I have access to the Google Wave sandbox and have been privileged to try it out. This concern about Google controlling the distribution of all information in the future is not warranted. The Google Wave API makes it clear that servers will share the hosting of waves. Which servers? Depends on the participants. Not necessarily Google, as the Google Wave API will be open source. This means that waves can be started on any host and Google likely would not be a participant. They could continue to provide search services that some would say are ubiquitous, but that’s another story.

“I think Google Wave is a pet project that happens to tap into the buzz word of realtime collaboration, but it fails to deliver something that could be actually useful.”

There will always be a role for the pony express, but anyone who thinks realtime collaboration is just a buzz word is in for a rude awakening. It’s going to happen. The only issue is when will there be a critical mass that supplants emailing and IM with robust realtime collaboration. When this does finally happen, it is difficult to say that there will be anything better than Google Wave for this purpose. Concerns about information overload are legitimate (e.g. Bill Gates quitting Facebook because he has too many FB friends), but the bottom line is that people can do more with recordable realtime collaboration (instant feedback in both or many directions) than with just email.

I’m sure there will be an adjustment period online for the less inclined and less tech savvy users, but they will come eventully. Google Wave is very exciting and I cannot wait to get my hands on the beta release of it in the coming months.

Trust in ‘the Google’ :-)

I can’t wait to try it out and see if Wave lives up to its promise.

You say that Google has failed at their attempts at social media. While this is correct, I think you mistake the Wave for being a social media platform. It is not. The social media platforms will adopt the Wave as the communications standard, leaving “chat” IM, email, forums, and comments like these behind. Why, I’ll bet that even you will replace this commenting system with a wave based one when it becomes available for you to do so.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that users won;t like the real time aspect of it. I just don’t see that.
1) In Google’s client implementation (as seen in the demo video) you can simply turn off the real time if you want the wave to act more like IM does today
2) we’ve had full duplex phones for as long as I can remember. Those don’t freak anyone out. I don’t see why having that happen in a text environment will
3) You mention the real time sharing of photos. How is this different from an email attachment you ask? Simple, it’s in the now. How long does it take for us to attach an image to an email (wait for upload), send email, receive email, download image and view. Would it not be more user friendly to have that happen nearly instantly?

One of the big things that makes computing, and the communications that happen through it, slow, is all the milliseconds that we spend waiting for the computer to do something. These are all wasted milliseconds, and they add up in a great big hurry. I for one would love to have my communications and computing to happen as I think. We think faster than we talk, and far faster than we type, and there’s no reason to add man-made delay to that time. But since we have added that man made delay, why not reduce that delay as much as possible.

I don’t agree with you that email works well. I much prefer IM, and realtime(ish) chat like FriendFeed and IRC to email, and use it when ever possible.

Going back to user authentication. From what you have seen you’ll have to be a Google user to access the only Wave servers in existence right now. This will change. There are already people developing Wave servers as we speak.

Cross federation authentication will happen in nearly the exact same metho that cross federations XMPP chat sessions happen right now. It’s no problem for us to understand that you could be authenticated on the AIM IM servers and yet still talk to a GTalk user, right? Why would wave be any different? It’s no problem for us to understand that you could be authenticated by your work, or by Google, and yet still send an email to me at Yahoo? Again, the same concepts apply. The fact that it’s real time doesn’t change that.

You ask where does the data live? The wavelets live on EACH server in the federation that has at least one participant in the wave. If a given wavelet has no participants on a given server, it does not appear there. (this was shown in the last 15 minutes of the video demo – the Google/Acme/other federation demo)

Let’s remember as we think about the wave. There are 2 very distinct things we’re talking about: Google’s product called Wave, and waves in general, which need not belong to Google.