Google Wave “is anti-Web”

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/06/google-wave-is-anti-web/

by Anon84 • 17 years ago

53 58 17 years ago

blogs.ft.com

He makes a good point. After all, that's what the UNIX philosophy is all about - small, well-written programs that do one job well, and can work together easily. I like having a lightweight IM client, and regular email. From what I've seen of wave, I wouldn't like it. I think this articulates very well what I didn't like about it.

However, that's exactly what I don't like about a lot of Microsoft's software. Outlook for instance, tries to include every feature you need in your office, and it crashes on me all the time because it has too many pieces.

Please note that in saying this, I do recognize that the man they are talking about doesn't seem like the kind to always tow the party line at Microsoft. After all, he said their mindset was "scary" when he got there.

noodle• 17 years ago

i dunno. maybe its just me, and maybe i haven't read up enough on the plans, but it seems that the concept behind wave isn't as monolithic as its being made out to be here.

seems like its a big idea, sure, turning conversations into objects, but its not something that precludes writing smaller programs to do specific jobs with respect to the objects. google is working on the outlook-in-scale type application in order to try and fully display the possibilities of the wave concept, but the open system will (seemingly, to me, at least) allow for apps with specific purposes. sleeker apps to do smaller jobs and use the objects to interact.

TallGuyShort3• 17 years ago

Well I certainly need to learn more about the protocol itself before I can say anything more intelligent on the topic. If anyone wants to join me, I just found this site, which I wasn't aware of, before:

http://www.waveprotocol.org/

snprbob86• 17 years ago

Has anyone ever actually used Groove? Or Mesh? They are both awful. I've heard Lotus Notes was even worse. I don't really put much weight on Ozzy's opinion.

That said, I think Wave is VERY WEB. Which is exactly why it stands a chance of succeeding where Ozzy's attempts have failed. I looked at the protocol and it doesn't seem all that crazy or complex. Robots can be written in any language as long as they can read and write JSON over HTTP. Gadgets are written in HTML and Javascript and are deployed over the web. It appears that near 100% of the gadgets and robots they demoed are UNIX-style "small, well-written programs that do one job well" and they plugin to a more complex UI.

Distributed, micro-kernel applications -- like the web -- do not preclude big ideas and large host apps. Browsers themselves are incredibly complex. If Wave proves to have utility and people use it, I don't see how it could fail.

ShabbyDoo• 17 years ago

Yes, I see the underlying platform of Wave as basically distributed version/concurrency control. I don't believe that one must use any of the Wave client stuff to interoperate. Furthermore, isn't this just a matter of degree vs. kind? One could make the argument that the standard for an email message is overly restrictive or that IM protocols limit innovation.

I tried Groove back in the day, and it was actually one of the first "prior art" things I thought of when watching the Wave demo video. And, IIRC, Groove's backend was some sort of XML database....

wglb• 17 years ago

Lotus Notes was a very imaginative product. I used it for a while at a couple of clients while I was consulting. One application was to build a moderately sophisticated document tracking workflow process. The other was to build various small databases for status reports and project status applications.

It was exceedingly simple to build simple network-based applications that would pretty much instantly replicate to wherever you wanted it. The applications were not very pretty, and all had a similar look and feel. It was extremely imaginative. I remember Bill Gates even back then, while taking a jibe at Ozzie for putting an OS in the product, said that he was one of the smartest programmers out there.

The web kind of changed everyone's way of thinking about that sort of stuff, and Notes kind of faded.

I am not quite sure what being anti-web means. If web means nice GUI brower stuff, then maybe, but if you think of web as being protocols with clients and servers, then I wouldn't agree.

batasrki• 17 years ago

I get the feel that Ozzie feels upstaged by Google. He's been trying really hard to do "collaboration tools" since Lotus Notes with not much mainstream success.

And now, here comes Google and boom, everyone wants one.

uhbvgytgb2• 17 years ago

>"small, well-written programs that do one job well" Like a browser thats an integral part of the OS and can't be removed.

ori_b• 17 years ago

I don't see what this has to do with the topic.

If you're trying to say that the browser sucks, I don't entirely disagree. I'd love to see web-aware apps with better development frameworks take over, in place of trying to shoehorn applications into the browser.

The browser is not a very good application platform, but that has nothing to do with Google Wave.

kevinpet• 17 years ago

Wave fits the Unix philosophy more than those small, well-written programs that do one job do. The unix philosophy isn't about single purpose programs vs. all-encompassing beasts, it's about interoperability. In unix, this meant line oriented text files, and lots of programs that can deal with that. Consider 'ls': it prints in single column format when the output is not a tty, so that you can easily consume the output elsewhere.

Wave is defining a new set of interoperability standards for everything like a conversation.

reyu• 17 years ago

->"Rather, it is an attempt to foist a fully-formed, complex system onto the online ecosystem, and the Web rejects such approaches."

Ozzie's arguments as presented in this condensed article seem vague to me. I'm not sure if he's trying to argue that Google Wave represents the AOL "walled garden" approach. If so, I don't think Wave is comparable.

mike_organon• 17 years ago

I disagree with that quote by Ozzie. The wave protocol is an extension of an existing IM protocol. The app is a combination and rethinking of existing web concepts (IM, email, and others). This isn't something entirely new. Also, other providers, along with robots and gadgets, do not need to be nearly as complex as the Wave app to participate, allowing more interop than is possible now with the old protocols.

notmyname• 17 years ago

Ozzie may be right, but only if one tries to implement Wave on top of the web. Sure the interface may be on the web (for some Wave clients), but the underlying protocol, from my understanding, works along side http. Similar to how smtp works along side http even if the user interface is on the web.

Google's demo was the possibility, and, yes, it was a shiny system, but I don't get the impression that Google is trying to sell that system. They are pushing the underlying architecture and protocols. Their demo was made up of several "independent and interoperable implementations of services from toolkits of foundational technologies." And the "foundational technologies" is the Wave protocol.

fizx• 17 years ago

IM is "anti-web" too, and its doing fine. While the Google Wave client may be too much, the open wave protocol represents an improvement over http and im protocols in use today. I'm sure that it will find its niche(s), and perhaps become mainstream when it finds its killer app (which may or may not be from the big G).

TallGuyShort3• 17 years ago

I'm not arguing - I'm just curious, but what makes you say that IM is "anti-web"? Because it's private? Or because the current maintstream protocols have adopted too many features?

jmillikin6• 17 years ago

IMs communicate over their own protocols, such as XMPP or OSCAR, not the Web.

sp3322• 17 years ago

The web != the internet. IM uses the internet, but is not part of the web because you can't link to an IM.

Four principles for being pro-web:

1. Use URIs as names for things

2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.

3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.

4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

(From Time Berners-Lee's essay on linked data: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html )

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

I think his point is it's "anti-web" but who cares? The internet is not just about the web. Saying something is "anti-web" is not necessarily an argument against it by itself.

arebop• 17 years ago

According to the article, Ozzie objects to the way that Wave has sprung almost-fully-formed from Google rather than evolving slowly by the codification of observations about successful implementations.

The headline is a claim about what Wave is and not about how it came to be.

I'm not an insider and I probably haven't studied Wave as closely as Ozzie['s staff], but it appears to be consistent with web architecture: the interactions are basically stateless client-server, there is a uniform interface for operational transformations, it accommodates caching, and it imposes enough structure to support layering.

jmillikin6• 17 years ago

I think he's wrong, for several reasons:

The services Wave aims to replace -- instant messengers, E-mail, IRC, groupware, Usenet -- are not part of the Web. While there are gateways between the Web and other Internet-based platforms, such as webmail and Mibbit, I'd guess that most interaction remains separate from the Web. Therefore, at worst, replacing these services with Wave is irrelevant to the status of the Web.

In a related note, Google itself has released Web gateways for E-mail and Usenet. I do not believe that they have since forgotten what the Web is. Indeed, Google's demonstration video itself demonstrates a Wave <-> Web gateway, in the form of an Javascript-based web application.

Second, Ozzie espouses an incorrect view of what Wave is. Based on the information Google has released so far, Wave is -- just like HTTP -- a protocol for communication between cooperating, heterogeneous agents. Aside from implementing Wave, which is merely a set of extensions to XMPP, no additional cooperation is required to write a Wave-enabled application. His statement that "Wave is just too big and complex a system" reveals just how fundamentally he fails to understand it.

Here, I take a quote and replace "Web" with "Wave":

"""As Ozzie described it, the power of Wave lies in the ability of many different developers to build their own, independent and interoperable implementations of services from toolkits of foundational technologies. It doesn’t matter if some of these implementations are very basic and lack the full capabilities of others: what matters is that they can be created easily and interoperate. """

Doesn't it remain true? Doesn't it still make sense?

I believe that Wave will be a roaring success, for the same reasons SMTP, NNTP and HTTP have been -- simple to implement, distributed, and not controlled by any single party.

axod6• 17 years ago

>> "simple to implement"

I haven't looked into wave in much detail, but being based on XMPP is by no means simple. XMPP is the most over engineered over complex verbose ridiculous protocol ever invented. There were several people saying Jabber would kill IRC years ago.

I'm reserving judgement on wave personally, I'm skeptical it'll be able to make a dent. Technically awesome, but I'm not convinced yet it solves real problems users have.

calambrac• 17 years ago

You've never seen SOAP and WS-*, then, I guess?

jmillikin6• 17 years ago

>> There were several people saying Jabber would kill IRC years ago

Who?

I doubt anybody knowledgeable would claim that Jabber would kill IRC, since the two protocols serve largely different purposes. Jabber has killed off most of the smaller closed IM networks, and even the large ones are smaller than they once were.

As for the claimed difficulty of implementing XMPP, I'd like to see some more references on that. I'm writing an XMPP library now, and it doesn't seem particularly difficult. With only an hour or two of work, it can connect securely to 3rd-party servers and act as a useful bot. With a bit more work, I'm sure it could be a production-quality library.

Furthermore, the proliferation of implementations for various languages and platforms suggests that the barrier to entry for an XMPP library is rather low.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

Instant messengers are not yet "part of the web", but are trending that way (my family uses Google Talk via the GMail page, for instance).

A huge portion of all Mail users use it exclusively via the web. That an archaic non-web protocol might bounce those messages from site to site is besides the point.

I don't want to get axod started on IRC.

Groupware is exclusively the province of the net now. Even in big companies, which have coalesced around Sharepoint.

Usenet was supplanted by blogs, blog comments, blog-search, and news aggregation sites.

tlrobinson2• 17 years ago

People seem to forget that the internet isn't just "the web". It's simply not realistic for certain applications to be built on the web (I mean the Wave protocol, not Google's Wave client)

And of course this is coming from a top executive at one of Google's main competitors. They don't have a history of saying nice things about Google, Apple, etc.

adw• 17 years ago

This isn't my idea, it's my colleague's, but he managed to get it through my thick skull this morning: it's all about the robots.

Wave robots can do anything, including publishing from a wave to somewhere else, filtering and parsing, importing content, linking, whatever. They're bidirectional pipelines! And that means they're a fantastic tool for automating things, and what's more, they're easy to explain to people less technical than us mob.

Imagine this: "here, i'll copy in the room booking robot", which goes away and reads the wave to book you a room, just as you might copy a secretary into an email conversation if you were lucky enough to have administrative support...

Two of the web services I've got most from recently have been Highrise and Tripit, in both cases because I can just forward them stuff and what I wanted to happen happens. Google Wave makes building that kind of app much, much easier.

That gets my attention, anyway.

stilist• 17 years ago

It seems the age of intelligent agents may have finally arrived. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent)

nailer2• 17 years ago

Why do we care what the creator of Lotus Notes has to say regarding the web?

ambition• 17 years ago

Mostly because he is now smart, wealthy and powerful.

nailer2• 17 years ago

So is Warren Buffet. Both have very little to do with the web.

omouse• 17 years ago

Because Lotus Notes was one of the first groupware applications which Google Wave looks like it's trying to be.

tybris• 17 years ago

To summarize, Wave does not kiss.

billybob• 17 years ago

"That was the verdict of... Microsoft’s top software guru"

This may be kneejerk, and I don't know anything about Mr. Ozzie, but try reading it this way: "Google's new web thing denounced by maker of competing desktop things."

Even if he's right, it just doesn't sound objective.

cjoh• 17 years ago

Google Wave is Anti-Web says Microsoft? How rich.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

Says Ray Ozzie.

cdibona• 17 years ago

I was mentally replacing "Wave" with "Azure" and it made the article much more accurate. Just sayin...

Raphael• 17 years ago

My foot.

Google Wave “is anti-Web”

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