Friday 12 June 2009

Google Wave: Killer App

I read an article a few days ago. It said: blah blah Google Wave blah ...

'What is Google Wave' I thought.
I watched this video and noted my thoughts which I edited later:
Different.
OK, nice.
Hmmm. Slick email. Bit scary (the idea of having the message on a server)

OK. I see, it is email and instant messaging (IM).
No wait. It is email, IM and blogging.... and blog feedback as well...

Hang on, it is now a document editor... but others can edit at the same time... and they can discuss points in the document... and its got version control...

Wow! a context spell checker too.
OK, you can publish docs and update them later.

With some sort of meeting acceptance thingy.
And it has multi-party games.

Spreadsheets and other content in the future.

I'm not surprised now when they add maps and video.

Why forms?
Nice, it can link to other social networking services.

Where are the ads?

I wonder what back-end XML database server they are using?

Stunning! Dynamic translation! They just got the whole world interested.
Ray Ozzie from Microsoft even had some things to say (which I re-state):

Ray starts out by praising 'those' that took it on.. it's nice. I don't think Ray used the Google word at all.

He thinks it is anti-web: that complexity is the enemy of the web. If something is complex - many roles, interconnections - then you need Open Source to have many instance since no one will be able to do an independent implementation.

Fundamental to the web is decomposing things to be simple so you don't need Open Source.

Ray says that the web is about open protocols, open data formats, no opaque packages and payloads being tunnelled. It is simple and out-there.

Later he says that Google Wave and Microsoft Groove are basically the same thing. That Mesh is based on Groove and that Mesh will not do all the things that Wave does or that Groove does but it will be sustainable.

Ray Ozzie built Lotus Notes. In its early days, it was beautifully simple. I liked it and I still do. Notes was way ahead of it's time. It was ahead of the web. It was strongly security minded, client-server based and Notes supported every relevant open standard that came along. At work we built an Operations Support System (1995 and onwards) with it and it is still supporting the job and fault management systems today.

Notes was great. Ray and his team did a great job. I think Google wave is what Ray would have liked Notes/Domino to be today.

Notes had a back-end database that seems to be like XML in structure and separated the presentation from the data. Wave has the advantage of virtually real-time synchronisation where as Notes, due to bandwidth limitations, was 'document' based and asynchronous. This is why Notes had to deal with replication conflicts - something they worked-around nicely - but Google it would appear doesn't have a problem since it is synchronising at a very low level.

Wave seems to have the following attributes:
  • Hierarchical database in XML.
  • Fine-grained time stamps.
  • Nothing deleted (partially solves replication conflicts and allows playback).
  • Remove edit history by publishing. Publiched docs retain links to source Wave and it has its own edit/update history.
  • Version control within document (allows playback).
  • Allows extensions (an XML data structure instead of a Blip - the content part of a Wave).
  • Each Wavelet has an Access Control List (ACL) of people and robots that can read the Blips within it.
  • I suspect that the Blips are signed with the author's private key and that other people in the ACL can read the Blip with the author's public key.
  • For security, during transmission, each fraction of a Blip would/could be encrypted with the reader's public key and decrypted with their private key - using TLS or SSL.
  • I think it would be possible to have no ACL so that the document would become a public document, but I would hope that Wave uses a white-list.
  • It seems that a reader is also an editor - no distinction. It may be simple enough the have reader and editor roles.
  • The GUI takes the Wave and formats it for display.
  • Spelling and translation seem to be in the GUI.
  • The Back-end manages replication and updates.
  • The scope of conflicts are eliminated by date-stamped single-character transactions and no actual deletes.
  • Front-end extensions can display other content.

I am wondering.

Has Google hit upon a partial solution for internationalisation (I18N)? Can a Wave, web and native applications use the Google translation service for window titles, menu items and help pages to eliminate bundling languages with an application?

Has Google enabled global collaboration of source code where, say, English comments and strings are translated into Chinese based on the browser user agent language setting?

Is Google Wave to beginning of the end of SPAM?

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