doable now. Aren't OS's supposed to be giving users control over what applications running on top of them are doin
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"Jabber is a nice open IM protocol. So it's interoperable, but other than that what big advantages does it have over Skype, MSN, etc? "
It is open, documented, decentralised, future ready, extensible. Ask the companies and people shaping the future of internet (Internet2) why they have chosen it as the default IM protocol to rely on.
I believe the GP's point was that freedom does not provide that many pros for the users who might not feel compelled to swich based on that alone. Wave has it easy here, it doesn't have competition.
OT? (Score:2)
At the risk of sounding off-topic, that "Operational Transform (OT)" in the protocol is too close to "Operating Thetan (OT)" for my comfort.
My feelings on Wave (Score:2, Insightful)
Wave is surely an interesting concept and application, but if there's any web app that just makes you want to scream for a native implementation, it's Wave. There's no way even the fastest web browser running on a Quad core or Octo core with 8 gigs of RAM will leave you satisfied with the experience. Just as I typed that, my browser froze in Slashdot.2.0 for like five seconds.
Why is Google spoiling good concepts by tying them to the browser exclusively? They just need to develop for the three major platform
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Wave is surely an interesting concept and application, but if there's any web app that just makes you want to scream for a native implementation, it's Wave.
I think focusing on making one cross platform Web application that can be embedded into Web pages is probably the most effective use of their resources. No one is going to bother downloading a client unless there is some significant use of Wave first or it is being deployed in a corporate/large organization setting. Google needs to get it out there and a Web app makes a lot of sense as a first attempt.
Why is Google spoiling good concepts by tying them to the browser exclusively? They just need to develop for the three major platforms, Windows, Linux and OS X.
Again, I disagree. For geeks, maybe this would make sense if Google had the resources to accomplish it at t
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I definitely agree with you. A rich client, maybe implemented with C++ and Qt4, would be very useful. The demo video actually shows a native command-line client for Wave. If that's possible, you should be able to develop any kind of interface. If Google doesn't release a thick client, maybe that's a business opportunity right at your doorstep.
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I've used Wave on a semi-decent iMac, and it works just fine, even in beta without them ramping up on their end yet. So I'm not sure why you think the way you do about its speed.
But Google is not tying this concept to the browser at all. It's completely open and you can absolutely implement a wave client natively if you want, and people will do that.
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Why is Google spoiling good concepts by tying them to the browser exclusively? They just need to develop for the three major platforms, Windows, Linux and OS X.
Perhaps the team doesn't want to have to constantly maintain 3 seperate codebases for the same app whenever an OS goes thru a major revision.
Or perhaps because they want users to use it "right now" instead of having them go thru the install process considering almost every machine has a browser on it.
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I tend to agree--I don't particularly care to have my email/IM/collaboration software all tied up into my browser (particularly in FF or IE). I want something that does one thing and does it well. But if the protocol is open, as far as I can tell (note: IANAD(eveloper)) there's nothing stopping anybody from building a nice lean, writing-focused Wave client.
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Why develop for three platforms and let geeks port that to many when you can develop as open source for one platform (DHTML) and actively encourage the geeks to port that to 3, and then to many?
Hell, if I worked at Google the last thing I would want would be to get involved in GNOME/KDE turf wars, piss off apple fanbois if it doesn't look precisely like a macintosh app or really develop anything for the Windows desktop. Like, ever. So instead, Google puts it on the Web where everyone can get at it from any
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I received a Google Wave sandbox account 8 days ago and I have been kicking the tires mostly in developing robot extensions. However, to answer your concerns about being browser based: the Wave team used GWT and the client side user interface is very nice. If you have not done so, watch the demo video.
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It is open source, so it can be implemented in any myriad ways, not just in a browser.
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Its a published protocol built on top of XMPP, with a defined data model; nothing is stopping people from building native apps that produce and/or consume wave updates. Certainly, Google is doing nothing to prevent this.
been writing Wave robots - may not install this (Score:2)
I received a Wave sandbox invitation 8 days ago and since then I have been spending a lot of time writing test robot extensions, installing them on Java AppEngine, and then inviting my test robots to participate in new waves I create.
Very cool. Very fun. Huge time sink. You know how it goes :-)
I would like a completely local development setup, but I don't know if it is worth the effort right now. Installing new versions of a robot on AppEngine is very quick, as is creating a new Wave in the sandbox - about
Anti-web? (Score:2)
I hope anti-web is a compliment -- this trend for replacing the OS with a comparatively limited browser, drawing commands with HTML widget hacks*, IP with XML over HTTP over TCP over IP**, local file storage with cookies and clouds***, etc, is really quite depressing...
* woo, html canvas! It's just like a native canvas, but 1/10th the speed, and you can only use javascript, and only in some browsers! yaaaaay!
** woo, web sockets! Just like native sockets, except crippled, and you can only use javascript,
More comments on writing robot extensions (Score:2)
As an end user, you can invite other *humans* to participate in Waves that you create. Waves can contain text and multimedia.
When I write a test robot, I install it on AppEngine (I use the Java version, but the robot support libraries are also available in Python). I can then create a new wave and invite my robot, just as I would invite a human participant.
My test robots watch for new invites or changes to the text in waves, perform some processing on that text, and then add their own 'blips' to the end of
Another summary that isn't (Score:2)
I tried installing wave protocol + OpenFire (Score:2)
The installation was easy (on OS X) but it does not do much. You can run OpenFire, install Google's open source wave protocol project, and run server + client scripts. The client script lets you create new waves and add other participant IDs.
However, when I try adding my robot that is running on AppEngine as a participant, I get an error on my local server. It looks like I need to re-install everything on a public server so my app on AppEngine can communicate back -- but, I am not sure what the problem is.
H
Leaves me wanting more (Score:2)
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First of all, it's been done already. Obviously google couldn't use the standards already in place.
It hasn't and Google does. Wave is based on XMPP, but extended to do stuff that hasn't been done before.
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As indicated in the comment at the top of that file [google.com], that code was generated by the Protocol Buffers [googlecode.com] compiler, protoc. You aren't supposed to edit that -- edit the .proto file [google.com] instead and regenerate. I'm not really sure why they checked the generated code into VCS -- normally only the .proto would be checked in and protoc would be invoked at build time.
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Re:I hope this doesn't catch on. (Score:5, Informative)
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Waves are exactly as local as email is. WFP sits atop XMPP (the protocol that runs Jabber). Waves do not reside "out there"; they reside on your XMPP server. I would expect any organization using Waves to maintain its own XMPP server or 3 (but I have seen stranger things).
WFP isn't perfect, but if you're going to complain about it not residing on your local machine, you'd better be prepared to make exactly the same complaints about email. Personally I think email has proven itself to be a plausible communic
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Yes. When you first open a wavelet from the server, the server provides you the complete serialized state of the wavelet (future updates are sent as deltas, not full states, but applying a delta to an existing state fully specifies the new state); so at any time the client will have a complete state of the wavelet (including all documents that are part of the wavelet) at some point in the past to reference
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I believe the updates are included synchronously. Ideally, of course, you'd be working with it online, but offline your deltas would probably merge alongside the other users' deltas rather than replacing it. You would have the two edits side-by-side with namestamps and datestamps.
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Sure, but probably not on a web-based client. Don't you think there might be a desktop client developed by someone someday?
Re:I hope this doesn't catch on. (Score:5, Informative)
Err, try again. The whole point of wave is that google are open sourcing the spec, and plan to release an open source *server* reference implementation.
The concept of wave servers appears to be similar to that of smtp email. Companies can run their own internal servers, and configure links to the outside world as needed.
Re:I hope this doesn't catch on. (Score:4, Interesting)
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By yet again re-enforcing their brand image as being synonymous with the web.
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I think the whole idea of wave is AWESOME. My one question is ... how is Google going to make money off of it???
I doubt if Google will make much money off of the wave protocol or message format... Much like SMTP, it'll just kind of be out there for other people to implement.
I'm sure they'll offer a free (ad supported) Wave service however, much like they've got Gmail now... And they'll probably offer a paid subscription to business users, like with Google Apps right now...
Of course, they're spearheading the whole thing... So they could probably get an actual wave server (hardware/software/whatever) to market long
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how is Google going to make money off of it???
Keep an eye on the various "Robots" and "Extensions" they'll be offering as services.
Also, destroying the competitive advantage of Exchange and Lotus Notes will have certain long-term strategic benefits.
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By default, no more advanced than using a wiki-page to schedule a meeting. But it'd be trivial to write a robot to match schedules, allocate resources, pop up reminders, etc.
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And Sharepoint too.
Google's success (for it's applications at least) lies in reducing peoples dependence on non web applications. The more people are happy to use web apps for their everyday computing needs, the more Google stands to benefit as they have the scope to dominate the market for webapps.
Anything that provides alternatives or improvements over existing apps helps their overall goa
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how is Google going to make money off of it???
They will be the only ones who can send SPAM :)
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I hope you do realize that all your complaints apply to e-mail as well. In the case of IMAP/Exchange that even goes for the persistence.
And they also apply to wiki, to IM, etc.
The fact that you can run your own server for your company/organization was actually demoed during the initial Google announcement.
The protocol is open, the source is open.
So why the hostile reaction towards Wave? Where did the knee-jerk come from?
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It's not currently a service, so you're point still isn't valid. Yes, they have ONE server up. It's a BETA. An INVITE ONLY beta. Where did you get the idea that someone is putting mission critical things there? Now that this reference implementation is out you can even have your own server running NOW, before Google's even hinted at running their own service.
Troll harder please.
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Well, it's getting a bit off-topic, but is hosting anything in the cloud really that insane?
Is your average internal mail or file server better with respect to uptime than Google or Amazon?
Or is your Internet and backup-Internet connection that bad? Would your company survive is it didn't receive any e-mail for a few days? What would the damage be?
Is your local mail server as redundant as the Google gmail servers?
I think these are all valid questions to ask and I think that for a *lot* of companies with a
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FWIW I was actually genuinely interested.
I've been using Android with gmail, maps, calendar and all in the cloud for a month now and I absolutely love it.
It's so much easier and faster to NOT have to download any mail and just keep it on the server.
It's so much more fun to be able to see my calendar on-line wherever I go, edit phone contacts on-line, etc.
I had a different perception of that experience earlier on and it changed completely with the HTC Magic & Android. Hence my request for feedback on th
Re:I hope this doesn't catch on. (Score:4, Informative)
just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere, that you can *probably* get access to if:
-the service is up and functioning properly
-you have the required hardware and software
-there are no connection issues between you and the server
You can set up your own wave server, just as you can with e-mail.
if your internet goes down, suddenly you've lost access to even internal communication at your office, as well as all archives and logs of past communication. Without local storage, you cannot do efficient search and retrieval of your own information.
Companies can set up their own wave servers and communications between members of the same server will never leave the network.
there are serious privacy issues as well, no doubt google will be surfin the "waves" looking for terms to market to you, but perhaps it is more shady than that even. google has agreed to censorship in foreign markets over the years, does it really make sense to let them hold onto your data in this way?
Yeah, they can - on their own server which will probably become the most popular one but you can use alternate servers to those of Google.
then again.. it's cool technology, and now that it's being open sourced, it means feasibly you can run your own "waveserver" and mitigate the issues above somewhat.
Not somewhat but pretty much equally to e-mail.
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just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere, that you can *probably* get access to...
So far the only implementation is a Web app. Is there any reason you can't store waves locally using a desktop client when someone writes one?
here are serious privacy issues as well, no doubt google will be surfin the "waves" looking for terms to market to you, but perhaps it is more shady than that even.
Similarly, you shouldn't use e-mail or Jabber for conversation because Google's free implementations are harvested for marketing data?
then again.. it's cool technology, and now that it's being open sourced, it means feasibly you can run your own "waveserver" and mitigate the issues above somewhat.
Even before they open sourced their implementation they had open, published protocols so others can write interoperable implementations. Having an open source reference implementation is obviously a boon to this process though. I see th
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a neat idea, for collaborative brainstorming or throwaway conversations perhaps, but i hope that nobody is planning on using this for any communication that is mission critical, in it's current form anyway.
Aside from some folks at Google and a few folks who got beta invites, nobody is using it in its current form. It is beta (alpha?) software in its truest form.
just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere, that you can *probably* get access to if:
-the service is up and functioning properly
-you have the required hardware and software
-there are no connection issues between you and the server
The requirements appear to be bandwidth and a web browser. Nothing more. And with Google Gears, you might not even need bandwidth.
if your internet goes down, suddenly you've lost access to even internal communication at your office, as well as all archives and logs of past communication. Without local storage, you cannot do efficient search and retrieval of your own information.
I'm not certain that anyone will be getting rid of local storage... It is entirely possible that you'll have some kind of offline cache of waves - much like what is done with IMAP. And I'm not certain why you think on-l
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just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere, that you can *probably* get access to...
What you're saying makes as much sense as saying you can't get to your mail if you're using IMAP, because IMAP mail is *out there* somewhere.
You clearly have not read any of the technical information about Wave.
Waves are comprised of "Wavelets," the pieces that make up a wave. You could absolutely write a client application that downloaded and cached everything locally, and m
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Since both the spec and the reference server implementation are open source, its quite possible for "waves" to reside on a local network under your control (and the same is true, though less relevant to the present thread, for "clouds", for instance Ubun
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They are more or less going for a full reboot of email, and are bringing the whole world along for the ride. They fully intend to just take the GMail-type niche (they have the coolest interface, and everyone uses them anyway), along with credit for the protocol. You can use Microsoft Interchange from Office 2020 and some sort of XMPP-Wave server to do it.
sure you can (Score:2, Insightful)
but what good would that do you, if it's an ever changing document, like a conversation between multiple people?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm watching the demo now. Obviously it can't stop spam when it's used as regular e-mail. However, it appears that once the wave is established, conversation can be limited to whoever you invite. Also Bob and Alice may know my e-mail address, but they don't know that I'm having a conversation with Cathy, or where I'm having it. There's probably some potential there too. It seems like it would be difficult to spam a conversation which has a lifetime of perhaps a few days.
Re: (Score:2)
From what I gather from their wave-protocol-verification [waveprotocol.org] whitepaper, it seems that wave has built-in callback verification [wikipedia.org].
Alot of the spam we see today in email comes from forged sender addresses. Email wasn't originally designed to verify sender addresses and alot of hacks have been developed to try to fix that but none of them are perfect (as you can see from the wikipedia article). Google Wave should do bet
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As an end user, you invite "people" to participate in each Wave that you create. New "blips" added to a Wave can have restricted access rights. If you only invite/work with people you know, then hopefully no problems.
It may be a problem that spammers can waste your time inviting you to waves that you are not interested in - I am not sure how this will be handled. I am interested in Wave as a development platform, and I would hope that small work groups can voluntarily work in peace. When I get time, I would
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah, Microsoft would have several separately licensed and managed components. They'd call them something like Exchange, Live Communications Server and Sharepoint.