
Google Wave “is anti-Web” - Anon84
http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/06/google-wave-is-anti-web/
======
jmillikin
I think he's wrong, for several reasons:

The services Wave aims to replace -- instant messengers, E-mail, IRC,
groupware, Usenet -- are not part of the Web. While there are gateways between
the Web and other Internet-based platforms, such as webmail and Mibbit, I'd
guess that most interaction remains separate from the Web. Therefore, at
_worst_ , replacing these services with Wave is irrelevant to the status of
the Web.

In a related note, Google itself has released Web gateways for E-mail and
Usenet. I do not believe that they have since forgotten what the Web is.
Indeed, Google's demonstration video itself demonstrates a Wave <-> Web
gateway, in the form of an Javascript-based web application.

Second, Ozzie espouses an incorrect view of what Wave is. Based on the
information Google has released so far, Wave is -- just like HTTP -- a
protocol for communication between cooperating, heterogeneous agents. Aside
from implementing Wave, which is merely a set of extensions to XMPP, no
additional cooperation is required to write a Wave-enabled application. His
statement that "Wave is just too big and complex a system" reveals just how
fundamentally he fails to understand it.

Here, I take a quote and replace "Web" with "Wave":

"""As Ozzie described it, the power of Wave lies in the ability of many
different developers to build their own, independent and interoperable
implementations of services from toolkits of foundational technologies. It
doesn’t matter if some of these implementations are very basic and lack the
full capabilities of others: what matters is that they can be created easily
and interoperate. """

Doesn't it remain true? Doesn't it still make sense?

I believe that Wave will be a roaring success, for the same reasons SMTP, NNTP
and HTTP have been -- simple to implement, distributed, and not controlled by
any single party.

~~~
axod
>> "simple to implement"

I haven't looked into wave in much detail, but being based on XMPP is by no
means simple. XMPP is the most over engineered over complex verbose ridiculous
protocol ever invented. There were several people saying Jabber would kill IRC
years ago.

I'm reserving judgement on wave personally, I'm skeptical it'll be able to
make a dent. Technically awesome, but I'm not convinced yet it solves real
problems users have.

~~~
jmillikin
>> There were several people saying Jabber would kill IRC years ago

Who?

I doubt anybody knowledgeable would claim that Jabber would kill IRC, since
the two protocols serve largely different purposes. Jabber _has_ killed off
most of the smaller closed IM networks, and even the large ones are smaller
than they once were.

As for the claimed difficulty of implementing XMPP, I'd like to see some more
references on that. I'm writing an XMPP library now, and it doesn't seem
particularly difficult. With only an hour or two of work, it can connect
securely to 3rd-party servers and act as a useful bot. With a bit more work,
I'm sure it could be a production-quality library.

Furthermore, the proliferation of implementations for various languages and
platforms suggests that the barrier to entry for an XMPP library is rather
low.

~~~
axod
From a previous thread on XMPP:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581>

Even the specs for XMPP+extensions seem to be written in XML, running to
thousands of pages due to the overly-general-underly-practical nature.

~~~
jmillikin
Yes, it's difficult to establish a secure connection. This is due to the
nature of security in general, and is not inherent to XMPP. If you want to
just write plain-text messages without authentication, you could do so with
netcat. If you want to use digest-auth and SSL, obviously the client and
server will be more complicated. Many servers will outright refuse to
authenticate a connection unless it's using TLS and digest auth, which is an
excellent idea.

I don't think expecting any modern protocol to support typing commands in by
hand over netcat/telnet is reasonable.

~~~
axod

      $ openssl s_client -connect irc.mibbit.com:6697
    

Works for me...

In comparison, it's not possible to use a general tool to do anything like
this with XMPP, because it's all wrapped in endless XML complexity.

~~~
jmillikin
You've yet to state how using XML as a serialization layer introduces any
additional complexity into XMPP.

Your example doesn't support TLS upgrading, forcing TLS and plaintext
connections to be handled on separate ports. You also ignore authentication
and authorization, which are much more important than merely opening an
encrypted socket to some arbitrary server.

IRC is a nice protocol for things that don't matter, but it's utterly
unsuitable for applications that require security or features beyond "send
text and hope some client receives it, eventually".

~~~
axod
It's about 3 times the bandwidth for a start.

I agree @TLS, authorization etc, but often those just aren't a priority.

email is often used without any security but it's far from something that
"doesn't matter". IM protocols have barely any security, yet we all use them.

~~~
jmillikin
3 times epsilon is still epsilon. The bandwidth taken by plain text, even
assuming worst case overhead of many small one-character messages, is
inconsequential compared to images or videos.

E-mail has optional security for things that do matter, namely GPG/PGP for
client <-> client and the STARTTLS extension to SMTP for server <-> server.
Wave, as a replacement for E-mail, provides pervasive security.

"IM protocols have barely any security" -- given that this discussion is
regarding an IM protocol with a built-in high-quality security infrastructure,
I don't see how this statement is at all valid.

~~~
axod
>> "IM protocols have barely any security" -- given that this discussion is
regarding an IM protocol with a built-in high-quality security infrastructure,
I don't see how this statement is at all valid.

I was talking about the main IM protocols in use today - yahoo/msn/aim.

You'd be surprised @ plain text. It quickly adds up. I do around 3.5TB of
plain text IRC/http a month, and if I could reduce that, I would. If we were
all using jabber instead of IRC my bandwidth would be more like 10TB. Quite a
difference.

>> "E-mail has optional security for things that do matter, namely GPG/PGP for
client <-> client and the STARTTLS extension to SMTP for server <-> server.
Wave, as a replacement for E-mail, provides pervasive security."

That comes back to my original comment - I'm not sure it solves any real world
problem users have. Users don't care about security like that.

~~~
youngian
>> "That comes back to my original comment - I'm not sure it solves any real
world problem users have. Users don't care about security like that."

I'm not sure that's accurate. Maybe users don't care about security, but I
would venture that's because they don't know any better. I don't think most
people understand that their emails and IMs are crossing the web in plaintext,
or just how easy it would be for someone unintended to get access to those
messages. I don't think it's an informed lack of concern.

------
adw
This isn't my idea, it's my colleague's, but he managed to get it through my
thick skull this morning: it's all about the robots.

Wave robots can do anything, including publishing from a wave to somewhere
else, filtering and parsing, importing content, linking, whatever. They're
bidirectional pipelines! And that means they're a fantastic tool for
automating things, and what's more, they're easy to explain to people less
technical than us mob.

Imagine this: "here, i'll copy in the room booking robot", which goes away and
reads the wave to book you a room, just as you might copy a secretary into an
email conversation if you were lucky enough to have administrative support...

Two of the web services I've got most from recently have been Highrise and
Tripit, in both cases because I can just forward them stuff and what I wanted
to happen happens. Google Wave makes building that kind of app much, much
easier.

That gets my attention, anyway.

~~~
stilist
It seems the age of intelligent agents may have finally arrived.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent>)

------
arebop
According to the article, Ozzie objects to the way that Wave has sprung
almost-fully-formed from Google rather than evolving slowly by the
codification of observations about successful implementations.

The headline is a claim about what Wave is and not about how it came to be.

I'm not an insider and I probably haven't studied Wave as closely as Ozzie['s
staff], but it appears to be consistent with web architecture: the
interactions are basically stateless client-server, there is a uniform
interface for operational transformations, it accommodates caching, and it
imposes enough structure to support layering.

------
fizx
IM is "anti-web" too, and its doing fine. While the Google Wave client may be
too much, the open wave protocol represents an improvement over http and im
protocols in use today. I'm sure that it will find its niche(s), and perhaps
become mainstream when it finds its killer app (which may or may not be from
the big G).

~~~
TallGuyShort
I'm not arguing - I'm just curious, but what makes you say that IM is "anti-
web"? Because it's private? Or because the current maintstream protocols have
adopted too many features?

~~~
sp332
The web != the internet. IM uses the internet, but is not part of the web
because you can't link to an IM.

Four principles for being pro-web:

1\. Use URIs as names for things

2\. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.

3\. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.

4\. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

(From Time Berners-Lee's essay on linked data:
<http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html> )

~~~
axod
So email is anti-web? Skype is anti-web? I don't quite see why anti-web is a
bad thing anyway. Why does it really matter?

~~~
sp332
Email is not indexable (I mean by search engines) and not linkable, and
therefore one cannot usefully add to the amount or quality of information on
the web by email. It doesn't matter how relevant your email would be to
someone else; if they're not on the TO: list, they're not going to get the
data. Even if you put a URL in an email, there's no way for the web to
represent the relevance of the email to the linked page. Also, you can't link
from one email to another.

I'm not saying email is bad, it's just not part of the web.

~~~
bad_user
_Email is not indexable_

Sure it is, like any other text-based document.

 _and not linkable_

Well, it does have a reply-to header that's used to construct the tree of the
conversation. Other than that public mailing-lists are exposed on the web.

 _one cannot usefully add to the amount or quality of information on the web
by email_

Email is good for private conversations. And for public conversations,
whenever I search something on Google I often find answers from mailing-lists,
exposed through a web interface.

That's pretty much as part of the web as it can be.

~~~
crux
The very fact that email needs to be pumped through a web server before it
enters that workflow somewhat proves the point. Email is not linkable or
indexable before you turn it into a web page. Therefore, it is not a web
technology.

~~~
bad_user
Email may not be a "web technology", but integrating it with the web is easy,
because it is still just text based with an open and simple protocol.

You'll have a much tougher time integrating Skype's audio conversations with
the web for example ... it's not an open protocol, and it is not text-based.
Flash was also a problem for a long time, even though Flash interfaces are
served from HTTP servers. Adobe may have released tools to extract metadata
from Flash movies, but it remains to be seen if those tools can be used
effectively.

These are better examples of what it means to be truly web-incompatible. Email
is not because it can be served through the web, and it's also a painless
process.

I like mailing lists more than I like forums. With the tools available I can
easily filter messages ... block people I don't like and tag messages related
to a certain subject of interest. An online forum can support these features,
but it usually does not.

That's the problem with online interfaces ... if the web interface doesn't
provide an API to plug-in external tools then you cannot adapt it to your
needs. And that's also why (IMHO) older protocols, like Email and IRC are
still around and popular.

------
notmyname
Ozzie may be right, but only if one tries to implement Wave on top of the web.
Sure the interface may be on the web (for some Wave clients), but the
underlying protocol, from my understanding, works along side http. Similar to
how smtp works along side http even if the user interface is on the web.

Google's demo was the possibility, and, yes, it was a shiny system, but I
don't get the impression that Google is trying to sell that system. They are
pushing the underlying architecture and protocols. Their demo was made up of
several "independent and interoperable implementations of services from
toolkits of foundational technologies." And the "foundational technologies" is
the Wave protocol.

------
TallGuyShort
He makes a good point. After all, that's what the UNIX philosophy is all about
- small, well-written programs that do one job well, and can work together
easily. I like having a lightweight IM client, and regular email. From what
I've seen of wave, I wouldn't like it. I think this articulates very well what
I didn't like about it.

However, that's exactly what I don't like about a lot of Microsoft's software.
Outlook for instance, tries to include every feature you need in your office,
and it crashes on me all the time because it has too many pieces.

Please note that in saying this, I do recognize that the man they are talking
about doesn't seem like the kind to always tow the party line at Microsoft.
After all, he said their mindset was "scary" when he got there.

~~~
snprbob86
Has anyone ever actually used Groove? Or Mesh? They are both awful. I've heard
Lotus Notes was even worse. I don't really put much weight on Ozzy's opinion.

That said, I think Wave is VERY WEB. Which is exactly why it stands a chance
of succeeding where Ozzy's attempts have failed. I looked at the protocol and
it doesn't seem all that crazy or complex. Robots can be written in any
language as long as they can read and write JSON over HTTP. Gadgets are
written in HTML and Javascript and are deployed over the web. It appears that
near 100% of the gadgets and robots they demoed are UNIX-style "small, well-
written programs that do one job well" and they plugin to a more complex UI.

Distributed, micro-kernel applications -- like the web -- do not preclude big
ideas and large host apps. Browsers themselves are incredibly complex. If Wave
proves to have utility and people use it, I don't see how it could fail.

~~~
wglb
Lotus Notes was a very imaginative product. I used it for a while at a couple
of clients while I was consulting. One application was to build a moderately
sophisticated document tracking workflow process. The other was to build
various small databases for status reports and project status applications.

It was exceedingly simple to build simple network-based applications that
would pretty much instantly replicate to wherever you wanted it. The
applications were not very pretty, and all had a similar look and feel. It was
extremely imaginative. I remember Bill Gates even back then, while taking a
jibe at Ozzie for putting an OS in the product, said that he was one of the
smartest programmers out there.

The web kind of changed everyone's way of thinking about that sort of stuff,
and Notes kind of faded.

I am not quite sure what being anti-web means. If web means nice GUI brower
stuff, then maybe, but if you think of web as being protocols with clients and
servers, then I wouldn't agree.

------
tlrobinson
People seem to forget that the internet isn't just "the web". It's simply not
realistic for certain applications to be built on the web (I mean the Wave
protocol, not Google's Wave client)

And of course this is coming from a top executive at one of Google's main
competitors. They don't have a history of saying nice things about Google,
Apple, etc.

------
billybob
"That was the verdict of... Microsoft’s top software guru"

This may be kneejerk, and I don't know anything about Mr. Ozzie, but try
reading it this way: "Google's new web thing denounced by maker of competing
desktop things."

Even if he's right, it just doesn't sound objective.

------
nailer
Why do we care what the creator of Lotus Notes has to say regarding the web?

~~~
ambition
Mostly because he is now smart, wealthy and powerful.

~~~
nailer
So is Warren Buffet. Both have very little to do with the web.

------
cdibona
I was mentally replacing "Wave" with "Azure" and it made the article much more
accurate. Just sayin...

------
cjoh
Google Wave is Anti-Web says Microsoft? How rich.

~~~
tptacek
Says Ray Ozzie.

------
tybris
To summarize, Wave does not kiss.

------
Raphael
My foot.

------
reyu
->"Rather, it is an attempt to foist a fully-formed, complex system onto the online ecosystem, and the Web rejects such approaches."

Ozzie's arguments as presented in this condensed article seem vague to me. I'm
not sure if he's trying to argue that Google Wave represents the AOL "walled
garden" approach. If so, I don't think Wave is comparable.

~~~
mike_organon
I disagree with that quote by Ozzie. The wave protocol is an extension of an
existing IM protocol. The app is a combination and rethinking of existing web
concepts (IM, email, and others). This isn't something entirely new. Also,
other providers, along with robots and gadgets, do not need to be nearly as
complex as the Wave app to participate, allowing more interop than is possible
now with the old protocols.

