Jared Quinn

This article is primarilly a response to the article by Anil Dash, entitled What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way.

What is Google Wave?
Google itself says “A wave is equal parts conversation and document.”. I’d personally prefer to think of it as a live document, and not psuedo-live. It is live because a Wave can be edited by multiple people, simultaniously and all changes can be dispersed to all users – it also handles changes made to documents that are out of sync with the rest of the wave. This multi-user shared editing however is not the only way a wave can be used.

However, before we get too carried away, an important point I’d like to make is that a Google Wave is not a single thing and seeing it as a single peice of technology in my opinion is entirely incorrect. Google Wave is a collection of technologies.

Google Wave is made up of some core components:

• Operational Transforms (OT) – This in my opinion is where the real magic of Google Wave happens; the reliable updating of document state to and from any revision in a coherent and guarenteed way. OT has been around for a long time in many different forms (see Wikipedia: Operational Transformation)
• Federation Protocol – This is the underlaying transport mechanism that Google Wave uses, it’s built ontop of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) – another stable and well adopted protocol which you’ll find on the back end of Jabber and Google Chat amoung other things. (See Wikipedia: XMPP)
• User Interface – Google have built a very Google-like interface for Wave, it runs in any modern browser. This isn’t the exciting bit, Google esentially popularised the AJAXy/Web2.0 interface revolution with web based applications.

I’ve intentionally left out the Robots and Gadgets bits, to me these are inconsequential, and really are “implementations” of the underlaying technology, not part of it.

Why it’s not a war between Wave and Web

The first major point I’d like to argue from the Web vs Wave article is the focus on upgrades and compatibility that part of the article has. Infrastructure or upgrades aren’t necessary to fully adopt Google Wave Technology. Anil goes as far as saying that:

“But the fundamental Wave protocols are, I fear, a bit too complex to ever be fully and correctly implemented by anyone other than Google.”

Wave technology infact builds directly ontop of protocols and technology that are already here, and useable by the vast majority of web users. Infact “Wave technology” could be embedded in websites without even being noticed by the user – this I feel is where it’s real inherent value is.

Anil says as a reason for Wave not being well adopted, that:

“XMPP is way too complicated for any normal human to deploy.”

I just do not see the need to implement XMPP anywhere to achieve the benefit of Wave. This is something that will be done for us – Google will be doing it for sure, and plenty of other companies out there will want to be delivering “Waves” (at the protocol level) at developers and users – potentially an interestingnew digital arena to compete in.

Another point Anil makes:

I literally wouldn’t even know where to start with the Wave developer documentation if I wanted to integrate it with my site or any of the little apps I like to hack on during a long weekend.

It’s still early days for Google Wave – it’s not a complete product or solution ready to deploy, it’s something that Google’s put out there for developers to take an early hold of and develop with.

The “developer” documentation is for people who want to implement Wave infrastructure, services or tools – for serious developers to look at what Google have come up with and start developing products and tools around that, that will simply plug in with existing content management systems and web technologies to bring the wave experience transparently to the user on almost any web page they happen to visit. Once these things happen and mature a little more you’ll probably find a plugin for your CMS or a library for your favourite scripting language that does the implementation, Fed protocol and OT for you, and all you need to do is point it at a chunk of content you’d like to Wavetize!

Looking forward to watching where this Wave takes us!