On 10 Feb 2010, at 06:50, kayode odeyemi wrote: > But I support the opinion about integrating Gmail into Wave. Reason is > because there's hardly no conversation without email these days.
There are a few things that need to be done. As fascinating as Wave is, it will have an adoption struggle because other means of communications are well entrenched, and benefit from the network effect. In other words, Google Wave suffers the same challenge as if someone came with another desktop OS, which between the established Windows and Mac, plus the free Linux, is a hard sell. Also, Wave is not yet mature enough. There are some glaring gaps in dealing with controlling access to data (Encryption!!!), and with the ability to delete data (reference counting GC sort of thing). Once these are solved Wave as a protocol can be considered "done", and it must be frozen at that point (imagine SMTP or http constantly changing...) The next step is getting an e-mail gateway working. Since E-mail is static, this is non-trivial, but it's key to allow an absorption of e-mail into wave. It would be foolish to try to solve this in a general way. I think e-mail works fine for message-reply or chat-style wave interactions. The gateway should recognize these and send/import e-mails as such. Anything beyond that should simply be turned into an e-mail message that points to a URL that allows the recipient to view the wave on some web browser. Going much beyond that would both complicate things too much and also remove too many incentives for people actually dumping e-mail as we know it and moving to Wave. A further step, when it comes to replacing IM clients, is that VoIP, is integrated. Voice and video conferences, with the option to capture these and embed them in the wave as sound or movie clips. Least but not last have to be fool proof wave servers that are close to point and click installs, such that federation can meaningfully work. There need to be "just works" type servers for (barf) Windows, Mac OS X Server, Linux and BSD. People want to be in control of their data, and with e-mail they are, if they run their own mail server. This list here is basically a collection of why despite the fact that I sent out dozens of Wave invites to friends, the Wave account is close to unused. No ability to delete and/or encrypt waves is near the top, people just don't want to have every goof-up permanently recorded in the history books or open to snoops of all sorts. The recent cyber attacks on Google should be more than ample to underline the importance of encryption. The lack of e-mail and IM integration is a second issue, because most people have ONE mode of communication. There are the IM types, who hardly ever send an e-mail, and there are the e-mail types, who hardly ever touch IM. None of then wants "yet another app" to deal with, but they might consider SWITCHING to Wave, provided it allows them to continue what they are currently used to doing and doesn't involve the effort to try to convert all their conversation partners to move to a new platform first. (Chicken & Egg network effect thing...) And lastly, people like me, have a distaste for the sort of cloud computing where critical data is held hostage, I have my own computing infrastructure, thank you, and if the internet goes down, I still have access to my data, and that's the way it should be; which means until 100% fully featured Wave servers can't be installed on my own computers (incl. web interface and all) and federation works in large scale deployments, Wave will remain a toy and a cool technology demonstration, but I'll avoid it for real work, and stick to e-mail and IM, where I'm master over my information storage. Ronald -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Wave API" group. To post to this group, send email to google-wave-...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-wave-api+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-api?hl=en.
