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.
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.
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.
It seems to be a different approach to the same problem, with Croquet using distributed synchronization of computation rather than synchronized distribution of updates.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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
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
I for one feel bad for the helpless telecoms. They have done everything in their power provide nothing but exceptional service to customers over the past 30 years, including protecting our privacy and investing in infrastructure ~/sacrasm.
Regardless of 'infringing' business models, we should be rejoicing the opportunity to compliment the current, and broken, communication model. By providing an alternative protocol with specific functionality it's not replacing current technology, simply enhancing it.
Le
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.
No, it is not necessary to run on a Google server, you can run your own server. Check out http://wave.google.com/ [google.com] for info. Wave looks awesome - seriously awesome
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
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.
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
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?
Yeah, but that didn't stop you from writing the rest of your highly negative post. Its like you knew your complaint wasn't valid, but decided to complain anyways.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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. [...] Why is Google spoiling good concepts by tying them to the browser exclusively?
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.
They just need to develop for the three major platf
I wonder how Microsoft will call it's clone of Wave... Bang? aLive? Sharepoint?
Nah, Microsoft would have several separately licensed and managed components. They'd call them something like Exchange, Live Communications Server and Sharepoint.
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.
Re:Single Google Wave Users = Meh (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Heh :D
Joking aside though, I loved the demo of the curses interface :)
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?
Parent
Re:OK, now what does it do? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave_Federation_Protocol [wikipedia.org] ?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Money? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Make no mistake, whoever is in charge of ad marketing in Google is a pure genius.
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
Re: (Score:2)
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
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I hope this doesn't catch on. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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.
Parent
Re:I hope this doesn't catch on. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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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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?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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
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:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.