Google's "Wave" Blurs Chat, Email, Collaboration Software 170
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.
Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:first (Score:4, Insightful)
Would be great if Google had added encryption into the protocol by default, it would make it so much better. Its a nice step to P2P the chat network, but its just stupid to send all the conversation unencrypted specifically in corporate situations.
Groove ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ugh (Score:3, Insightful)
quite needed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Except maybe it will be what something like Twitter, Facebook, and IM should have been from the beginning. For one thing, it sounds like it will be open and decentralized, meaning that I can set up my own Wave server, and you can set up your own Wave server, and our users can talk without any problems.
You can already do that with IM so long as we're all using Jabber, but otherwise it can get a little problematic. But I can't set up my own private facebook or twitter server, and even if I do, there's not support for my server to let people befriend and network with people on the real Facebook and Twitter.
To me, that's always been the #1 problem with social networking sites on the Internet. You can't set up your own, but instead your left to make a new account on whatever site is cool this week. Like what if instead of being able to set up my own webpage, I had to set up a webpage on whatever hosting company was trendy, and then rewrite it based on that host's protocols?
Serious threat to Facebook, Twitter, et al (Score:5, Insightful)
The decentralised nature of this system will directly threaten Facebook, Twitter et al.
The DNS system works, and scales, because everyone publishing information to the DNS is responsible for the upkeep of the nodes that publish their own records.
Facebook and Twitter, however, have scaling and financial problems. Facebook, so far as I am aware, continues to make a substantial annual loss despite its enormous success, and I have yet to hear that Twitter has managed to turn a profit.
More importantly, the privacy of everyone publishing much of their personal, private correspondence using a small number of centralized agencies is directly threatened -- and it could get particularly messy if, in a few years time, $SOCIALNETWORK fails to become profitable, goes into receivership, and the vast databases of private information are identified by the administrators as the organisation's most valuable asset.
In contrast, a Wave infrastructure, like DNS, will distribute the upkeep and storage of private information to many (hopefully) locally trustworthy systems. Because of social engineering / hacking attacks, leakage of private information can and will still occur, but the impact should hopefully be minimized if the Wave protocol and its implementations have been suitably well engineered.
This is going to be interesting.
Re:Groove ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that real-time collaboration is a flawed concept in most contexts. People are not at their best when they have to be creative, inventive, or thoughtful in real-time with an audience. Nor do people do their best analysis when they're sitting around a (virtual) whiteboard.
Asynchronous collaboration tools are always going to be more important than synchronous ones; synchronous is better for broadcast and one-to-many communication.
Please kill "One Note" (Score:4, Insightful)
If this could kill Microsoft One Note that would be so nice. :)
Cool. (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm reading this right, it looks like patent MAD. Basically, Google is saying, "If you sue anyone for patent infringement about this spec, you give us the right to sue you. If you don't sue anyone, we're cool."
The implicit threat is, of course, that Google will own as many patents regarding this spec as anybody, but as long as nobody exercises them, it doesn't matter -- they're still allowed, for this spec.
Which is both very cool, and raises some interesting questions -- like, what if I implement the spec as part of a much larger app, and someone sues me for infringement of a different part of the app? Or, what if I want to create a modified version of the spec, or create a wholly unrelated application that infringes on patents related to this spec -- do I open myself up to lawsuits then?
Re:Public warning (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you did fix it.
Google tracks you online.
Google knows what you watch, what you read, what medical conditions you search on, reads the emails you send to your mom, knows where you live and what color frisbee is stuck on your roof, and soon will track every phone call you make from the gphone.
Replace "google" with "the feds" and I bet we'd all... oh, no, nevermind, I just remembered, we all trust big corporations...
Re:Muddying the waters... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think I must be getting old, but I'm having difficulty seeing a whole lot of functional difference between this and Facebook. I can understand why Google might want to claw back some advertising revenue, but that's about all I can see here.
Re:Public warning (Score:2, Insightful)
Google tracks you online.
Oh yes, long live Microsoft sponsored FUD.
Noone forces you to use Google, if they know what porn you surf for, it's your own damn fault.