Comments on: Google Wave or just a Blip?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:26:53 +0000

Ok, I’ll give it a watch. Can I just say, though, that I find video on the internet a particularly frustrating experience, in general? Sometimes its very useful. And I’m sure seeing some of the Wave features in action helps. But as a information transfer medium, sometimes 2-3 paragraphs of text is so much richer than 45 minutes of video.

That’s just a personal rant, though. Thanks for the pointers!

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:12:19 +0000

They say they will open-source most of it, and they seem committed to helping people install their own servers. Watch the whole video, and you’ll know as much as I do. The presentation I attended was more compact, but didn’t add any new information (Googlers seem to be very tight about that sort of thing).

By: jeremy

jeremy — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:27:04 +0000

No, I don’t mean whether the protocol is open. I mean whether the software is open source. Can you download it, and install it on your own server?

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:17:13 +0000

Jeremy, you are correct (at least according to the presentation)–you can implement the protocol yourself, and Google does not act as a central server. This is not (or not just) a hosted service, but rather a protocol.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:11:25 +0000

Am I correct in understanding that it’s open enough that you can run your own Wave server, and not have to send everything through Google? Or am I mistaken?

By: naysh

naysh — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:30:36 +0000

Same issue about interoperability keeps bugging me too. 3rd parties are free to implement the Wave protocol in their applications to bring about interaction which would otherwise not exist.

The question is what would compel them to do so ?

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:15:54 +0000

Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought that protocol is meant to enable different Wave instances to interoperate with one another, rather than to enable Wave instances to interoperate with non-Wave instances.

By: JoSeK

JoSeK — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:26:59 +0000

I think interoperability is well addressed at Wave with the Wave Protocol (http://www.waveprotocol.org/)

And about the access to the conversation, I think the Wave interface is only a preview of what they’ll develop over it. But most important is that being an open platform, many people will develop clients that’ll show the information in several ways. That represents a great strategy, allowing to 3rd parties to innovate over the platform, as it happened with Twitter.