[p2p-research] Google Wave

[Smári McCarthy]

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The challenges of Google Wave:

  1. We must ensure that it becomes Society's Technology and not
Google's Technology; any monopoly on digital communications is
inherently bad, but I needn't lecture people on the p2p research list
about that!

  2. We must ensure that older forms of communication be bidirectionally
compatible to as large an extent as possible; our thousands of e-mail
thoughts must not be lost.

  3. We must ensure that this does not raise, but rather lowers, the
barrier to entry for low end computing. Currently only a small fraction
of humanity has connectivity and that is changing only with the adoption
of cheap low end computers in developing nations. The processing
overhead of XML is vastly higher than that of plain text e-mails, to a
degree that it might exclude things like the Thinner Client (a $10
microprocessor unit with a few kilobytes of memory that hooks up to a
television). Bridging technologies must exist also.

  4. At the end of the day, we must be able to say: "Ah, that was a good
idea." ... and although I join in the Google Wave hype just as much as
everybody else who's looked at it and seen in it the protocol of the
future, I currently cannot say that, because I see huge problems that
stem from the ownership of ideas, the loss of history, and the exclusion
of billions.

  - Smári



Tomas Rawlings wrote:
> I guess most people will have heard of Google Wave;
> 
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html
> 
> 
> The interesting idea of re-writing web-communication in a matter that
> starts with a more peer-centred approach rather than end-to-end snail
> mail model that email was based upon.  It merges ideas from wikis and
> blogs and IRC into email.  What I though was interesting was that they
> say they will open-source the technology.  This seems to me going back
> to the ideas I first heard Michel expound, that of the commons holding
> the value and the buisness building around this; is this a tacit
> admission by Google of this?
> 
> 
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