Email, we hardly knew ye

[mofoburrell]

With the recent announce­ment from Google regard­ing the release of Google Wave-slated for late Septem­ber 2009 - I finally decided to do some read­ing on it. I recom­mend watch­ing the abridged video of it to get an idea, though the abridged ver­sion leaves out some cool stuff about the protocol.

I love the pro­tocol. Both Google’s actions and words point to Wave being some­thing which is not con­trolled by Google in any way. The pro­tocol will be open and Google’s ref­er­ence imple­ment­a­tion will be open source. To start with, Google will be the world’s largest Wave pro­vider since they’re the ones who have developed the pro­tocol, ref­er­ence imple­ment­a­tion and have done the test­ing on it, but ideally organ­iz­a­tions will start offer­ing Wave accounts in exactly the same way they offer email accounts today.

If you watch the video, you get a very ambi­tious view of Wave: it will not only obsol­ete email, but also instant mes­saging, polling, blog­ging, pic­ture shar­ing and file shar­ing, wikis and even video games. Being a little bit famil­iar with XMPP - the tech­no­logy Wave is built upon - I have to say it was only a mat­ter of time before someone tried to do some­thing this ambi­tious. XMPP is a beau­ti­ful pro­tocol and open and extens­ible to boot. Wave seems like some­thing that had to hap­pen eventually.

Even if Google Wave sup­plants noth­ing other than email, it would be well worth it. Email has a lot of short­com­ings, as any­one who took my net­work­ing course should appre­ci­ate. Cryp­to­graph­ic­ally secure authen­tic­a­tion and encryp­tion end-​​to-​​end is required by the pro­tocol - it is impossible to send any­thing unen­cryp­ted with Wave - and that alone is some­thing to be pleased about.

The down­side to this all is I’m get­ting all excited now about it and I want to start work­ing on devel­op­ing a Wave cli­ent. I’m all adult and bor­ing these days with my “respons­ib­il­it­ies” and so it has to get thrown to the bot­tom of my to-​​do list along with all the other cool non - research-​​related pro­jects I’d love to do.

And I should say I have a hor­rible his­tory of pre­dict­ing which tech­no­lo­gies will catch on and which won’t. In my world, MSN and Face­book should be fail­ures; PGP and XMPP should have taken the world by storm. With that track record, I sup­pose Google Wave is doomed to be a spec­tac­u­lar fail­ure, which would be a real shame.

Originally published at Wizardlike research. You can comment here or there.