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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.
Make the client Windows-only again and you'll feel my wrath!
(Reply by Google: What are you going to do, quit gmail? Ouch! )
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
From my reading, they're requiring TLS on the XMPP stream, which pretty well covers encryption.
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.
My real life is still in BETA.
English is not this
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.
Google is also introducing the new service "Particle" which will be the same service with different properties.
Pride 'N Prejudice RPGs? I wanna be Mr. Collins he had his choice of babes.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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?
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.
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 ...