Email, we hardly knew ye
With the recent announcement from Google regarding the release of Google Wave—slated for late September 2009 — I finally decided to do some reading on it. I recommend watching the abridged video of it to get an idea, though the abridged version leaves out some cool stuff about the protocol.
I love the protocol. Both Google’s actions and words point to Wave being something which is not controlled by Google in any way. The protocol will be open and Google’s reference implementation will be open source. To start with, Google will be the world’s largest Wave provider since they’re the ones who have developed the protocol, reference implementation and have done the testing on it, but ideally organizations will start offering Wave accounts in exactly the same way they offer email accounts today.
If you watch the video, you get a very ambitious view of Wave: it will not only obsolete email, but also instant messaging, polling, blogging, picture sharing and file sharing, wikis and even video games. Being a little bit familiar with XMPP — the technology Wave is built upon — I have to say it was only a matter of time before someone tried to do something this ambitious. XMPP is a beautiful protocol and open and extensible to boot. Wave seems like something that had to happen eventually.
Even if Google Wave supplants nothing other than email, it would be well worth it. Email has a lot of shortcomings, as anyone who took my networking course should appreciate. Cryptographically secure authentication and encryption end-to-end is required by the protocol — it is impossible to send anything unencrypted with Wave — and that alone is something to be pleased about.
The downside to this all is I’m getting all excited now about it and I want to start working on developing a Wave client. I’m all adult and boring these days with my “responsibilities” and so it has to get thrown to the bottom of my to-do list along with all the other cool non – research-related projects I’d love to do.
And I should say I have a horrible history of predicting which technologies will catch on and which won’t. In my world, MSN and Facebook should be failures; PGP and XMPP should have taken the world by storm. With that track record, I suppose Google Wave is doomed to be a spectacular failure, which would be a real shame.
Wave is not really a replacement for email. It does somethings very well but clearly the focus is on collaboration which is not the domain of email (though email does get used for that).
If email were invented today, it would look more like TrulyMail. Here is a company which re-invented email. Sure they have few users but that will change with time.
We all know the problems with email: You don’t know if/when your messages are delivered, too much spam, your messages are not really private, etc. TrulyMail solves these problems.
The only problem is that it is a complete replacement for email (it actually has nothing to do with email and uses its own servers). Their latest release includes integration with email to make the transition a bit easier for those of us who live in the real world (and cannot simply dump email).
You mentioned PGP but encryption is so difficult to get working that even IT people are slow to embrace it.
I think people want something simple. Wave is simple (as I see from the video) but I, for one, don’t like my data being *stored* unencrypted. Of course, an encrypted pipe is necessary but that doesn’t mean I want anyone, even Google, to have my unencrypted messages stored somewhere. Better to have true end-to-end encryption.