The announcement and demo of Wave, Google's real-time communication and collaboration platform, at the IO conference was met with a standing ovation. Representing the federation, aggregation and mashup of communications protocols and paradigms, Wave illustrated the future of web apps and interoperability.
Tim O’Reilly wrote the following walk-though of Google Wave, a good way to familiarise onself with it and understand its initial value proposition: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-wave-what-might-email-l.html. The creators, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, asked themselves, "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today", a very crisp and concrete way to think of a broad problem.
Yet what is more remarkable is how Google itself has recognised that real-time communication and collaboration extends far beyond the email paradigm. In providing a platform & protocol based on hosted XML documents (“waves”), a focus on massive concurrency and low-latency updates on top of a decentralized XMPP architecture, they have really upped the game for dynamic, real-time data on the internet. In choosing XMPP as the foundation for this decentralized, interoperable environment, they’ve accepted what the Web 2.0 community has understood regarding how the potential of the Web can only be realised with a balanced compute paradigm. In taking federation, aggregation and mashups to the next level, they’ve made it clear that email is not a suitable backbone for interoperability, communication and collaboration – it is a remarkable medium, yet suitable only for certain modes. XMPP is far more suitable interoperability layer, allowing Google’s Wave federation protocol to provide a richer level of interoperability by including additional auto discovery of IP addresses and ports using SRV records and TLS authentication and encryption of connections.
This approach heralds yet another challenge to Microsoft and traditional approaches to both the back office and the private Cloud. For the back office, message based data management will be hard pressed to approach the level of integration and interoperability of Google Wave. This itself enables private Clouds which can more easily integrate and interoperate with one another. In a sense, rather than Google Wave representing “what email might have looked like had it been invented today”, it represents the full potential of the mashup – policy-based dynamic composition of applications on the web. Whilst Microsoft is enabling Office in the Cloud (MSOnline), Google is enabling anyone to assemble their own custom back office in the Cloud out of any SaaS that are available. I see this moving the needle on truly dynamically-composed applications and balanced compute - and as a very crisp and concrete response to "why can't we just do this with email"?
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