5 very detailed posts analyzing Google Wave | Hacker News Reader

5 very detailed posts analyzing Google Wave

endesha.com

29 pointsjgilliam11 comments

Two questions:

1 - What language is the wave server written in? Have google mentioned this yet?

2 - If Wave is going to disrupt and displace email, how are they going to combat spam? Messages between wave servers are encrypted which is a good start, but how are they going to ensure that we don't end up where SMTP is now?

2 - They are encrypted, but more importantly, they can also be signed. That could make it so that you have to pay some cert authority $20-100 if you want to set up a Wave server that talks to the rest of the world, but... actually, that sounds pretty reasonable to me.

That's just my understanding. I could be wrong.

http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec

"The connection MUST be secured using the TLS feature of XMPP."

So yes, you will need a cert to run a public wave server, but there is no sensible way to avoid this.

First, you should read on how XMPP works from http://www.xmpp.org. Second, no, you don't need an SSL certificate. You may choose how your XMPP server authenticates your own users and it's up to you do decide whether you want them to use TLS/SSL or not and no any other XMPP server have means to learn what authentication method was used on user end. The established practice is to use TLS with self-signed SSL cert. Server-to-server connectins are usually insecured, so Google may require to use SSL while connecting to their XMPP servers, yet as till now they don't.

It's right there in black and white. This isn't XMPP, it's Wave over XMPP, so there's no reason they can't impose additional constraints, and kudos to them for doing so. Optional TLS is effectively the same as no TLS and that just won't do for _the_ next gen messaging standard.

The demo video had a spam folder, just like gmail, so there's something baked in.

People will be able to write robots that will flag spam.

From http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec it's clear that Wave is 100% based on XMPP, which means contact authentication prior to communication takes place, hence there's no room for spam in Wave/XMPP (at least in esteblished meaning of 'spam').

1 - if you watch the "Wave and GWT" video from Google I/O, you'll see that both client and server are written in Java. (They share some of the truly hairy communications code.) Of course, the client compiles down to Javascript (using GWT).

2 - I don't think they've addressed the spam issue yet.

"A wavelet is a part of a wave which can be best compared to a e-mail in a e-mail thread or a message is a discussion forum."

Isn’t this wrong? As far as I understand, a wavelet should be compared to an e-mail thread and a blip to an individual e-mail message. And this comparison just makes sense in the context of a messaging widget serving the same purpose e-mail serves today.

I would be eager to discuss possible outcomes of this new technology. Exciting times are coming, and more than never it’s unbelievable open to everyone to participate in the shaping of the future. Web 2.0 is becoming a commodity.

Three questions to discuss: - What will be the distribution and evolution of gadgets? Will we converge to winner takes all monopolies in each of the functionality spaces? This depends a lot on gadget inter-operability, how will one be able to move a wavelet from wave to wave. Will there emerge wavelet standards? This way gadget (and robot) developers can extend each other efforts opening up competition.

- How will online identity change? There are already a lot of privacy issues on debate, I think most of those are non-issues raised by the demoed gadgets. People are aware of those and most of the things raised by now will be just solved with some preference settings. Of primary interest to me will be how will these robots extend and manage our online identity? Big issue.

- Enterprise applications and google stake, if everything is open (as it seems right now) what will be Google’s interest on it? I might be being naive here, but I can’t see clearly how will google monetize the huge enterprise market for this. Wave provider hosting?

No, I think he's got it right.

A blip is just a distinct (per-user) document that lives in a wavelet (the wavelet can have a distinct membership from any other wavelet in the wave).

So the wavelet functions as an "email" (which can have sub-emails with different contributors) in the wave "email thread".

"Enterprise applications and google stake, if everything is open (as it seems right now) what will be Google’s interest on it? I might be being naive here, but I can’t see clearly how will google monetize the huge enterprise market for this. Wave provider hosting?"

Imagine your company invented email, or the web, and built all the initial software. Even without any lock-in, you would do alright.

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