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Google Wave Backstage
As Google Wave is about to be released to 100,000 beta testers tomorrow, reader snitch writes in with a link to an in-depth interview with Dhanji Prasanna, whose title is Core Engineer. It covers some of the technologies, tools, and best practices used in building Wave. "InfoQ: Would you like to give us a short technical outline of what happens to a message (blip) from the moment a user types it in the web client, until becomes available to every one else that is participating in that wave — humans or robots? ... Dhanji: Sure, a message written in the client is transformed into a series of operations that are sent to the server in real time. After authenticating and finding the appropriate user session, the ops are routed to the hosted conversation. Here these ops are transformed and applied against other incoming op streams from other users. The hosted conversation then broadcasts the valid set of changes back to other users, and to any listening robots. This includes special robots like the ones that handle spell checking, and one that handles livesearch (seen in the center search-panel), as well as explicit robotic participants that people have developed. Robotic participants write their changes in response to a user's and these are similarly converted into ops, applied and re-broadcast."
I have to say that I am excited about the prospects of a chat/im/document/wiki/social network collaboration system all rolled into one, but I am very skeptical if they will be able to pull it off the way they have been touting it.
For starters, most people are very well ingrained into their way of using the particular applications that accomplish the things Wave does (all independent of each other), so I think a massive component to the success of Wave will be how good the integration tools will be. Will we be able to import contacts from Exchange straight into Wave? Will we be able to use waves in email services other than wave? IE: Could a wave user interact with a wave with someone who is using MS Exchange the same way as they interact with someone who is using Wave also?
That said, I think Wave could seriously revolutionize the standard of email communication, and I really hope for all our sake they are able to pull it off.
nah, none of these things
google wave is going to be the backbone of a thousand homebrew MMORPGs, probably nethack interface style at first, but i don't see why eventually it couldn't look like WoW
heh, thanks google, for giving us our own battle.net to play with in the style of an easy programming interface
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it