Armin Ronacher

I'm probably not telling news if I tell you that Wave is awesome. And that for so many reasons. Quite frankely, I was blown away by the demonstration not only because the application felt like a desktop thingy, what really convinced me that this is something new was the fact that Wave is not only an application on Google servers but also an open protocol. It's nice that the application is open source as well, but dammit: It's an open protocol. Imagine the possibilities.

Concept wise the idea is nothing new. We've had that realtime text based communication with very old ICQ clients as well (at least reddit say that). However people change and after a decade things look different again. Wave would integrate into my personal workflow like if it was developed exactly for what I do. I love E-Mail but when it comes to figuring out problems with others nothing beats IRC for me. Just for comparison: the #pocoo IRC channel has ~100 people online at the same time but the activity on the mailinglist approximates zero.. The main problem I have with IRC is however that it's hard for other people to benefit from earlier discussions. We do have a logging bot in the channel and the logs are publicity available but they are painfully to use as reference for your own problems. So IRC has problems but the nearly real-time behaviour makes it easy to help me fix other people's code or discuss implementations etc.

Wave extends both mail and instant messaging. A wave can be composed like a mail and people can comment to it like they would do on IRC. Imagine how effective mailinglists would work that way. You have a problem and describe it in a new wave. Then someone that has some ideas can add a new comment to it. If you happen to be online at the same time you can write to it like it was an IRC session. And that would even scale to a large number of concurrent users because the users are not writing to a central log like they do on IRC but to a topic. In this case the problem you just outlined in that new wave.

So far the only Google products I use and like are the search, maps and youtube. I don't care about gmail because I like to have things in my own hands. I hate centralized systems as much as the next guy. With Android things at Google somehow changed. They started their first large-scale open source project. I always thought that would stop there, but they were doing that again for Chrome as well. And with Wave the whole concept of Open Source at Google went into a new direction. Wave is not only a product but also a protocol you can implement yourself. And if people accept it there should be some alternative implementations available soon. And not only is the specification open, also the implementation Google uses. That makes it incredible easy to get started and setup your own Waves.

I have no idea why Google is doing that, but I think it's great. They are not forcing the users to be present on their servers. They even said in the introduction video explicitly that if you're sending a Wave from one user to another user on the same Wave instance, the messages would never leave the original server. There are very few companies that would dare to give users that much freedom.

You probably have to be a big company to be able to give away your product like this, but I seriously hope other companies will follow Google in that regard. I know Microsoft is slowly getting the concept of open standards and I can only hope they will try to become a bit like Google here. (even though I'm pretty sure this won't happen)