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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. Wh

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.

axod 17y 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 17y ago
  You've never seen SOAP and WS-*, then, I guess?
  - andrewf 17y ago
    The best WS-* is WS-I, which lays out the ways in which you should use SOAP and the rest of WS-* if you actually want to talk to anyone.
- jmillikin 17y 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.
  - axod 17y ago
    From a previous thread on XMPP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 Even the specs for XMPP+extensions seem to be written in XML, running to thousands of pages due to the overly-general-underly-practical nature.
    - jmillikin 17y ago
      Yes, it's difficult to establish a secure connection. This is due to the nature of security in general, and is not inherent to XMPP. If you want to just write plain-text messages without authentication, you could do so with netcat. If you want to use digest-auth and SSL, obviously the client and server will be more complicated. Many servers will outright refuse to authenticate a connection unless it's using TLS and digest auth, which is an excellent idea. I don't think expecting any modern protocol to support typing commands in by hand over netcat/telnet is reasonable.
tptacek 17y 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.

axod 17y 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 17y ago
You've never seen SOAP and WS-*, then, I guess?
- andrewf 17y ago
  The best WS-* is WS-I, which lays out the ways in which you should use SOAP and the rest of WS-* if you actually want to talk to anyone.
jmillikin 17y 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.
- axod 17y ago
  From a previous thread on XMPP: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 Even the specs for XMPP+extensions seem to be written in XML, running to thousands of pages due to the overly-general-underly-practical nature.
  - jmillikin 17y ago
    Yes, it's difficult to establish a secure connection. This is due to the nature of security in general, and is not inherent to XMPP. If you want to just write plain-text messages without authentication, you could do so with netcat. If you want to use digest-auth and SSL, obviously the client and server will be more complicated. Many servers will outright refuse to authenticate a connection unless it's using TLS and digest auth, which is an excellent idea. I don't think expecting any modern protocol to support typing commands in by hand over netcat/telnet is reasonable.

tptacek 17y 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.