I initially planned to write up some detailed thoughts on the Google Wave video and the Google Wave Federation protocol. However the combination of the fact that literally millions of people have watched the video [according to YouTube] and I’ve had enough private conversations with others that have influenced my thinking that I’d rather not post something that makes it seem like I’m taking credit for the ideas of others. That said, I thought it would still be useful to share some of the most insightful commentary I’ve seen on Google Wave from various developer blogs.

Sam Ruby writes in his post Google Wave 

At one level, Google Wave is clearly a bold statement that “this is the type of application that every browser should be able to run natively without needing to resort to a plugin”.  At to give Google credit, they have been working relentlessly towards that vision, addressing everything from garbage collection issues, to enabling drag and drop of photos, to providing compelling content (e.g., Google Maps, GMail, and now Google Wave).
…
But stepping back a bit, the entire and much hyped HTML5 interface is just a facade.  That’s not a criticism, in fact that’s generally the way the web works.  What makes Google Wave particularly interesting is that there is an API which operates directly on the repository.  Furthermore, you can host your own server, and such servers federate using XMPP.

These servers are not merely passive, they can actively interact with processes called “robots” using HTTP (More specifically, JSON-RPC over POST).  Once invoked, these robots have access to a full range of operations (Java, Python).  The Python library implementation looks relatively straightforward, and would be relatively easy to port to, say Ruby.

This dichotomy pointed out by Sam is very interesting. One the one hand, there is the Google Wave web application which pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a rich web application that simply uses Javascript and the HTML DOM. This is a companion step in Google’s transition to taking an active role in the future of building Web applications where previous steps have included Google representatives drafting the HTML 5 specification, Google Gears and Google Chrome. However where things get interesting is that the API makes it possible to build alternate client applications (e.g. a .NET Wave client written in C#) and even build services that interact with users regardless of which Wave client they are using.

Joe Gregorio has more on these APIs in his blog post Wave Protocol Thoughts where he writes

There are actually 3 protocols and 2 APIs that are used in Wave:

• Federation (XMPP)
• The robot protocol (JSONRPC)
• The gadget API (OpenSocial)
• The wave embed API (Javascript)
• The client-server protocol (As defined by GWT)

The last one in that list is really nothing that needs to be, or will probably ever be documented, it is generated by GWT and when you build your own Wave client you will need to define how it talks to your Wave server. The rest of the protocols and APIs are based on existing technologies.

The robot protocol looks very easy to use, here is the code for an admittedly simple robot. Now some people have commented that Wave reminds them of Lotus Notes, and I'm sure with a little thought you could extend that to Exchange and Groove. The difference is that the extension model with Wave is events over HTTP, which makes it language agnostic, a feature you get when you define things in terms of protocols. That is, as long as you can stand up an HTTP server and parse JSON, you can create robots for Wave, which is a huge leap forward compared to the extension models for Notes, Exchange and Groove, which are all "object" based extension models. In the "object" based extension model the application exposes "objects" that are bound to locally that you manipulate to control the application, which means that your language choices are limited to those that have bindings into that object model.

As someone’s whose first paying job in the software industry was an internship where I had to write Outlook automation scripts to trigger special behaviors when people sent or modified Outlook task requests, I can appreciate the novelty of moving away from a programming model based on building a plugin in an application’s object model and instead building a Web service and having the web application notify you when it is time to act which is the way the Wave robot protocol works. Now that I’ve been exposed to this idea, it seems doubly weird that Google also shipped Google Apps Script within weeks of this announcement. 

Nick Gall writes in his post My 2¢ on Google Wave: WWW is a Unidirectional Web of Published Documents -- Wave is a bidirectional Web of Instant Messages that

Whether or not the Wave client succeeds, Wave is undoubtedly going to have a major impact on how application designers approach web applications. The analogy would be that even if Google Maps had "failed" to become the dominant map site/service, it still had major impact on web app design.

I suspect this as well. Specifically I have doubts about the viability of the communications paradigm shift that Google Wave is trying to force taking hold. On the other hand, I’m sure there are thousands of Web developers out there right now asking themselves "would my app be better if users could see each other’s edits in real time?","should we add a playback feature to our service as well" [ed note - wikipedia could really use this] and "why don’t we support seamless drag and drop in our application?". All inspired by their exposure to Google Wave.

Finally, I've ruminated publicly that I see a number of parallels between Google Wave and the announcement of Live Mesh. The one interesting parallel worth calling out is that both products/visions/platforms are most powerful when there is a world of different providers each exposing their data types to one or more of these rich user applications (i.e. a Mesh client or Wave client). Thus far I think Google has done a better job than we did with Live Mesh in being very upfront about this realization and evangelizing to developers that they participate as providers. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding in a year or so when we see just how many services have what it takes to implement a truly interoperable federated provider model for Google Wave.

In between watching the Google Wave video and Slumdog Millionaire, I got around to completing the first set of tabs for the ribbon in RSS Bandit. Screenshots are below, as usual let me know what you think.

Fig 1: The home tab. This is the default tab on launching the application. I like that formerly hidden features of the application like subscribing to newsgroups and managing podcasts are now front and center without having to compromise on the common tasks that people want to perform.

Fig 2: The ability to synchronize RSS Bandit with your Google Reader or NewsGator Online feeds is also now a lot more discoverable instead of being hidden in some obscure menu with an obscure name ("Synchronize Feeds"). 

Fig 3: The folder tab. This is menu is contextual and becomes selected when you click on a folder in the tree view. There are two features I’d like to call out in this view; Rules and Filters.

Fig 4: The rules tool is where we’ll end up placing existing and new options on behavior the user would like executed on receipt or viewing of new content.

Fig 5: The filter tool is used for filtering the items that show up in the list view. We've had several requests for this feature over the past few years but couldn’t figure out an elegant way to incorporate it into the user interface.

Fig 6: The feed tab. This is a contextual tab that is selected when you click on a feed in the tree view. One feature that I love which is now properly highlighted is that we support creating new posts in feeds that support this such as newsgroups (existing feature) or posting a new status update on Facebook if you have hooked it up as a feed source (new feature).

Fig 7: The item tab. This is the contextual tab that is highlighted when you select an item in the list view. There are no new features highlighted here. What we do think will be interesting is if we make it straightforward for existing and new IBlogExtension plugins to end up showing up in the item tab. So you should think of this tab as being extensible and should expect that some of our existing plugins (e.g. "Email This", "Post to Twitter", etc) will also end up in this tab.

A few days ago, Jeff Atwood responded to one of my status messages on Twitter with the following response of his own

This is a good opportunity to talk about what Twitter brings to the table as a social software application (as opposed to the Twitter as Google Killer meme). Twitter currently positions itself as a microblogging platform which is implies that it’s like blogging just smaller. A blog is often two things, first of all it’s about personal publishing platform for one or more people to share their opinions and knowledge with the world. The second thing is that it is the community of people who read that blog and the conversations they have about it on the site. The second is usually embodied by comments on the blog. In fact some, like Jeff Atwood, have argued that a blog without comments isn’t really a blog. As Jeff writes

I firmly maintain that a blog without comments enabled is not a blog. It's more like a church pulpit. You preach the word, and the audience passively receives your evangelical message. Straight from God's lips to their ears. When the sermon is over, the audience shuffles out of the church, inspired for another week. And there's definitely no question and answer period afterward.

Of course, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect. Maybe a blog with comments disabled is more analogous to a newspaper editorial. But even with a newspaper editorial, readers can make public comments by sending a letter to the editor, which may be published in a later edition of the paper.

When you look at a blog such as Mashable and compare it its Twitter counterpart or even Jeff Atwood’s blog versus his Twitter account, it seems clear which is more of church pulpit where the audience passively receives your evangelical message versus a forum for two way communication between the audience and the author.

An interesting dynamic that Twitter has added to personal publishing that doesn’t have a good analog in blogging is the notion of a public list of subscribers to the publisher’s content with links to every one of them and a fairly pejorative name for them  “followers”.  This feature has led to both micro and macro celebrities engaging in games to see who can amass the most fans with the most notable public display being the race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to a million followers.

Twitter takes blogging to the next level as a platform for building and encouraging celebrity. The other side of this is poignantly captured in James Governor’s post A truth of Asymmetric Follow: On sadness, fans and fantasy 

Well last week I had a chance to walk in the fan’s shoes, and of course I learned a lot, while trying to build buzz for our charitable efforts for Red Nose Day. I have to admit I hated it. I *really* wanted to get the attention of @wossy or @stephenfry. Could I? Of course not. These guys have day jobs…

But it was only on spending a lot of time surfing around user profiles to check for spambots that I discovered how profoundly depressing the celebrities on Twitter phenomenon can be. It was coming across profiles of Twitter users following ten or so celebrities on Twitter (and nobody else), wondering why their questions weren’t being answered. Why are they ignoring me, I keep asking them questions? After I saw a few of these profiles I felt a little depressed.

From this perspective it is unsurprising that tech celebrities like Jeff Atwood & Robert Scoble and real-world celebrities like Ashton Kutcher & John Mayer love the Twitter dynamic. Similarly, it is also unsurprising that over 60% of users abandon the service within the first month. After all, we aren’t all celebrities.

In its current form, Twitter is growing primarily as a platform for celebrities, wannabe celebrities and their fans. The key thing to note is that celebrity here isn’t limited to the kind of people you read about in People magazine and US Weekly. For example, I use Twitter to follow web technology celebrities like Tim O'Reilly and Scott Hanselman. On the other hand, my wife uses Twitter follows popular mommy bloggers like McMommy and Playground for Parents.

Going back to Jeff Atwood’s twitter message, I don’t consider Twitter to be Facebook with the annoying bullshit stripped out. For the most part, the Facebook experience has focused on being away to bring your offline relationships to the web. This is captured in the current home page design which proclaims that Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

From my perspective, this goal has more widespread appeal and utility than being a next generation platform for celebrity on the Web. Your mileage may vary.

Now Playing: Kid Cudi - Day N Nite (remix) (feat. Jim Jones & Trey Songz)

I’ve made some more progress in integrating the Facebook news feed into the next version of RSS Bandit currently codenamed Colossus. This weekend I completed the addition of support for viewing and replying to comments in the news feed. So here are some screenshots of current comment workflow for interacting with Facebook comments

Fig 1: Viewing the comments in response to a funny status update from Anil Dash 

Fig 2: Responding to the comment by pressing "Ctrl + R" or right-clicking and selecting Post Reply.

Fig 3: The news feed on Facebook with the comment posted from RSS Bandit

The second major change coming in the Colossus release is the adoption of the design elements from the Microsoft Office fluent user interface such as the ribbon, contextual tabs, galleries and live preview. To prepare for this change, we’re first building a prototype of the redesigned user interface and once we’re happy with it we will start refactoring the RSS Bandit application to enable swapping out our existing menus and taskbars with the new interface.

Here’s where we are in the design prototype for next release. Let me know what you think in the comments.

In the past week or so, two of the biggest perception problems preventing proliferation of OpenID as the de facto standard for decentralized identity on the Web have been addressed. The first perception problem is around the issue of usability. I remember attending the Social Graph Foo Camp last year and chatting with a Yahoo! employee about why they hadn’t become an Open ID relying party (i.e. enable people to login to Yahoo! account with OpenIDs). The response was that they had concerns about the usability of OpenID causing reducing the number of successful log-ins given that it takes the user off the Yahoo! sign-in page to an often confusing and poorly designed page created by a third party.

Last year’s launch and eventually success of Facebook Connect showed developers that it is possible to build a delegated identity workflow that isn’t as intimidating and counterproductive as the experience typically associated with delegated identity systems like OpenID. On May 14th, Google announced that a similar experience has now been successfully designed and implemented for OpenID in the Google Code blog post titled Google OpenID API - taking the next steps which states

We are happy to announce today two new enhancements to our API - introducing a new popup style UI for our user facing approval page, and extending our Attribute Exchange support to include first and last name, country and preferred language.

The new popup style UI, which implements the

OpenID User Interface Extension Specification, is designed to streamline the federated login experience for users. Specifically, it's designed to ensure that the context of the Relying Party website is always available and visible, even in the extreme case where a confused user closes the Google approval window. JanRain, a provider of OpenID solutions, is an early adopter of the new API, and already offers it as part of their RPX product. As demonstrated by UserVoice using JanRain's RPX, the initial step on the sign-in page of the Relying Party website is identical to that of the "full page" version, and does not require any changes in the Relying Party UI.

Once the user selects to sign in using his or her Google Account, the Google approval page is displayed. However, it does not replace the Relying Party's page in the main browser window. Instead it is displayed as a popup window on top of it. We have updated our Open Source project to include a complete Relying Party example, providing code for both the back-end (in Java) and front-end (javascript) components.

Once the user approves the request, the popup page closes, and the user is signed in to the Relying Party website.

The aforementioned OpenID User Interface Extension allows the relying party to request that the OpenID provider authenticate the user via a “pop up” instead of through navigating to their page and then redirecting the user back to the relying party’s site. Thus claim that OpenID usability harms the login experience is now effectively addressed and I expect to see more OpenID providers and relying parties adopt this new popup style experience as part of the authentication process.

The second biggest perception blocker is the one asked in articles like Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies? which points out that no large web companies actually support OpenID as a way to login to their primary services. The implication being that companies are interested in using OpenID as a way to spread their reach across the web including becoming identity providers for other companies but don’t want others to do the same to them.

That was true until earlier this week when Luke Shepard announced Facebook Supports OpenID for Automatic Login. Specifically,

Now, users can register for Facebook using their Gmail accounts. This is a quicker, more streamlined way for new users to register for the site, find their friends, and start exploring.

Existing and new users can now link their Facebook accounts with their Gmail accounts or with accounts from those OpenID providers that support automatic login. Once a user links his or her account with a Gmail address or an OpenID URL, logs in to that account, then goes to Facebook, that user will already be logged in to Facebook.

In tests we've run, we've noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.

This makes Facebook the first major web company to truly embrace OpenID as a way to enable users to sign up and login to the site using credentials from a third party (a competitor even). The fact that they also state that contrary to popular perception this actually improves the level of engagement of those users is also a big deal.

Given both of these events, I expect that we’ll see a number of more prominent sites adopting OpenID as they now clearly have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by doing so. This will turn out to be a great thing for users of the web and will bring us closer to the nirvana that is true interoperability across the social networking and social media sites on the web.

After all the hype, I got around to taking Wolfram Alpha for a spin last night due to being unable to sleep after a weird Doctor Manhattan themed nightmare. The experience of using the site is very impressive and there is a great walkthrough of the power of the site in the Wolfram Alpha screencast which I encourage people to watch if you are interested in learning about a new breed of search engine.

There have been a ton of articles calling Wolfram Alpha a "Google Killer" but after using the site for a few hours although I find it fascinating, I question how much of a threat the site is to Google either as a way to satisfy the typical questions people ask Web search engines or a threat to Google’s search advertising cash cow. You can get a sense for the kinds of queries that Wolfram Alpha handles amazingly well from the list below

• life expectancy 40 year old male UK
• GOOG YHOO
• nathan name
• president of nigeria 2004
• weather seattle christmas day 2008
• microsoft
• ethnic groups nigeria

As you can tell from the above list, Wolfram Alpha is like having a search engine over the kind of data you’d see in the CIA's World Factbook or Time Almanac. There really isn’t anything like it on the Web today. However it isn’t really a competitor to traditional web search engines who for the most part are still focused on finding web pages despite the various advancements in answering a subset of queries with direct answers instead of links to web pages such as Google's OneBox results and Live Search’s instant answers feature.

From my perspective, the threat to search engines like Google isn’t Wolfram Alpha but the trend it represents. That trend is the renaissance of the vertical search engine. Earlier this year, I was putting together a panel at the MIX ‘09 conference and needed to invite the panelists from a pool of people who I’d either heard about or knew of professionally but had never contacted directly. How did I find out how to contact these people?  Even though all of them had blogs, there wasn’t a consistent way to track down contact information. So I looked them up on Facebook and sent each of them a private message. Mission accomplished. Unbeknownst to me, Facebook had become my “people” search engine”.

Here’s another story. Last year I worked on the most satisfying software release of my career, Windows Live (wave 3). After the launch I wanted to find out what people were saying about the product so I did a Twitter search for Windows Live and posted the results. While I wasn’t paying attention, Twitter had become my “what are people saying about <insert brand here>” search engine.

This trend of search engines dedicated to specific scenarios and contexts that can’t be answered well by Web search is the trend that traditional search engines should watch carefully.

I can imagine Wolfram Alpha eventually growing to satisfy a lot of the sorts of queries I go to Wikipedia today to get answers to and doing so in a more authoritative manner. In that case, it would become my “facts and trivia” search engine. However there are currently too many gaps in its knowledge of commercial products (e.g. search for “ipod” results in a coming soon notice) and people (e.g. the Jim Carrey entry is amazingly brief yet still manages to have a factually inaccuracy) to make it a true replacement for wikipedia. That said, the service shows great promise and it will be interesting watching as it evolves.