Buzz - Riding the Wave?
Earlier this week, Google announced their new "Buzz" service, which they are already integrating into gmail to allow an "extension/improvement" of email. In it's most basic form, it's a social networking tool allowing you to interact with others. In addition to integrating it into gmail, they are also providing a (very nice) web interface for Android and iPhone.
Interestingly, in watching the Google Buzz Launch Event, I didn't notice a single mention of Google Wave until near the end when someone asked a question about possible Wave integration (paraphrased answer: "that's an exciting integration that we're looking into"). Wave, for those of you that don't know, is an online tool for collaboration which is currently in Beta for a (relatively) small group of people. The beta-launch of Wave was met with excitement, but eventually confusion and frustration with the interface -- most comments that I heard were something along the line of, "This is cool, but what's the point? Why would I use this instead of email/Facebook/twitter/fill_in_the_blank?".
The most exciting part of the Wave announcement to me, was not the Wave sandbox provided at wave.google.com, but was the underlying technology -- the so-called Wave Federation Protocol. The protocol is defined openly, and there is basic open source implementation. As I see it, the Wave protocol sets out to solve many of the problems that have plagued email for a long time: encryption, authentication, document sharing, etc.
Email has been in sad shape for years. Just ask any email administrator. Don't trust them? Check out all the spam and phishing emails you've received in the last week, then imagine how many your email provider is automatically blocking for you. Unfortunately, people are entrenched in email and wouldn't be willing to part with it. So how can IT staff replace the dated email infrastructure with one which is more robust, secure, and easier to collaborate/share documents with? It won't be possible unless that system is able to interact with current email systems while extending it for those that want the extended features. Wave protocol should give us the needed transition, so it just boils down to needing to get more wave protocol servers in place (imagine each ISP providing these in place of email servers they currently provide). I'm anxiously waiting and watching for Wave protocol servers to start popping up outside of Google... and that's where I think Buzz comes in.
Buzz allows you to create messages, comment on others' messages, share messages publicly or with selected individuals/groups. This sounds a lot like what the Wave protocol was designed to provide. With the luke-warm response given to the wave beta roll out, it wouldn't surprise me if Google would go back to the drawing board and figure out a better front-end to show off the power of wave. And why stop there? Why not integrate it into people's email boxes?!? If Buzz actually runs on top of the wave protocol, which is what I'm proposing, it would be an amazing proof of concept of how to allow a transition (or even convergence) of email and Wave (protocol). I guess only time will tell if I'm correct, but I am hopeful and confident that this is the next step in the evolution of the wave protocol. Any Google engineers care to disclose some details for us?