Today Google released the first 20.000+ lines of code of the Wave Protocol and installation instructions that let you run your own Wave servers – sort of.
We’ve played a lot with Google Wave lately. Besides the core functionality that has been demoed to the world as part of this year’s Google I/O conference, many developers where eager to start extending Google Wave through it’s APIs.
In a similar approach seen with many social networks, one way to extend Wave is through Gadgets. Though Google Wave does not yet completely implement an OpenSocial container, its approach to Gadgets is pretty comparable and the usual suspects (polls, weather forecasts, all sorts of maps) can all now be found in Waves around the world.
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While all of Wave’s real-time and collaborative editing features are fantastic, by far the most significant part – and possibly the game changing aspect – is it’s core ability to be federated. What does this mean? Well, when you are using today’s so called cloud services most of them are hosted by organizations. Consequently your data is physically stored on servers these companies own and run and every Tweet you make, every FriendFeed you post ultimate traverses through their infrastructure.
In a federated world these servers can be decentralized. A pretty prominent example for a federated architecture is email.
Google Wave has been architected to allow organizations of all sizes, and even people like you and me, to run their own Wave Servers. Obviously Wave Servers can talk to other Wave Servers.
Since today the Google Wave Sandbox has been the only infrastructure using the Google Wave Protocol. Federation has been announced but neither the protocol sources nor parts of a server implementation were available publicly.
This has changed. If you’ve always planned to become the first Google Wave hosting service besides the search giant itself, head over and check out the sources and the installation instructions.
Are you on Wave already? Let’s get in touch! Find me as 24z@wavesandbox.com.
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