Crushed by the Wave
As many of the blog reading net citizens Google has recently (well some time ago actually, but still feels pretty recent) opened up a draft for their Wave protocol. They plan to work together with “the community” to improve it refine it.
Now what is Wave? Wave is a planned Google service. It is said to be able to replace Mai, IM and whatnot.
What is the Wave Federation Protocol? It is a XMPP extension allowing for collaborative real-time XML editing. Before saying anything else let me just point out that I think this is great. Such a protocol is something that has been wanted in the XMPP community for a long time and a big player publishing and pushing one is just great. The protocol does still need some refinement and I hope Google will work together with the people at the XSF and the XMPP community on this front.
What Google has opened up is mostly the second. They have to some degree opened up how their service works, but right now it seems mostly proprietary, which is interesting given that what most people seem to perceive as one of the big features is the possiblilty to federate. Federation between Waves is indeed possible, but the XML used therein is currently not openly defined making it impossible to display it in a useful way.
However that’s not what I really want to talk about. What really kind of crushed me is that large parts of the community building around Wave seem insane to me. I’m just going to name some examples (not connecting them to people) of ideas people have and just point out what scares me about them. Let me also say that those ideas do not come from Google employees AFAICT. As an aside those are mostly not really protocol related.
- Introducing a new scheme for Wave addresses (note that what is meant is not the address of the wave, but the address of someone participating in one). To anybody that has been paying attention it will be pretty obvious what is wrong with this. Wave is just an extension to XMPP. Therefore each participant in a Wave will be a XMPP user and his address will be his XMPP address. If you actually build a service and make user addresses user~example.com this fundamentally breaks the protocoll Google build on.
- Embedding voice. What scared me here is mostly was the seemingly total lack of technical understanding. To elaborate a bit: What they basically wanted is to be able to do VoIP in the Wave and possibly play it back later. The idea is to embed this in the protocol somehow. Until Peter Saint-Andre went in nobody did even mention Jingle. My personal stance is that this is possible and should actually be easy to archive, but not by linking it deeply in the Wave protocol (which is as already said for collaborative XML editing). I would put a hyperlink to an on going conversation (this would need finishing up Muji and would just be a link to a MUC [i.e. xmpp:conversation@example.com?join]) and another hyperlink to a speex recording. No real magic involved. The part that nearly gave me a hear attack though was that somebody actually offered money for an implementation of very basic Asterisk integration. Which is scarry because the protocoll is actually not at a point where I wold deem an implementation of anything really useful and the amount of money was IMHO way to much for the amount of work that would be involved.
- Using it for health care patient cards. In the ligt of the Gesundsheitskarte you might understand what may problem with this idea is, but to make it quick: This is data i do absolutely not want in a wave or anything similar. Of course the basic idea is perfectly right. Healing a patient can be a collaborative effort between multiple doctors. Reviewing other peoples ideas and getting other peoples points of view is a perfectly sane idea, but it still has to be the patient who decides what personal data he wants to show whom and who needs to be rest assured that nobody that he doesn’t want to know about his heath issues doesn’t learn about them. Putting it in a Wave is just very wrong (
It’s a little wrong to say to say a tomato is a vegetable, it’s very wrong to say it’s a suspension bridge
- Stuart/Big Bang Theory).
So, I’m just going to hope that the Protocol turns out good and is put to good use and that some saner people keep on improving it. (I could say “No offence” at this point and really I don’t want to offend anyone, but it’s just that it is too easy for me to get worked up about such things and I had to get it out.)
Tags: bashing, jabber, Jabber/XMPP, oppinion, XMPP
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