[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

Sat May 30 11:24:19 UTC 2009

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 6:49 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> > Yeah, sure. Like the way Jabber killed proprietary protocols like MSN
> > and AIM, right? It's been 9 years since the first release now.
>
> This is a completely other path. As I said, I thought that the
> development of something almost identical to the Wave would be much
> slower. However, at this point, there is one large corporation behind
> it and it is not partially, like they are behind XMPP with their
> Gtalk.

If AOL had built XMPP into AIM in 1997, the story would have played out much
differently.

> The proprietary IM networks will steal the best ideas from Wave and
> > add their own bit of marketing spin, which somehow, to the hoards of
> > faithful users, will seem even cooler than what Google Wave can do.
> > That's assuming they even perceive a threat.
>
> Yes, this is potential problem.

It's weird, because what I see as the killer apps for this have nothing to
do with instant messaging, and nothing to do with email either.

I'm not sure if it'll catch on, because Google seems to have added so much
extraneous crap into the mix, but given the ability of people to adapt
Google services to novel uses, maybe it will catch on.

I don't plan on replacing my email or instant messenger with this (though
hopefully plain old vanilla gmail will be built in and I won't have to).  I
might replace my Google Reader, though, when someone comes up with an RSS
bot.  I might also replace a few private wikis I have, especially if my
friends on those private wikis find Wave easier to use.

My initial dislike of the idea turned when I stopped trying to think of Wave
as email, as Google is pushing it.

> Browsers are something Microsoft actually supports and packages with
> > their OS, unlike federated, open-protocol IM clients, which as we've
> > seen over the past 9 years, they are not interested in. They've even
> > discontinued their IRC client.
>
> There will be web interface, too.

I thought that's all it was was a web interface...  IIRC the preview was run
in Chrome and Firefox, wasn't it?