First aves

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.