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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.
The first "wave" created? "Hello world!"
Come on, you can do better then 90% of the Tech Journalists
They always release their software for Windows first. Will this be the same? I wonder...
for PNP RPGs!!! I'm going to write a dice throwing app. God, I'm a nerd. :-\
Make the client Windows-only again and you'll feel my wrath!
(Reply by Google: What are you going to do, quit gmail? Ouch! )
Speaking personally, I think "they" (Google) will always own the word in their minds, in the sense that "they" will continue to use it with a negative connotation attached. No amount of cultural shift will affect the meaning that "they" will personally ascribe to it. What will change, I believe, is mass-culture's perception of the word. The negativity will be sucked out of it by the tides of the young and the tolerant. People like yourself will voice yourselves less cautiously, and will be listened to more openly. But it isn't going to be easy, and it will often come at a mental/emotional/physical cost. People's notions of self and identity are wrapped up in words like 'atheist' and 'believer,' and many of those people will continue to be threatened by a destabilization in what they consider to be 'family values.' Or, on the other side, will continue to feel frustrated and fenced in by an intolerant larger culture - all as we make slow but visible strides toward a more socially accepting, yet individually hyper-critical, society. In other words: Business as usual.
(Just my two cents)
This makes a lot of sense for those of us that read the news for the comments. I'm looking at you /.ers
(ps i love reading comments too!)
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
Somehow I can't shake the feeling that this is a similar product as 'Groove' from a few years back...
Maybe increasing your medication would help?
Barely out of beta, and now it's obsolete.
I get the feeling this could blur quite a few distinctions regarding protocol-based traffic monitoring (shaping, legal persecution, etc.). What if some dastardly person occasionally put a video stream or audio stream into the workspace, for instance...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It's like email and twitter and instant messaging and facebook all in one.
Disgusting.
So, they use SIP to chat and handle voice. There's a protocol for presentation that's rolled into some SIP servers. You guys have no idea how powerful the SIP standard is. There isn't a client that handles it all yet.
Besides the very un-special nature of the application, I'd be interested to see if the Telcos will litigate Google on their gigantic pool of obvious patents. Either that or Google's paying them a 'vig' already.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Oi Google, Google, give us a Wave Give us a Waaaaave Google, Google give us a Wave Give us a Waaaaave Rraaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!
i cant wait for this app... its so hard for people on tight budgets to collaborate on projects due to the high software costs... sure one can argue that there are many free alternatives out there but there really isn't anyone that has it quite right yet. One on one collaborations are okay but it is still quite impossible to have a decent meeting on line if you have three people or more, for free...
It doesn't appear that there's any "Voice" in it inherently... it's just a method for retrieving and modifying XML documents in a shared setting. I wouldn't think that putting Voice data in there would be very efficient.
I can not believe this was tagged Firefly so quickly. I am truly among my peers here on Slashdot.
Note that this app uses (or going to use) HTML 5. Not sure if it already contains a tag for encryption.
As long as it's not Dot-Communism.
It's this I find most interesting:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
This reminds me of a PhD thesis I read about a few years back. Adam Fass' Messyboard
MessyBoard is a networked bulletin board that allows people to share notes, pictures, files and other content. Everyone who looks at a MessyBoard sees exactly the same thing, and all users see changes in real time. It runs as a Java applet inside your web browser, so no software installation is necessary. Text and images from other applications can easily be posted on MessyBoard using drag-and-drop and cut-and-paste. Each board has a URL that is easy to remember, so you can access it from any computer on the Internet.
MessyBoard stores a complete history of all activity, allowing users to go back in time and recover old content simply by clicking on a slider bar.
Coincidentally, Fass now works for Google in WA state.
Google is also introducing the new service "Particle" which will be the same service with different properties.
This thing is a complete rip off of photophlow
This could be a cool tool for playing RPGs (of the pen and paper variant) online.
Use the chat or Skype for talking, and the Wave functions for posting maps and stuff, and clients for rolling dice and such.
Just paint his roof white.
On a personal level, we just planned a large camping trip for 19 people on Memorial Day Weekend through email, and it would have been a lot easier had we been able to conveniently embed maps and such into the conversation, and had it flow a little more real time.
On a business level, we have employees on two coasts and this might be a useful tool. Though how much of this is really P2P and how much of the data resides in the cloud? The encryption issue stated by a poster above is also a big one, and I would want all business related traffic encrypted.
Good stuff though, can't wait to play with it.
countdown to this being used for warez and porn ... 3 ... 2 ... 1
Great, nothing like a good wave to help get some height. Should make it considerably easier to jump the shark with.
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.
Ahh, I see you slipped a cute physics joke through one of the slits.
Well, given that it's all XMPP-based, and XMPP has standardized methods to negotiate an out-of-band video/voice session, this could dovetail quite naturally.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
My inescapable train of thought while reading the summary:
Google Wave Federation.
Goole Wave?
Federation?
Genesis Wave.
KAAAAAHHHHHHN!!!!!
TLS sounds about right.
The protocol also provides a verification protocol (see http://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.
What about PFS and deniable encryption so things can't be used against you in the future?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy
If this could kill Microsoft One Note that would be so nice. :)
I'm gad to see that Garry Winston at NURV has finally launched Synapse!
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?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
http://www.basecamphq.com/
Which is a good thing, because my priorities have moved on anyway.
All I ever wanted the never really started TransForum 2.0 for was a tool for communication and collaboration about other, potentially media-rich, projects.
Now a decade on from when TransForum 0.99 was momentarily state-of-the-art, I have a dozen projects ready to try surfing this next Southern Ocean Wave ... as always too much choice.
Now if only Google will finally complete what has long been their obvious mission and provide a guaranteed permanent URI for everything ever worth citing.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
...if the Telcos will litigate Google
Sadly, you won't be able to find said Telcos on the Internet... :-/
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Alright, I'm painting. But, WTF did he SAY?!?
Isn't this the software they were developing in the film Anti-Trust? I think it was called Synapts.
This seems like Google is pushing towards what would be a wiki-esqe realtime concurrent collaboration content management system rolled into a unified communications framework, right? It's versioning your communications when dealing with semi-static content, so there's the whole wiki/CMS/Google Docs play there, along with the usual train of voice/chat/email communications (googletalk does the chat and voice, gmail does the email and can show chat histories, now only need autotranscription of voice chats for searching communications).
As some people have been moaning over google needing to get into realtime search ala twitter, a deep realtime CMS/UFC hybrid would give a lot of insight regarding information relationships and the user themselves, provided someone (Google) controls the platform end-to-end. This would be taking things like Cerego/smart.fm's user memory modeling to its logical end, trying to have a rough software analog of a user's mind/semantic space.
Asteroza
might be angry
http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec#intro-overview
Google Wave is based off of XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber). The protocol is fairly useful as a distributed message bus, but this is the first high profile use of it I've heard of.
So how does "wave" compare to Croquet?
Innara, Innara, wherefore art thou?
Now, if only I can get the Calahan, full bore, with custom sites named "Vera" to go with wave...
I thought you had to write robots.txt on your roof in foot high letters.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
Do you know what a "vig" is?
Am I the only person who thought about Netscape 4's whiteboard and wondered why this technology is still 10 years behind?
At this rate my D&D campaign will never end.
I'm sorry, but if your technology takes almost 1.5 hours to describe you'll have lost most of the world.
For instance:
Phone: punch in number, talk to friend, etc.
Car: big fat rectangle stop, long skinny one, go, D = drive, R = Reverse, P = Park, turn the wheel in the direction you want to go.
Computers: Click or double click on browser icon, go to google.com, in the search field type "Free Porn", click I'm feeling lucky.
Camera: point the camera at what you want a picture of, click the button, see how shitty the picture is and try again.
etc.
+10 for nerd content though