Wave
= project by Google that promises to 'overtake email'
Discussion
Thomas Lord: Why Wave Matters
"I think the real advance - albeit an incremental one anticipated in the designs it builds upon - is in the protocols and data model.
And I don't think the protocols and data model
are anywhere near done and I'm certain that there
are flaws in the current design, but here is why
they matter:
To a first approximation, every resource on
the web as we know it today is identified by
a host-based URL. Of course most commonly
the URL has the form:
Contrary to popular assumption, we do not name
resources on the web - we name hosts and
relative addresses within hosts. If I type into
the location box on my browser:
My browser operates correctly not when it returns
to me a verbatim copy of the GPLv3 in plain text format but, rather, when it contacts the host "example.com" and asks it to reply to a GET request for "/docs/GPLv3.txt".
In effect, a URL of that form does not name the
document - it names a question posed to whomever
currently owns "example.com".
In fact, there is no widely accepted, human-friendly,
secure, distributed and decentralized namespace in
which I can name some specific text - like a GPLv3 text
file originally published by the FSF - and expect
a browser to find it.
Wave opens that door a crack. There's still
some chains keeping the door closed but the deadbolts
have been unlocked and the door cracked a couple of
inches and with a few swift kicks the rest inevitably
follows. The web-as-you-know-it has numbered days,
now.
Wave opens the door, more specifically, to a
secure, human-friendly, browser-friendly (really,
user-agent-friendly), distributed, decentralized,
dynamically updated, secure, and location independent
namespace for web resources. A namespace in which
routing is based on content or resource name and goes
to any convenient verifiable host of that has that
content or can provide that resource.
The way that Wave encourages this is by encouraging
the development of clients that route to resources
by host-independent IDs like wave ids, wavelet ids,
and document ids -- while at the same time leaving
fairly open ended what a document id is and leaving
open to extension what an id is.
Wave initiates the game of building a much needed
and much anticipated overlay network that can operate
in a distributed and decentralized way, giving names to
resources rather than questions to hosts."
(Autonomous mailing list, June 2009)