

Google Wave is the new X-Windows - enki
http://lolstartups.com/post/159309953/wave-is-the-new-x-windows

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jimbokun
"It essentially defines the data structures of a collaborative document
editor"

Thank you!

I have not been able to make sense of the press coverage trying to describe
what Google Wave is. This is immensely clarifying. Google Wave is chiefly
technology for building collaborative editing applications. Casting it in
terms of competing against email, IM, or Facebook, is simply a category error.
I suppose the technology demo labeled "Google Wave" built on the underlying
tech may be partially at fault for the confusion.

~~~
extension
You can look at it is a collaborative document editor, but the fact that the
developers intend for it to be used for day to day communication is important.
It means that they will make sure it does all the little things a
communication tool needs to do.

Most importantly, the waves (documents) are structured as threaded
discussions. Users have global, unique, human readable addresses. Access to
waves and parts of waves can be controlled per-person. There is an an inbox
that lists waves by time. It keeps track of which ones have unseen content and
notifies you when a change is made, and so on.

I don't think any mere mortal can get a good sense of what Wave is without
seeing it in action. I didn't really wrap my head around it until I had spent
a couple of hours using it.

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rjurney
No, Google Wave is the new RIPscript:
[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS...](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPSCRIPT/)

"In 1993 Telegrafix created RIPscript or RIPscrip, which stood for "Remote
Imaging Protocol". It was intended to be a vector-like graphics protocol that
used ASCII files to describe lines and shapes to a client. This sort of
approach (send descriptions of graphics, render them at the client side) had
been done before, but a major push came with RIPscript and it followed onto
the internet as a plug-in. Ultimately, the protocol did not catch on and was
soon forgotten."

~~~
gfodor
Now _there's_ something I haven't thought about in like 15 years!

RIP script was cool, I remember the editor they had for it was pretty slick.

~~~
rjurney
Doesn't it kinda remind you then? You know - the folly of specifying the
future before it happens. RIPscrip made tons of sense until... something
unpredictable like interwebs happened :) The pipes turned out to be different
in practice than the BBS perspective told us. Wave has that same kind of
feeling to me. Not saying there's not some neat there, but the style of the
announcement and marketing... feels like RIPscript to me - doomed, arrogant,
silly.

------
sung
"In the blog posts I’ve read, Wave’s merits are analyzed solely based on the
current developer UI preview. ... and not an infrastructure protocol under
heavy development."

Great insight! I also feel the same way; that is a very important point that
people often overlook. Wave has a huge grand vision that could be shown far
beyond the power of current UI client.

Great to hear that you are a fellow gtug campout member. It was one of the
best experience. Thanks to Google for providing it.

~~~
jonmc12
Yea, it was a great event!

The winning team built a prototype of a Justin.tv type of app in 2 days.

I do think it will be sometime before the platform sees any applications that
have mainstream adoption. Video may be the first thing that gets wave rolling
from consumer perspective.

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cpr
One critical question is whether Google will successfully define the Wave
client/server (GWT-based) protocol in an open fashion, or at least open enough
that people can implement their own.

Otherwise, the whole thing will be dependent on the quality of their
client/server, and people will still be locked into a single implementation.

And, the other issue is just how extensible their data model can be, for other
clients to do more than just their simplistic pidgin-HTML document rendering
model. I.e., can another client/server pair use a more sophisticated document
model but still have the document maintained by other implementations? (Not
talking about robots or gadgets here, but a more fundamental question of
document extensibility.

On these questions (and others) hang the whole general utility of the
collaborative document editing facility.

~~~
nailer
They already have - the first public wave server was PyGoWave, which was made
from the open spec by third party developers.

~~~
omouse
Where's the client?

------
ssriram
Great Job!! I've replied to your group post at
[http://groups.google.com/group/wave-
protocol/browse_thread/t...](http://groups.google.com/group/wave-
protocol/browse_thread/thread/2634a27c4839bdab?hl=en)

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swombat
Seems like a pretty sensible view, and probably fairly close to what Google is
aiming for.

I know a number of non-technical people who have watched the whole GW
presentation and they can all immediately see the potential of Google Wave to
be used within their work and adapted to their workflows. It's very smart of
Google to support developers first, because GW's success will probably be
highly dependent on specific applications/customisations built on top of their
platform.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I'm wondering whether google wave can solve the problem of having to use
overly complicated interfaces like email or social sites just to share a link
with friends.

I feel like I should be able to drag and drop an image or link into something
and have it show up on my friend's computer.

~~~
sophacles
My friends and I call that jabber :-P

~~~
nazgulnarsil
i dont mean IM where things disappear and involve synchronous chat though.

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liz_hitchcock
This is potentially very useful to schools who wish to collaborate with other
schools. But students need to be 'contained' within one Google Wave with a
defined 'team' working on for example a citizenship project on fair trade etc,
rather than be free to start new Waves on the subject of say Zak Effron or
start messaging their friends... can you have an owner defined Wave ie by the
teacher and partipants ie students permissioned to access only that one Wave.

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tdoggette
I think that Google Wave will be interesting for the social place it falls
into. Will it be the new Usenet, or IRC, or web forums? Will it be large and
unified ("I'm on Wave, hit me up"), or fragmented ("Yeah, I switched over to
the wave Matt's running. You should try it out")?

These are the interesting parts, I think.

~~~
jimbokun
If there is any validity to the X-Windows comparison, none of those questions
make any sense. Substitute and you get "I'm on X-Windows, hit me up" or "Yeah,
I switched over to the X-Windows Matt's running," which no one would ever say.

I agree that the coverage so far have said exactly the kinds of things you are
saying. I never understood what they were really getting at, but this article
makes a lot more sense to me. It is mainly a protocol, and what the press are
calling "Wave" is just a demo app that Google put together.

~~~
tdoggette
In this case, though, I think the press are right. What really matters is what
people do with the software, not what happens underneath. It's our job as
nerds to get it from a communications protocol to a community.

------
hvs
Did that analogy give anyone else shivers down their spines? That isn't to say
that separating mechanism from policy is a bad idea.

I just hope that we get the words "client" and "server" defined correctly this
time around.

~~~
pohl
I always thought that XWindows uses the term 'client' and 'server' correctly,
while the average joe simply uses the words too loosely: they want to say that
the client is "my machine right here", and the server is "that machine over
there".

But, in reality, it is the display server process that offers display services
to client programs that use them.

~~~
dejb
It always felt wrong to me because the remote computer acted in response to
your actions. You click on something and it responds. I'm sure there were
valid technical reasons for it but commercially it must have been disaster.

~~~
sp332
You're thinking of it in terms of the application, not the display. The app
was running on the app server, which connects to the X server as an X client.

~~~
dejb
I'm thinking more in terms of the person sitting in front of the computer
rather than than the app. They are the ultimate 'client' who is served by the
computer in front of them. That computer (thin client) is the client of the
application server and so on down the line to the database and whatever other
services (servers) are called.

I can't really see a solid line of differentiation between an 'X server' and a
browser. Would you call the browser an HTML/Javascript server?

~~~
pohl
You're using loose terminology that a system administrator might use, where
"clients" and "servers" are machines.

X Windows is using computer science jargon instead, where "client" and
"server" are words that describe roles that two programs might play in a
specific kind of relationship with each other.

~~~
dejb
> You're using loose terminology that a system administrator might use,

How dare you insinuate that I might be a system administrator. Or that system
administrators really don't know much beyond their domain. I won't stand for
it!

I'm sure 'X windows' is technically a server in some the strictest sense.
Technically I guess the client app issues a request for user input which is
served by the X server. To extend that model the X server issues a sub-request
to the user who fulfils that request. To me this seems to twist the
terminology to the point where the user is just another service available to
the program. It reflects a view of reality that does not appeal to ordinary
end users and I believe this limited the success of X windows and unix/linux
on the desktop.

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omail
The title mislead me. I thought he was going to argue that Google Wave is like
X-Windows. He seems to be saying Google Wave can be used as the transport
layer for a display service. There does not appear to be any reason why it
can't be X11 on top of Google Wave other than the insane latency requirement.

EDIT: He seems to be more keen on replacing X11. I think a protocol which
works with X would be better.

