Spicebird
They have been having a go at this for a while
http://www.spicebird.com/
Google Oz coders crossbreed email with IM
Google has unveiled a new-age communication and collaboration tool developed by the brother tandem behind the original Google Maps. Available today to a limited number of developers, the tool is called Google Wave, and naturally it's an online application that leans heavily on the still-gestating HTML 5 standard. "This is an …
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Thursday 28th May 2009 21:59 GMT Solomon Grundy
Outlook and Predictions
it seems that Google has outdone themselves and recreated MS Outlook and Exchange. I couldn't find anything in the beta that a properly configured Exchange Server won't do.
Yea Google!
Yes, it is a trick to get stupid users to give away information. Google is a vampire that sucks the life out of everything. It's a real shame their search engine is so good. I won't touch their other stuff. (except Translator - just because I like the stupendously horrible translations it comes up with)
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Thursday 28th May 2009 23:05 GMT Antti Roppola
Exchange
@Solomon Grundy
"I couldn't find anything in the beta that a properly configured Exchange Server won't do"
Except me and my friends do not happen to share access to a properly configured Exchange Server. Wave is presumably accessible to all Look at Facebook, people will give up their private details in a snap if it provides utility.
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Friday 29th May 2009 04:21 GMT David
Spec seems to be a bit of a mess
It doesn't help that its an extension to XMPP, which is not the internet's simplest protocol.
The authors assert the success of email was due to open protocols. I'd argue that the success of email was largely down to being a very very very simple and easy to implement protocol. SMTP sits directly on top of TCP. It uses ASCII. It uses half a dozen commands. That's it, it's simple enough to "implement" by hand, using telnet. No need for fancy API's. You could teach a ten year old to do it.
Wave uses XMPP, and this sits on top of TCP, TLS, and SASL, using XML, UTF-8, X509, MD5, base-64, URNs etc, which is great - much better than email - but has a lot bigger learning curve. You need libraries and APIs, frameworks, public key infrastructures, XML parsers, and so on. On the server side, I wonder if we will ever see the situation where practically every organisation on the net has an XMPP server and they communicate seemlessly (as we see now, more or less with SMTP).
Or will the complexity lead to a few big walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter?
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Friday 29th May 2009 09:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
will facebook & twitter sue
Now google will be able to grab all the content from the other sites but replace the ads with their own. curious if they attract some of the same lawsuits that some online news aggregators have been hit with for doing that sort of thing (the content grab, not the flashy ui).
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Friday 29th May 2009 09:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Looks interesting
I've wished for ages that you could properly thread email conversations as sending entire chains in another mails is, frankly, pants.
@Solomon Grundy
"I couldn't find anything in the beta that a properly configured Exchange Server won't do"
Bullshit of the highest order. Exchange may well do mail, NNTP, calendars and allow attachments - but it does NOT aggregate the whole thing into one stream. If I have an NNTP chat about a doc in an emails - those are not correlated on Exchange - that's something I have to do manually.
@A prediction
"Wave is a stupid waste of time and how evil Google are using to con idiots out of their privacy."
This is a good point, but as the code is OpenSource and the protocol also open; there's nothing to stop me or anyone else creating servers/clients that do not chat to Google. In my line of work I can actually see some use for this - but on a bespoke fork and not using the browser. Whether or not we'd pursue that would greatly depend on the license used.
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Friday 29th May 2009 19:42 GMT Yan-Jie Schnellbach
Interesting
Yeah, all of that can be done already, but aggregating it into a single protocol? That makes it convenient and easy to handle, for the end-user, at least.
The nice thing is that this concept will not only allow you to do all at once, it looks simple enough to "just use" it as mail OR as IM OR as collaboration tool, within one interface - so you can transition seamlessly. It's sort of just a virtual table you sit around - you can chat a bit or start working on a project, without changing rooms (i.e. apps).
And since the whole thing is open-sourced... I don't even need to whip out my tinfoil hat, it may even make a great intranet application that cannot talk to the outside internet! I like it!
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