The Braindumpery

So Google has unveiled Google Wave, which they promote as a replacement for email. It’s kinda like a distributed Facebook. It aims to replace IM, email, forums, wikis, blogs, photo galleries and anything else a plugin writer wants to embed.

The Gist

The central feature of Wave is that each message is part of a “wave” or “discussion.” Replies are automatically part of the wave and when new people are added (think CC’d) to the wave they can see the entire history of the wave from the first message that started it. Once a wave starts any participant can annotate, reply, edit, and imbed pictures, maps or just about anything else.

The Two-Edged Plugin Sword

When I label Wave a “distributed Facebook” I’m referring to its limitless extendability and chaotic interface where lots of people are constantly pouring in comments, photos, notes, and invitations to play sudoku, chess, etc. So like any good tool, wave plugins have the potential for extreme productivity or severe time wasting. Personally I fear the plugin space becoming riddled with time wasters and people feeling entitled to “invite” me to participate in their mob wars/treasure hunt/fantasy vine-swinging league just because I gave them my wave address. On the upside embedding maps in a message or even a full-fledged Evite-type interface becomes a snap; emails that essentially invite you to some web site to experience richer interaction are obsolete since things like Evites, forum discussions, Chipotle order forms, wiki pages, or online auctions can be embedded in a message in live form rather than static links.

I’m curious to know just what it means to “install” a plugin. What level of interaction can I have with a wave if I don’t have all of the plugins that it requires installed? Will it get to execute in whole or part in my browser without my installing it, or does installing just give it access to my private information and preferences?

The Uncertain

What does this mean for spammers and spammees? Not much but on the whole it gives spam victims a better environment in which to filter out spam, and spammers more tools with which to make their payloads obnoxious. Kudus to Google for not overselling any feature of wave as a solution to the inherent cost of open communication that is spam.

I’ll have to check the documentation or maybe even the white papers, but I get the impression that, while communication is encrypted, all communication is still visible to the servers involved. Obviously this is unavoidable if the client is a web app; in that case the server has to know the content of the message in order to present it, but as someone will eventually write native clients I’d rather hoped there would be a way to make communication secure from snooping by server administrators. Of course Google likes having access to all your emails for data mining purposes so it wouldn’t surprise me if this option is missing from the protocol.

And what about offline access and what of waves whose originating server or account becomes defunct? It would be bad indeed if I close a wave account and all the waves I originated disappear from the inboxes of the other participants. Also, does the real-time simultaneous nature of editing waves make it impractical to do offline editing and composition?

I also wonder if the interface will scare off would-be adopters. As I said it’s kinda chaotic and forces users to make more decisions than traditional email interfaces; for example, do I reply to the message below it, in the middle of it, or all over the place, or do I just edit it, or add some obscure plugin that I think will help the conversation and worry about whether other people will have the plugin? Admittedly there are as many ways to compose a reply in today’s email systems, but at least it mostly boils down to editing text.

So I’ve my misgivings but good on ya Google having a crack at replacing one of the internet’s most deeply entrenched protocols. Maybe it’ll catch on.