On 11 February 2010 03:38, Ronald C.F. Antony <[email protected]> wrote: > The next step is getting an e-mail gateway working. Since E-mail is static, > this is non-trivial, but it's key to allow an absorption of e-mail into wave. > It would be foolish to try to solve this in a general way. I think e-mail > works fine for message-reply or chat-style wave interactions. The gateway > should recognize these and send/import e-mails as such. Anything beyond that > should simply be turned into an e-mail message that points to a URL that > allows the recipient to view the wave on some web browser. Going much beyond > that would both complicate things too much and also remove too many > incentives for people actually dumping e-mail as we know it and moving to > Wave.
At the LCA2010 Wave mini-conference I seem to remember someone saying Google tried to get an e-mail gateway working, but encountered some very difficult problems. If they continued the way they were going, Wave would become just a clone of email. As such the project was put on hold. I don't know what these issues were, or if they can be solved. > The lack of e-mail and IM integration is a second issue, because most people > have ONE mode of communication. There are the IM types, who hardly ever send > an e-mail, and there are the e-mail types, who hardly ever touch IM. None of > then wants "yet another app" to deal with, but they might consider SWITCHING > to Wave, provided it allows them to continue what they are currently used to > doing and doesn't involve the effort to try to convert all their conversation > partners to move to a new platform first. (Chicken & Egg network effect > thing...) The #1 big problem I have wave, is that there end up being so many different windows I need to open to check different things, and at the moment Wave isn't assisting, it is making matters worse. Maybe in the future this could change. e.g. right now if I remember I should be checking the following on a regular basis: * home email * work email * gmail email * twitter * Wave sandbox * Wave preview * reader.google.com * calendar * request tracker at work * jabber (I tend to miss incoming messages and not having a speaker doesn't help) * etc - I am sure I missed something here... Some of these things do need to be kept separated, e.g. home email/work email, but I think there is room for improvement. > And lastly, people like me, have a distaste for the sort of cloud computing > where critical data is held hostage, I have my own computing infrastructure, > thank you, and if the internet goes down, I still have access to my data, and > that's the way it should be; which means until 100% fully featured Wave > servers can't be installed on my own computers (incl. web interface and all) > and federation works in large scale deployments, Wave will remain a toy and a > cool technology demonstration, but I'll avoid it for real work, and stick to > e-mail and IM, where I'm master over my information storage. There needs to be a way to backup waves and continue using them read/write if the server goes down. Or if you have a disagreement with the hosting company for any reason. Similarly it should be possible to create federated servers that don't require a massive hardware budget in case the wave proves to be more popular then expected. At the moment my understanding is that the hosting server has a high workload for every client connected, and it isn't possible to offload this workload to another more capable server. -- Brian May <[email protected]> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Wave API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-wave-api?hl=en.
