Shashi Velur’s blog

I am very excited to receive my Google Wave Developer Sandbox account.

Google Wave is actually three layers - the Product, the Protocol, and the Platform. What I am seeing in the Developer Sandbox is actually the Product using the Platform and the Protocol.

After spending a couple of hours with Google Wave product, to say the least, I am amazed at it’s complexity and it’s richness as a comprehensive unconstrained communication platform. If we can conquer it’s complexity perhaps by using a simpler Google Wave Application, I wonder what this would become in a year.

I cannot help but compare Wave with the traditional communication channels. So, here it goes:

Wave vs. Wiki/Microblogging/Email/IM/IRC:

1. Wave messages live on the Wave server instead of the local client.
2. A complete history of each Wave as to who did what and when is maintained on the server and it can be replayed any time.
3. Google Wave is built on the Google Wave Federation Protocol is an extension to the core of XMPP.
4. Liveness: Editing a wave is immediately visible to other users as it is edited it. You can watch your contact edit a wave live.
5. Tagging and built-in search available.
6. The Wave platform supports two types of Wave extensions - Gadgets and Robots. This gives Wave a lot of potential, openness and richness.
7. Google Wave session is encrypted (https).
8. Google Wave is actually three layers - the Product, the Protocol, and the Platform.
9. The actual Google Wave UI seems to be very fast and responsive. But, is still very raw and unstable in a few areas. Some features seem to be disabled right now. This is understandable because the beta product is still possibly a few months away.
10. Google Wave is a web application and so only a browser is required. 

I was warned that IE 8 is not a supported browser. However, after I chose the option to continue, it worked. To be safe, I used Google Chrome 2.0

I plan to read, experiment and blog more about the Google Wave Platform, Protocol and Wave extensions in the near future.

Technorati Tags: Google Wave, Google Wave Developer Sandbox, XMPP