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Comment by deepblueocean | Hacker News Reader

I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol, in which case it's _already_ an open standard. What would be awfully nice is if Google (which is a category mistake - what I really mean is "the Hangouts team") would clarify this, release any updates to the protocol that they've made, and perhaps define something more than the weak API provided for the current Hangouts platform.

In particular, the right test of openness is this: can I build an interoperable client that could participate in a Hangout as a first-class entity?

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As a former google wave developer, I can only say that I hope this isn't the case. Wave's federation protocol embedded an XML-like data structure (wavelets) in protobufs (binary) which were then encoded using base64 and embedded in XMPP extensions (ie, more XML).

That way lies madness.

thank you for giving me a new 'something' to contrast some of our internal transport cruft.

i can now, at least, think positively: 'well, at least it's not XML encapsulated in base64-encoded protobufs shipped over XML.'

How did Wave end up with that sort of mess? Isn't Google full of Very Smart People?

They do love their XML in Android layouts, though @.@

The internal architecture of wave was very abstract. a lot of this abstraction was exposed in the first federation spec, somewhat due to necessity, somewhat due to lack of time.

Here's a thought: what constitutes a very smart person? How often do those occur in the global population? Now, how many people are there on the planet and how big is the company?

The Earth may not be big enough for that to work out. This is before you remove people who aren't in this industry, people who are too young or too old to work there, people who don't want to work there, people who DID work there and left, and so on.

It might explain a lot, particularly when they go on a hiring bender. Where are all of these new people coming from?

Thats been the case with xooglers interviewing with my company. It seems like there are a lot of average to below average people working at Google for some reason. Or at least the below average people interview a lot.

What were the considerations which led to this design? Why not just stick with XML inside an XMPP extension directly?

> I was always under the impression that the core Hangouts protocol _was_ the Wave protocol

I've never heard this. Do you have anything that backs you up? I found a Quora answer that says that the Hangouts API is based on the the Wave API, but that's it.

Where oh where oh where did you get that idea?

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