[p2p-research] Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this.

[Ryan]

Very good discussion of Wave and its implications...

Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Google Wave: You need to pay
attention to this. via JasonKolb.com by jason+PODCAST at jasonkolb.com
(Jason Kolb) on 9/16/09

So here's the deal with Wave: If you deal in technology, and you get
this one wrong, you'll miss the boat. And it's a big boat. If, on the
other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some
incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet
application architecture. Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap
since HTTP itself.

I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to
read fully thru and digest the specs and available code. I haven't done
any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you're going to start
hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.




What is it?Ok so what exactly Google Wave is can be confusing, because
there are three parts: the protocol, the server, and the client. A lot
of people are really going to miss the boat here if they don't keep the
distinction between the three in mind, because I see a lot of people
focusing on the wrong parts.The Protocol
At its core, Wave is an extension to the XMPP protocol. This is the
REALLY important part. Here I'll back up for a moment for a little
background on XMPP.

XMPP is a protocol which describes communication. It models
communication between two nodes on a network.
Now, communication can take many forms, and XMPP accommodates many of
them. It also supports different types of conversations: presence,
notifications, subscriptions, back-and-forth--these are all modeled by
XMPP. And it supports a wide variety of communication TYPES as well:
video, audio, text, and so on.
I hear people mistakenly talking about Wave as immature or new
technology. It's not. XMPP has been around since 1998, being developed
and actively worked on for almost 12 years now. It's been approved by
the IETF since 2004.

Although it's been mostly used for chat, that's only the tip of the
iceberg when you dig into this protocol. I'm still pretty flabbergasted
that this protocol hasn't been used more than it has, and I'm excited
to see somebody finally tapping into its potential.
I'll touch on what Google has brought to the table with the protocol in
a minute, but suffice to say that if Wave takes off as I hope it will,
the full power of the XMPP protocol will finally be available as a core
piece of application architecture. This is the real game-changer here,
and what you need to be thinking about.The ServerThe server (a "wave
provider") is a modified Openfire XMPP server that understands the Wave
protocol extensions. Openfire has been around for a while too.
While wave providers are used for storing and server XMPP content in
Google's implementation, there is a lot of potential in turning
existing applications into wave providers as well. Any existing
server-based content can be used as the basis for a wave, so just about
any application out there right now has the potential to extend its
existing functionality by offering its contents as waves.The ClientOk,
this is probably what you've seen videos of. It's a wave client because
it speaks wave protocol to wave providers.


What Google has done is develop the first really full-featured XMPP
client, which also uses some of their new XMPP extensions to facilitate
things like character-by-character updates. They've developed an
incredibly sexy client, and I'm glad about it, because a sexy client
like is what's required to sell an innovation this large to both the
mass market AND the technical community.What Google has done,
exactly?So what exactly has Google done to the XMPP protocol?
A couple of things:
- It recognizes a conversation as data, and stores the data in a
persistent way that can be easily referenced over time. Conversation
storage and persistence is a huge gaping hole in enterprises right now,
which you'll nod your head in agreement with if you've ever scoured a
wiki for information or cleaned out your inbox because it got too big.
- It makes XMPP conversations secure and scalable. By building in
synchronization protocols, conversations can take place distributed
across the network instead of at specific central servers (which is how
wikis, blogs, and microblogs operate).
- It describes a way to replicate content over a large network so that
it's available on a wide scale while still being fast and synchronized.
Data replication on a global (but as-needed) scale, very cool.
- It integrates a very simple and elegant security model which operates
on an as-needed basis. I've blogged about this in more detail before
here. These were some needed additions to XMPP, and really describe
some of the peer-to-peer operations that I've been looking for for a
long time.Why is this so interesting?XMPP. In case you haven't noticed,
I'm a big fan.
XMPP is so versatile that if it becomes widely adopted it will be to
the Internet what HTTP was: a platform for new types of applications.
And where HTTP as a platform is a server-centric model, XMPP is capable
of peer-to-peer communication.
Remember what happened when everyone got HTTP clients (they're called
browsers :) ? The Internet exploded. Well, if everyone gets a
full-fledged XMPP client I think you can expect roughly the same thing
to happen.
One of the most fascinating features of XMPP is the way things are
addressed. EVERYTHING is addressable over the network. You can talk
directly to ANYTHING, and ANYONE. I can't stress how big of a shift
that would be from the current model. It's HUGE. I wrote a whole series
of posts on this a few years ago, and it's just as exciting now as it
was then.
Let's take a step back and think about this for a second. I'll probably
do another post just on the addressing scheme at some point because
it's so key, but it's worth a brief recap.
- Right now I cannot send text directly to your instant message account
(unless you're using an XMPP-based client), I have to send the message
to your IM server which relays the message to you.
- I cannot send audio directly to your phone, the phone company has to
route it there.
- I cannot share a picture directly with your Facebook account, I have
to sent it to Facebook first to be carried on to you.
- I can't send a file directly to you, I have to put it on a share or
email it to you. (Not to mention the fact that these are all
disconnected, you can't combine these into a single message stream.
XMPP addresses that problem very nicely, as the wave client shows.)
XMPP removes these intermediaries from the network. Social networks and
proprietary transports no longer have an exclusive license to deliver
content, the clients talk directly to one another.
Do you see the difference? There are no longer social networks or any
other type of networks required to relay the communication, we are now
down to exactly 3 components:
- Clients
- Storage
- Applications Of course there is always the underlying dumb pipes that
transport the data, but from a functional perspective the network has
been normalized out of importance.
Clients can be whatever we need them to be. It can be the Google wave
client, it can be your phone, it can be a desktop app. These will
evolve over time, but the Google client is a fantastic starting point,
certainly light years ahead of anything else that's available today.
Storage becomes a utility, something you pay for as you go. I already
use this model myself for backups, I shoot them up to the Amazon cloud
and pay for the amount I use. As time goes on my communication--audio,
video, pictures, text--will be stored there as well, and I'll use it in
my waves as needed. (Note that waves do NOT embed this content, they
link to it and the client downloads and renders it in place.)
And the applications. This is really exciting, because just about every
application in existence will be transformed by this quantum shift in
the network topology. Applications now interact with your client and
provide input to your communication stream, and output to your storage.
They will become a facet of your communication, not a completely
disconnected activity. You will communicate with apps much in the same
way that you communicate with people, and they will communicate with
you.
Take CRM and ERP systems for example. Instead of customers emailing you
about a sale and then sending purchase orders, it will be part of
the "sale wave". The entire sale, from start to finish, will be
encapsulated in a single wave, bringing individuals in and out of the
conversation as need. The ERP and CRM platforms themselves will be
participants in this conversation, recognizing the purchase order,
executing the workflow, processing the order, making the order details
available to manufacturing or delivery in a sub-wave, and then making
the receipt available to the customer and the sales team. Your CRM
Whether you approve the purchase order from your desktop, your phone,
or a point of sale device, makes no difference--they can all be
directly addressed and participate in the conversation natively.
That's just one example off the top of my head, but I truly believe
that every software application in existence will eventually need to be
re-architected to be much less application-centric and much more
communication-centric.
The Bottom LineThis is no longer pie-in-the-sky stuff like it was when
I was first writing about it.
I have seen nothing else out there that rivals the XMPP/Wave protocol
for the sheer richness of the conversation that's possible, not to
mention the fact that it can easily turn into a bona-fide platform for
next-generation applications.
The danger, then, is that you ignore this and it takes off. You and
your application will be shut out of this rich, real-time collaborative
stream of communication. You can, of course, tack integration on later,
but the real benefit here is to the application that incorporates these
concepts into its core architecture. I can look at just about any
application out there and think of tons of potential applications for
this technology.
This is the type of revolutionary advance that is required to lift
productivity and open brand new possibilities to the extent necessary
to revive the economy, which is pretty exciting. If this post sounds
like I'm breathlessly waiting for this technology to take off, it's
because I am, and I have been for about 3 years now. Here's hoping
Google succeeds.


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