Will Google Wave become a tsunami?
p2pnet news view Advertising | P2P:- Very interesting idea. But should alarm bells be ringing because huge advertising company Google, which has never seen user data it didn’t covet, is behind it?
Everything Google does is designed with one purpose in mind: to make Google even more powerful than it is already. So will Google Wave eventually turn into Google Tsunami?
Over in Australia, after starting Where 2 Tech, Lars and Jens Rasmussen became Googlers, ultimately turning their project into Google Maps.
They soldiered on and finally, “we decided it was time to leave the Maps team and turn Jens’ new idea into a project, which we codenamed ‘Walkabout’,” Lars says on the official Google blog.
He says he and his brother wondered »»»
- Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
- Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
- What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?
Enter Google Wave, “equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more”.
With it, users create a wave and add people to it.
“Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web,” says the post.
“They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use ‘playback’ to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”
Really interesting, and code will be freely released, Rasmussen says, citing Android as typical of Google efforts under which code is made available as “open source” to “encourage the developer community to get involved”.
Actually, Android isn’t open source. Rather, it’s a “semi-open-source,” to use Google’ s own words.
Is such a thing possible? Surely, something is open source, or it isn’t?
“Google initially intends to continue the development of Wave in co-operation with select programmers,” says Heise Online, then, “the program will be presented to the public as a service on Google’s servers and later, “Google plans to release the ‘lions share’ of the source code, enabling anyone to offer a Wave service on their servers.”
‘Lion’s share’ means most, not all. What parts will it retain? And why?
Meanwhile, click here for the developer blog.
And stay tuned.
semi-open-source structure – ‘Semi-open source’ Google Android, May 11, 2009
Heise Online – Google Wave: The instant wiki communicator, May 29, 2009
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May 29th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Let’s not jump onto the ‘evil google’ train right away. I’m glad they’re at least releasing ‘most’ of the source code. As a developer of mostly OSS websites, I typically release all the code besides the security/user auth system. Why? Because I’d rather not make it easy for it to be broken. This is not to say that I think security by obscurity is a good thing, But I’d rather not make it even easier.