Google Wave as infrastructure

Google Wave as infrastructure: "All of the things in the Wave demo are possible without Wave. The interesting thing about Wave is not so much the application, but the infrastructure, the protocol and the underlying concepts. Many limited collaboration apps have offered various subsets of the Wave functionality, for example, and the superficial functionality can be built using existing technology, without fancy new protocols and clients etc.

But that's missing the point. Wave is interesting because the infrastructure makes it extremely open-ended.

A lot of people have been comparing Wave to e-mail. That's missing the point too. Wave has the potential to be as important as the Web. I'm serious. Wave is taking the web and making it interactive, embeddable, recordable, and shareable on a whole different level than what we are used to. And like most great 'revolutionary' ideas it doesn't actually add all that much new"

Google Wave Preview

Google Wave PreviewThis presentation is an hour and 20 minutes but an interesting view into collaborative systems. Google are positioning this as the future of email while merging with tools like Google Docs. A chain of emails is a conversation, which in Wave is a type of document, somewhat like a Wiki or a bulletin board. In essence it is a server hosted document tree collaboratively edited. Changes are made real-time like Google Talk (pushed through via Jabber-like XMPP)

Draft Protocol Spec ‎(Google Wave Federation Protocol)‎

Draft Protocol Spec ‎(Google Wave Federation Protocol)‎: 

Google Wave is built on top of XMPP which is the core protocol of the Jabber Instant Messaging.

"Waves are a new medium for communication that could be described as a new form of multi-user document. Conceptually, waves do not exist themselves, instead being made up of a set of one or more wavelets which in turn contain one or more documents. A wave is visualised to participants primarily through display of its root conversation wavelet, which is discovered through convention (wavelet of ID '~conversation/root'). Users become notified of wavelets by being added as participants, ala being invited to edit and participate in a multi-user document. It is also worth noting that wavelets have create-on-use semantics, and as such, users must create a new wave by adding themselves to its (currently non-existant) root wavelet."

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.

Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.