harnir’s blog

This post is also available in Polish. Ten wpis jest również dostępny po polsku.

Whoosh.

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of a Wave.

I just finished watching the video presentation of Google Wave, which probably all of you did before me anyway. I feel stumped. Just think about it - when this product goes online, Internet will become divided - there will be things inside a wave and things outside a wave. If it picks up (and I’m sure it will, it looks that good anyway), our world, ways of communication, the perception of information will be changed forever.

E-mail, IRC, Jabber, internet forums, blogs, Twitter and other microblogging websites, Usenet news - those and similar protocols will be either eradicated or on a brink of heat death in 8-10 years. As for information centers like Wikipedia, I’m not sure - if there will be a way to make a wave “public”, ie. visible and searchable for anyone on the ‘net, then these services might get hit too. In that case in 15-20 years Internet (or rather most of it) will be transformed into Wavenet. The problem is - what should an average developer do now? I guess he can deploy his application as a web service, and transform it to the Wave bot when the system goes online, with benefit of a head start.

I really like that Google decided to make a full blown protocol instead of doing everything on their servers, like Gmail. XMPP was really created for stuff like that - instant communication with many clients at once, in a global, decentralized environment. And that way Google neatly bypasses the “monopoly” accusations from Microsoft, Apple and others. I mean, what’s the problem? You have a protocol, show us what you can do with it. Neat. :)

In it’s presentation, Google mentioned Chinese - I wonder how Wave will cope with censorship, especially in China, Belarus and recently in other countries. Will it be saved from it? Probably not, considering simple block of the protocol on the routers in China. Or Chinese could go with a different route and, for example create a bot which would automatically add itself to all Waves from and to China and monitor them (considering automatic translation from 40+ languages a valuable addition), letting the government spy on it’s people. What, you say they won’t be able to do that? Just create a national Wave server for .cn domain and monitor it’s use, adding a spy bot to each wave. Simple as that. When you think of it, that might be one of the biggest flaws of the system - you have all those clients, bots and services, and ultimately every message has to go through a central server, on which the operator can do whatever he wants. But maybe I’m wrong and somebody already creates an even more decentralized version of the wave protocol, similar to BitTorrent. That would be awesome for some countries and people, I’m sure. And don’t forget about the encryption, GPG, stuff like that - even if not on the protocol level (which I really hope will have encryption available by default) then on the message level itself.

I also wonder about the media. In a presentation Google employees sent to each other images, movies and other stuff. I wonder where’s the content held - probably in “the cloud”? Tough choice considering privacy, copyright and ownership of the content. But even right now if you put something on the Internet, it really stops being only your property. Everyone can copy and share stuff, collaborate on it right now, and when the Wave comes, it will be even easier. What you say, that you will be able to send copyrighted material on the wave, with lock-in and DRM? And nobody will be able to hack that? Don’t even think about it, because the second it goes out, people will pick it up, one way or the other, put it on a new wave and there goes your precious protection system… Just look at the BitTorrent today. Tomorrow (”later this year”) it will become as popular as e-mail is today. Nightmare of the RIAA and the MPAA.

Well, ’till the end of the year then. We shall see what happens next. All I know - this year’s Christmas won’t be the same.

wave

Audio-visual transmission sent over the Cortex. Full waves (audio and visual) are generally only available within major Alliance systems. Once a ship has left a major system (or is traveling in a system too unimportant to have a Cortex beacon), the sender must resort to more primitive means of communication. — Firefly Wiki

You can’t stop the signal…