Posts Tagged "opensource"

Want to share a public wave with someone who hasn’t jumped on the Wave bandwagon? Need to publish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from editors and wanna-be trolls? How ’bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and displays it as a web page without the reader needing an account.

Google has released the first prototype Wave Protocol Server, for people to begin the steps to creating their own Wave servers. The code requires a Java enabled server with Openfire XMPP installed. The installation instructions include the details of preparing Openfire for use as a Wave server.

Installation of the Wave Protocol [Google Code]

The final and most exciting of the “Three Ps” is Wave as a protocol. The Product is Google owned and operated. The Platform enhances their offering. The Protocol opens the code up and makes it available for others to use, re-create, and improve. From the day Google Wave becomes available, the Wave Protocol will allow other parties to create competing products that will interoperate with Google’s offering.

To me, this is the most exciting and wonderful part of Google’s announcement. No one company stands a chance of dethroning email as the reigning form of communication on the ‘net. By opening up their idea, Wave stands a chance of becoming the way we communicate into the next decade. Only by giving users a choice about where their business critical data is stored will users begin to trust Wave like they have learned to trust email.

Google have stated that when they launch Google Wave, anyone will be able to download the “lions share” of the code to run on their own servers promising that the open-source code will run and operate almost exactly the same as the Product they offer on Google’s own servers. They liken it to the SMTP (email sending) protocol – open for everyone to create and use their own implementations as they see fit, and email has taken off because of it.

Google Wave was recently announced at the Google I/O developer conference. This is an amazing video and well worth the hour and twenty it will take you to watch it. If you’d like to know what the future of web communication might look like, you can get a head start right here.