My initial reaction to the Google Wave demo at I/O was luke warm. C'mon, it's just a nifty UI over publish/subscribe messaging! Along with pubsub, the federated aspect of Wave---the seamless integration of users across multiple domains---is just standing on top of vanilla XMPP. From a cynical point of view, Wave is much more of an engineering feat than a shining piece of technological innovation.
It's not all about recycled technology, though. The exciting part of Wave is the collaborative abstraction of XMPP that is centered around conversations rather than individual messages. As someone interested in developer tools, I see a lot of potential in Wave. The presenters at I/O actually had a demo of a Google Code issue tracker extension that allows you to create, follow, and respond to conversations in a bug report using Wave (see around the 1:02:30 mark):
Very, very nice. After watching the demo, I realized that Wave-based developer tools could share a lot in common with the ideas I wrote about a few weeks ago---integrating artifact streams with work streams in a microblogging tool:
In both scenarios, I think the proposed value comes from:
1. aggregating and persisting conversations in one place; and
2. enabling easy ad-hoc communication between participants.
In any case, it looks like Google Wave may provide a nice framework to play with my ideas, so I'm excited to see how it shapes up.
2 Trackbacks
[...] Handcock was initially lukewarm about Google Wave, but upon reflection, sees some [...]
[...] Handcock was initially lukewarm about Google Wave, but upon reflection, sees some [...]