"It essentially defines the data structures of a collaborative document editor"<p>Thank you!<p>I have not been able to make sense of the press coverage trying to describe what Google Wave is. This is immensely clarifying. Google Wave is chiefly technology for building collaborative editing applications. Casting it in terms of competing against email, IM, or Facebook, is simply a category error. I suppose the technology demo labeled "Google Wave" built on the underlying tech may be partially at fault for the confusion.
No, Google Wave is the new RIPscript: <a href="http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPSCRIPT/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS...</a><p>"In 1993 Telegrafix created RIPscript or RIPscrip, which stood for "Remote Imaging Protocol". It was intended to be a vector-like graphics protocol that used ASCII files to describe lines and shapes to a client. This sort of approach (send descriptions of graphics, render them at the client side) had been done before, but a major push came with RIPscript and it followed onto the internet as a plug-in. Ultimately, the protocol did not catch on and was soon forgotten."
"In the blog posts I’ve read, Wave’s merits are analyzed solely based on the current developer UI preview. ... and not an infrastructure protocol under heavy development."<p>Great insight! I also feel the same way; that is a very important point that people often overlook. Wave has a huge grand vision that could be shown far beyond the power of current UI client.<p>Great to hear that you are a fellow gtug campout member. It was one of the best experience. Thanks to Google for providing it.
One critical question is whether Google will successfully define the Wave client/server (GWT-based) protocol in an open fashion, or at least open enough that people can implement their own.<p>Otherwise, the whole thing will be dependent on the quality of their client/server, and people will still be locked into a single implementation.<p>And, the other issue is just how extensible their data model can be, for other clients to do more than just their simplistic pidgin-HTML document rendering model. I.e., can another client/server pair use a more sophisticated document model but still have the document maintained by other implementations? (Not talking about robots or gadgets here, but a more fundamental question of document extensibility.<p>On these questions (and others) hang the whole general utility of the collaborative document editing facility.
Great Job!! I've replied to your group post at
<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/browse_thread/thread/2634a27c4839bdab?hl=en" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/browse_thread/t...</a>
Seems like a pretty sensible view, and probably fairly close to what Google is aiming for.<p>I know a number of non-technical people who have watched the whole GW presentation and they can all immediately see the potential of Google Wave to be used within their work and adapted to their workflows. It's very smart of Google to support developers first, because GW's success will probably be highly dependent on specific applications/customisations built on top of their platform.
This is potentially very useful to schools who wish to collaborate with other schools. But students need to be 'contained' within one Google Wave with a defined 'team' working on for example a citizenship project on fair trade etc, rather than be free to start new Waves on the subject of say Zak Effron or start messaging their friends... can you have an owner defined Wave ie by the teacher and partipants ie students permissioned to access only that one Wave.
I think that Google Wave will be interesting for the social place it falls into. Will it be the new Usenet, or IRC, or web forums? Will it be large and unified ("I'm on Wave, hit me up"), or fragmented ("Yeah, I switched over to the wave Matt's running. You should try it out")?<p>These are the interesting parts, I think.
Did that analogy give anyone else shivers down their spines? That isn't to say that separating mechanism from policy is a bad idea.<p>I just hope that we get the words "client" and "server" defined correctly this time around.
The title mislead me. I thought he was going to argue that Google Wave is like X-Windows. He seems to be saying Google Wave can be used as the transport layer for a display service. There does not appear to be any reason why it can't be X11 on top of Google Wave other than the insane latency requirement.<p>EDIT: He seems to be more keen on replacing X11. I think a protocol which works with X would be better.