Google Wave

Google Wave, a new tool for communication and collaboration on the Web, leverages an innovative real-time multi-user document known as a Wave. Each Wave is a hosted document that can be used for various idiomatic workflows including, but not limited to, instant-messaging-style conversation, document collaboration, photo sharing, event organizing, live blogging, meeting agendas, flame wars, or a combination of all of the above.

In the simplest form, each Wave contains a hierarchy of named XML documents. Each of these documents supports concurrent modifications and low-latency updates between their participants. The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to XMPP that defines how these hosted documents are shared between organizations and their users (typically bounded via domain name, in the same style as email or an instant-messaging service). This XMPP extension is an almost completely new type of protocol, one that is far from the delayed nature of SMTP and requires a greater level of reliability than traditional instant messaging. More broadly, this new protocol poses various challenges for development and deployment, some of which may even be seen as hurdles to mainstream adoption.

This talk will present the Google Wave Federation Protocol and discuss its relationship to existing systems and networks.