A Curmudgeonly Look At Google Wave

rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."

Comments

Bandwidth and Hosting

[Marc_Hawke]

The concerns I noticed were more technical than the ones he looked at.

Hosting... Every email/every conversation will need to be stored on some central server, complete with any images and change history. Switching to a central location seems like a step backwards from the distributed system we have already with email.

Bandwidth. Every change, send character by character to whoever happens to have it open. That's a lot of 'real-time' bandwidth for this central location. Both of these would work great in a corporate level with a WAVE server running on the LAN, but when it goes global, those servers will be smokin'

Especially with the concept of wave enabled blogs. If you blog hits DIGG, then the wave server will be sending out your edits to thousands of people simultaneously. I wonder what the datapath is. I'm sure Google/Blogspot has a lot of bandwidth, but when you combine all IM, EMAIL, BLOG traffic along the same pipes to a central location....

I just wonder about the scalability of the hosting solution.

They did say that organizations can start their own WAVE server. Sounds like it works much the same way the Jabber (XMPP?) protocol works. But still, if this catches on, I see a future of new congestion problems.

On the flip side...I was very impressed by the demo...and if this catches on in a big way (and works) it could be a serious redefining of communication on the web.