David Notik

Continued from Ben Siscovick's post:

Google Wave offered "the fully open email model" from the very beginning. That is, an open protocol and API that any server can employ to talk to any other server anywhere on the internet.

Its creators envision precisely this and they wisely recognize that it's the only way their product, which they believe holds such promise, will become ubiquitous.

So Google Wave is already beyond Twitter in concept, already embracing, intrinsically, the fully open email model. So, to me, from that angle at least, there's no similar story with Twitter.

Just like email, Google Wave came out of the gate not just as a protocol and platform (the API) but also as a *product" which is Google's version of the interface to that fully open protocol, like what Outlook is to email. And while much of that product, that interface, Google will *not* share, it is sharing a lot of it, plenty of it, and a lot more than matters. Because the important stuff is the protocol, the API, the stuff that lets you and I create our own interface, maybe one that suits our users better.

Continuing with the email analogy, it's like Outlook and Eudora and Gmail and the countless other email clients. They're all different interfaces, but they are all based on the same underlying platform -- email (or more specifically POP and SMTP and IMAP). Here too, you'll eventually have many wave clients besides Google's, like Microsoft Wave, Woven Wave, whatever.

Just skim http://www.waveprotocol.org/wave-community-principles and http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-specs/draft-protocol-spec.

Twitter, by contrast, never even indicated they wished to enable anyone to become a Twitter server, able to communicate with other Twitter servers. It's entirely different, and their vision is far narrower!

With respect to Twitter's future, a more broad and open, alternative communications platform (or specifically an open protocol) will rise and Twitter may in time become one of the interfaces using that, even the most popular one. If you haven't got it yet, that open protocol that Twitter and others use may very well be Google's wave protocol.