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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.
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! )
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.
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.
From my reading, they're requiring TLS on the XMPP stream, which pretty well covers encryption.
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...
I can not believe this was tagged Firefly so quickly. I am truly among my peers here on Slashdot.
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.
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.
countdown to this being used for warez and porn ... 3 ... 2 ... 1
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.
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.
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.
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
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!
yeah, with HTML5, encryption is easy. You just surround any content you want encrypted with <secure>credit card number goes here</secure> and the magic of HTML does the rest!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Seriously mods this was sarcastic, not informative ...
Traffic Cop: Mr Heisenberg, do you have any idea how fast you were driving?
Heisenberg: No, but I know exactly where I am
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
People are not at their best when they have to be creative, inventive, or thoughtful in real-time with an audience.
I'd be interested for you to elaborate on why you believe this. There's plenty of counter-evidence to this point in that the following practices are time-tested ways of creative thinking:
- comedy writers bouncing ideas off each other to start penning a script or sketch
- group brainstorming for new names of products and advertising ideas
- new product ideation amongst engineers
I'm sure everyone is different, and some prefer quiet solitude to be creative, but it seems the exception rather than the rule in most organizations. I personally find that people tend to be much more cautious and defensive when they have time to craft a well thought out idea, as opposed to blurting out a potentially stupid/creative idea.