Gary Edwards's Library tagged google-wave →  View Popular

Summary: Collaborative document editing means multiple editors being able to edit a shared document at the same time.. Live and concurrent means being able to see the changes another person is making, keystroke by keystroke.

Currently, there are already a number of products on the market that offer collaborative document editing. Some offer live concurrent editing, such as EtherPad and SubEthaEdit, but do not offer rich text. There are others that offer rich text, such as Google Docs, but do not offer a seamless live concurrent editing experience, as merge failures can occur.

Wave stands as a solution that offers both live concurrent editing and rich text document support. 

The result is that Wave allows for a very engaging conversation where you can see what the other person is typing, character by character much like how you would converse in a cafe. This is very much like instant messaging except you can see what the other person is typing, live. Wave also allows for a more productive collaborative document editing experience, where people don't have to worry about stepping on each others toes and still use common word processor functionalities such as bold, italics, bullet points, and headings.

Wave is more than just rich text documents. In fact, Wave's core technology allows live concurrent modifications of XML documents which can be used to represent any structured content including system data that is shared between clients and backend systems.

To achieve these goals, Wave uses a concurrency control system based on Operational Transformation.

www.waveprotocol.org/...operational-transform - Preview

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Good article.  One of the first to go beyond the demo, recognizing that Wave is application platform - a wrapper for the convergence of communications and content.

Excerpt: Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation.

What the Wave demo showed is support for a continuum from the shortest messages to longer and longer forms of content. All of it can be shared with precise control, tagged, searched. The version history is kept. No more mailing around a document. This takes the beauty of e-mail and wikis and extends it in a more flexible way to a much larger audience.

Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary.
The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes.
But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.

www.forbes.com/...nology-cio-network-google.html - Preview

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Operational  Transforms (OT) is used by Microsoft CustomXML and Google Wave!  The original idea was first presented by Zerox Parc researchers in 1995, prior to the i4i patent.  The Jupiter System  includes the Jupiter Window Tool Kit, wich is all about OT.  XML came much later with the i4i patent for encoding XML with OT positioning.

Insert(pos, text)Delete(pos, num-of-chars)

See Google Wave API: http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform

Credit Florian Reuter for this find!!!!! 

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Press Release Excerpts: NetDocuments, the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) content management service provider, announced today that it is developing an integration with Google Wave(TM) (http://wave.google.com/) to simplify document collaboration and extend the NetDocuments collaborative reach to more people.

Google Wave is a new communication and collaboration tool, currently available as a developer preview. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. Wave supports live transmission as a person types, and participants can have faster conversations, see edits more quickly and interact with others in real time.

The integrated solution offers NetDocuments customers the following:--  Ability to create a wave within NetDocuments and display it as a    separate object in a folder. It can also be embedded as an IFrame within a NetDocuments Project/Client-Centric Workspace allowing the wave contents to be visible when viewing the entire Workspace.--  Ability to have NetDocuments folders, documents, and search results displayed within a wave.--  Drag and drop documents from an internal NetDocuments folder to a wave, and vice-versa.--  Login to the collaborative space using any methods that Google    supports.--  Leverage the real-time wave collaborative features when it's released to the market.

search.sys-con.com/1081247 - Preview

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Google programmers open source two components of the Google Wave messaging and collaboration prototype. One includes the Operational Transform, which forms the complex center of the Wave model. Google Wave is an example of the Pushbutton Web, where real-time communications rule the roost.

Google July 24 said it released to open source the OT (Operational Transform) code, the framework that enables multiple people to edit a single document in real time across a wide-area network, as well as a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to the XMPP core protocol, geared to allow near real-time communication of wave updates between two wave servers.

www.eweek.com/...oul-of-Google-Wave-Code-419286 - Preview

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Another good article form Michael Hickins, this time linking the success of Google Wave to the success of Microsoft OOXML. Rob Weir jumps in to defend , well, i'm not sure. I did however respond.

Excerpt: Developers hoping to hitch a ride on Google’s Wave have discovered that Microsoft may have unwittingly helped them resolve the single greatest problem they needed to overcome in order to challenge the dominance of Office.

When Microsoft set out to create Office 2007 using a brand new code base — Office Open XML (OOXML) — it needed to accomplish two goals: make it compatible with all previous versions of Office, and have it accepted as a standard file format for productivity tools so that governments could continue using it while complying with rules forcing them to use standards-based software. .....

Depending on your perspective, either Microsoft has sowed the seeds of its own undoing, or international standards bodies succeeded in forcing Microsoft to open itself up. Either way, Microsoft has given away the key to compatibility with Office documents, allowing all comers to overcome the one barrier that has heretofore prevented customers from dumping Microsoft’s Office suite.

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.... "While i don't see Google or anyone else replacing the MSOffice productivity environment anytime soon, i do see Google challenging Microsoft wherever the Web comes into play. As for the future, that battle for desktop productivity will take place, just not with ChromeOS, Linux, or, the MacOS. What has to happen before the assault on the Microsoft's productivity empire can begin is that the business systems bound to the MSOffice productivity environment must transition to the Open Web, via SaaS or some other replacement. Or, the productivity environment itself must be re-purposed to the Open Web.

The tricky part will be that re-purposing play. ChromeOS is a blockbuster announcement. Not a declaration of war, but a shot across the bow that shouts; Google will defend the Open Web, and profitable business they have there. .....

~ge~

www.businessinsider.com/oblem-wheres-the-market-2009-7 - Preview

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Ouch! Phil lands on Cisco like a ton of bricks. He hears them Talk the talk but doubts Cisco can walk the walk. This is a very detailed analysis and indictment. Sounds to me that Cisco will sooner rather than later be out there shopping for Collaborative Web systems.

Excerpt: Color me skeptical, but I feel the detail behind yesterday and today’s Cisco Live event hasn’t matched the aspirations set out in executive keynotes. I like the vision set out by CEO John Chambers of providing a technology infrastructure that (as Oliver Marks puts it) does a better job of connecting people. I’m highly supportive when CTO Padmasree Warrior looks ahead to a future fabric of ‘intercloud’ interoperability standards — ending lock-in by individual cloud providers — and talks about ‘federation’ between cloud and on-premise. But when I look at the map of where Cisco claims to play in the cloud, I’m struck by how feeble its tenure is at each level, from the underlying foundation all the way up to both Paas and SaaS, where WebEx is its undernourished poster child, as I’ll discuss below.

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"Horizon Info Services is committed to offering industry-leading technology services to small businesses at affordable prices."

This is an interesting approach. Horizon is a reseller of customized and enhanced Google services. They provide enterprises and SMB's with gMail hosting, on-line backup services, security, and customized Google Apps. They are also ready to dive into Google Wave, as the ultimate interface for aggregating Web based communications, messaging, conversations and collaborative documents.

www.horizoninfoservices.com - Preview

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Michael Hickens has been writing about Google Wave and how it will forever change the Web. In a recent article he took on the incredible WebKit - HTML+ phenomenon, tying in the surge of WebKit marketshare at the edge of the Web with dramatic changes taking place across greater Web.
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From Michaels article: .... "I recently described how Google's Wave, a collaboration tool based on the new HTML 5 standard, demonstrated the potential for Web applications to unglue Microsoft's hold on customers. My post quoted Gary Edwards, the former president of the Open Document Foundation, a first-hand witness to the failed attempt by Massachusetts to dump Microsoft and as experienced a hand at Microsoft-tilting as anyone I know......"
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The year 1998 marked the end of the browser wars, the end of Netscape, and the beginning of Microsoft's anti-trust woes. It also marked the beginning of XML, and the end of HTML, with the W3C leaving HTML, CSS and SVG to rot. What a year.

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Today we find the landscape considerably changed. Instead of a browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, ending with the triumph of an IE monopoly, today we have a browser race. And IE isn't a contender, having been pretty much abandoned by Microsoft once they had Netscape in the dirt.

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The introduction of XML 1.0 in 1998 ushered in a new era of customized XML schema's for all kinds of data exchanges. The Web came alive with data flows from disparate databases and transaction systems that were never designed to talk to each other. The noise across the Web, private and public, was deafening.

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There was however a few notable attempts to encode document based content in XML, with OpenOffice ODF and MSOffice OOXML taking center stage. Unlike the excitement and extraordinary Web capabilities that surrounded XML data schema work, XML documents veered away from the Web. By design, ODF and OOXML are incompatible with the language of the Web. But given the legacy of client/server dominance powerful "end-user-facing" desktop office

industry.bnet.com/...-fight-starts-with-smartphones - Preview

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Oliver has a short post concerning Google Wave and the new world the Wave will have wrought. Once section in particular caught my eye:
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<b>Two behemoths going after each others markets</b>
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<i>..."Google apps, while a very popular tool for students, has never caught on in the enterprise due to security concerns, with a few exceptions - Microsoft Office is the default in cubicle land. Google search meanwhile is currently the global market leader, and is a popular enterprise solution in the form of internal appliances behind the firewall, while Microsoft’s search and associated electronically stored information taxonomy and tagging has been famously weak."</i>
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<i>"While these two giants slug it out for the others coveted market the playing field may well change significantly as the third big internet revolution unfolds. We’ve gone from <b>Web 1.0</b>, the read only static html website world to <b>Web 2.0</b>, the read-write, ‘user generated content’ web. The explosion in interconnectedness is at the expense of information fragmentation: the third web generation (<b>Web 3.0?</b>) is all about the meaning and context of data and information.</i>
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<i>"Behaviorally suggested content; the personalized experience of a web that seems to know you and anticipates what you want is just around the corner...."</i>

blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration - Preview

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<i>....."With Wave, which Google previewed for developers at its I/O conference yesterday, developers can for the first time create Web-based applications that compete with Microsoft in terms of quality (while utterly trumping it on price). It also creates the conditions for customers to comfortably shuck off the shackles of installed software — including Office and other Microsoft products — in exchange for truly lightweight hardware like netbooks or advanced smartphones, without sacrificing the richness of their computing experience. If it gets the kind of developer love it should, Wave is just the first of a series of a breakers that will loosen Microsoft’s grip on the desktop, and may also render Adobe wholly irrelevant."</i>

<i> .... "Wave is a Web-based application that breaks artificial barriers between document types; work documents, email, instant messages, photographs, maps — Wave makes no functional distinction between them, and allows users to literally drag all those elements into a single, shareable meta-document. Wave is written using HTML 5, the first significant change to standards for Web coding since 1998. HTML 5 also forms the basis for Webkit, the language underlying the operating systems of the vast majority of smartphone browsers — Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Palm’s WebOS and Nokia’s Symbian. The one glaring omission? Microsoft Windows Mobile, of course.............. "</i>

industry.bnet.com/...le-wave-crashes-over-microsoft - Preview

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Some interesting questions about Google Wave; proposed by Om Malik and Jordan Golson, but with some hesitant reservations. As the title of this nervous commentary suggests. The narrowness and shallow context of this article is to be expected from hapless back-benchers incapable of grasping the big picture. But GigaOM? What a surprise. Maybe i should be revising my Silicon Valley information feeds?

Google is into it with Microsoft, and for the sake of the future of the OpenWeb, Google better win. How does anyone able to fog a mirror miss this? Incredible.

"..... Has Google, with its latest project, Google Wave, actually come up with the Next Big Thing in online communication, or is it yet another Googler vanity exercise? Wave is a combination of email, instant messaging and a real-time wiki — plus open architecture and APIs. Or as creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon put it, “what email would be if it were invented today.”

Om also points out another comment from Lars: <i>“Email is the most successful protocol on the planet…we can do better.” </i>

I think Google Wave is in the center of a number of revolutionary Google initiatives advanced at the recent Google I/O. HTML 5, the Canvas Tag, O3D, and the assault on the x86 Microsoft desktop stronghold are all part of Google's greatest challenge; keeping the Open Web free and competitive with the emerging MS Web.

Michael Hickens has an interesting article;<i><b> <a href="http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10001911/google-wave-crashes-over-microsoft/">Google Wave Crashes Over Microsoft"</a></b></i>. Michael spoke with me prior to publishing, and i gave him my cosmic viewpoint of how things fit together (or not). You can find a loose summary of our discussion here: <i><b><a href="http://docs.google.com/View?id=dghfk5w9_7hptc6vfn">Google Wave: Crashing the Microsoft Desktop Monopoly</a></b></i>. Clearly i am still writing :)

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