Wave In A Box

Last week Google announced their plans to enable others to keep Wave alive. It will be the first step for a federated Wave community that is independent of Google.

It's a good thing but I'm also leery of Google's open source efforts. The FedOne server seems over engineered for what it does. Sometimes I think Google employs too many smart people. A few more pragmatic programmers might provide a better balance. I'm hoping Wave In A Box simplifies everything a little bit.

On the other hand, FedOne is written in Java which always looks over engineered to me, so maybe I'm completely wrong. ^_^

Wave Replacement

Google's decision to discontinue Wave caught a lot of people by surprise and left many looking to alternatives. Google intended from the start that it would not be the only provider for Wave so federation was designed into the protocol at an early stage. However most of the alternatives are not quite ready for production use yet.

Novell Pulse may be the best option for enterprise users. For the casual user, there is supposed to be an free version but it is not clear when that will be available. Another option is WaveLook. And no, I'm not referring to the Outlook based client. ^^ They are working on a browser based version but it is not clear if this is just a client or a full web service, or even if it will be free.

In theory it should be possible to run one's own server and still access the federated Wave network. I'm aware of three open source servers but they are all far from complete.

FedOne, Google's reference server, is the most advanced but it still lacks support for bots and persistent storage is not built in. You have to add it yourself and since this is written in Java, that won't be so easy for me. I haven't even been able to build this server yet.

PyGoWave is another open source Wave server. It is written in Python so I could hack on it more easily but the roadblock is that it requires MySQL. Since I already have PostgreSQL running, I really don't want to run another database server. So I would need to modify PyGoWave before I can even try to get it running.

The third option is RubyOnSails. I haven't investigated this one yet, so I can't say any more about it for now. For all I know, it may be the best of the bunch.

And even if I get a Wave server running, there's still the not so minor problem of a Wave client... We live in interesting times, indeed.

Google Cancels Wave

Yesterday, Google announced that it has cancelled Wave development. As one of the few people who found Wave useful, even if it was only for role playing games, I'm quite disappointed. For the vast majority of people, though, Wave was simply a disappointing enigma.

Google has released some Wave code and published the protocol, so it is possible that an open source project may emerge. The question is whether the community is large enough to support such a project. At this point, only time will tell.

Trolling On The Wave

It's rather sad how quickly the Internet trolls force everyone to circle the wagons and become defensive. Wave is no exception. A moderated wave had to setup after a someone trashed the index wave for all the role playing games. I guess this a problem we are never going to out run as long as there is someone who doesn't want to share the commons.

Wave Improvements

Wave improvements are sometimes announced but I think most changes are not. In the latter category, earlier this week I noticed that waves are loading significantly faster, perhaps as much as two times faster. When I first started using Wave, one annoyance was that Ctrl-Z (undo) did not work. A while later, I discovered by accident that this feature had been added. I've now subscribed to the blog I linked above, but I wonder if they mention the more subtle changes there. If someone knows of a detailed change log, let me know.

Wave Mysteries

I am totally mystified by Wave's CPU and memory usage. Load a large (over 150 blips) but simple (text only) wave and watch your browser's memory usage soar to 500MB. On my older 2GHz Athlon 64, CPU usage hits 98%! What on earth is Wave doing that needs that much resources just to display lots of text? Since Wave is still alpha software, one hopes that those resource demands will improve, but even a 50% improvement would still be outrageously high.

Wave! What Is It Good For?

Absolutely nothing! Yes, I know it's just sad that I'm referencing Springsteen.

After lurking on a few Wave RPGs, I finally decided to try playing in one. I suspect that makes me one of the few people that has found something to do on Wave. Note carefully however, I didn't say it was a useful something.

People who expect technology to do useful things, are out of luck on Wave. That means that a lot of people are activating their accounts, logging in once, poking around a bit, concluding Wave is useless, and never ever logging in again.

I've concluded that Wave requires you to imagine a use for it, before it becomes useful. Seriously. That's so stupidly counter-intuitive that I reached a second conclusion:

Google probably doesn't know what Wave is good for either.

(This post was sponsored by the makers of the italic font style.)

Personal Wave

My main problem with Wave is not technical, but social. When I finally got some Wave invites to hand out, I naturally gave one to all my close friends. They are all geeks so one would think that they would be playing with the new shiny thing at least a little bit. But life away from the keyboard takes priority, so they really haven't been visiting Wave very much. Today was actually the first time I had a real time conversation on Wave with someone I know well. Weird that it took so long.

Chrome

I've been using the Google Chrome browser as a dedicated Wave client for about a week and have been very impressed. Chrome easily beats Firefox in memory usage and performance, which is most useful when using an oinker application like Wave.

However, I won't be switching to Chrome completely for my daily browsing needs, until essential functionality like NoScript are available. Once that happens, Firefox's days are numbered as the main web browser on Linux.

Fun With Alpha Waves

I'm starting to enjoy myself on Wave now. At first I couldn't find anything to do that kept me interested for very long, but finding the roleplaying waves gave me something to explore further. And, a few friends are finding their way on the system, and everything is better with good friends. But, this is alpha (maybe pre-alpha ^_^) software, so there are a few humorous quirks. Well, maybe not so humorous...

For example, once you add a person to a wave, you are stuck with them. That's right, you can't delete them. I discovered this after I accidentally added someone to a wave. Fortunately it was a scratch wave, and I know the person well, because any wave member can change that wave, including adding new members. Wave has no access control yet. After a while I decided to add others the wave and just turn it into a sandbox for all my friends to play in.

I decided to do that because of another funny flaw: you can't empty the trashcan so you can't delete a wave. It gets even more strange because waves in the trashcan are still "active" so bots can find and act on the junk waves. I discovered this little quirk when the DiceLink bot seemed have difficulty finding the correct character record sheet. I remembered I had stuck an older record sheet the trash, and when I tried to empty the trash: oops, there's no option to do that yet.

Although these are serious problems, I'm making light of them because Wave is still alpha software, so some things just won't work properly yet. Now if this had a 1.0 sticker on it, I'd be slightly less forgiving.

The astute reader will have realized that the problems are linked. You cannot delete the wave unless you can also delete a user from the wave. And deleting a user from a wave raises whole bunch of other questions. What do you do with all their blips in the wave? Do you just remove the wave from the user's inbox as well? And so on. Isn't software development wonderful?

RPGs On Wave

Role playing games were an obvious choice for a bunch of geeks looking for something interesting to do on Google Wave. Out of necessity game play must use a text based narrative style since graphical extensions suitable for a tactical style game, are not available yet. I expect that will be one the first type of Wave extension to emerge once developers get into their stride.

The narrative style is interesting because you end up with complete story written collaboratively by the players. This is something you never got when playing around a table, unless someone recorded and transcribed the conversation. I've never met anyone who would volunteer for that job!

One method for formatting the narrative is described here, but even that is likely to change as everyone gains experience with medium. Hopefully the narrative style will continue after the graphical tools become available.

If you are on Wave, then this wave will get you started. If you do not have a Wave account, this Ars Technica article explains some of the difficulties.

Google Wave And NoScript

One nuisance that I've encountered with Google Wave preview, is that some extensions and NoScript Firefox addon don't get along too well. The extensions are not hosted on Google's servers which triggers NoScript's cross site scripting blocker, unless you add that server to NoScript's whitelist.

Wave's developers will need to address this. While it is only a nuisance now, as more extensions become available, it will become a security problem. Having to whitelist every third party extension site is an opportunity just begging to be exploited.

Playing With Google Wave

Thanks to Myles Braithwaite I got an invite to Google Wave. I'm really interested in Wave but as with all new things, I'll be playing more than doing anything productive. One annoyance is I don't know any else on Wave at the moment...