February 15, 2010
@ 02:59 PM

From the Google Wave Federation architecture white paper 

Google Wave is a new communication and collaboration platform based on hosted documents (called waves) supporting concurrent modifications and low-latency updates. This platform enables people to communicate and work together in new, convenient and effective ways. We will offer these benefits to users of wave.google.com and we also want to share them with everyone else by making waves an open platform that everybody can share. We welcome others to run wave servers and become wave providers, for themselves or as services for their users, and to "federate" waves, that is, to share waves with each other and with wave.google.com. In this way users from different wave providers can communicate and collaborate using shared waves. We are introducing the Google Wave Federation Protocol for federating waves between wave providers on the Internet.

From a Buzz post by Dewitt Clinton, a Google employee

The best way to get a sense of where the Buzz API is heading is to take a look at http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/. You'll notice that the "coming soon" section mentions a ton of protocols—Activity Streams, Atom, AtomPub, MediaRSS, WebFinger, PubSubHubbub, Salmon, OAuth, XFN, etc.

What it doesn't talk much about is Google. That's because the goal isn't Google specific at all. The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle. The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format.

From Mark Sigal’s post Google Buzz: Is it Project, Product or Platform?

I think that it's great that Google is iterating Gmail (read Tim O'Reilly's excellent write-up on it here), and actually improving an existing product, versus rolling out a knock-off of something that is already in the market.

Nonetheless. I am confused. I thought that Google Wave was destined to be the new Gmail, but after yesterday's announcement, I am left wondering if Gmail is, instead, the new Google Wave.


Since the saying goes that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, I won’t make any comment besides sharing these links with you.

Note Now Playing: 50 Cent - Crime Wave Note


 

Monday, February 15, 2010 3:57:11 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
When I saw the link on twitter, I thought to myself, surely an MS guy can appreciate the kind of "mission overlap" that happens on different teams in big companies. You didn't let me down, Dare. YTMND. ;-)
Monday, February 15, 2010 9:46:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I always thought that Google Buzz underneath was using the Wave protocol. If it doesn't then I would really worry about the future of WaveProtocol.org

Nonetheless, I commend Google on experimenting with something new! We never know what we were missing all along.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 5:36:02 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Using the wave protocol underneath would only make sense if google was representing buzz conversations as waves. I see a clear distinction between buzz and wave in that wave uses a more "continuous" paradigm. It's really like the difference between waves and particles.

I wouldn't be surprised if they leveraged Gmail's ability to reconstitute a conversation from a bunch of individual email messages. That would be a much closer fit to what buzz is.
Charlie
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 3:03:53 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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