As you may know, Google’s goal with Wave is to eventually replace e-mail. While that seems unlikely to happen, federation is certainly a key to even discuss it.
As TheNextWeb says:
Google Wave has been designed from the ground up to allow federated distribution models, meaning you can build and host your own Wave servers, e.g. for your corporate users, and make them talk to other Wave servers. It’s very much like the distributed nature of SMTP based email transmission, but technically way more complex due to the real-time nature of the service.
While federation won’t affect most users for now, it could be essential in the future. For example, your business could host it’s own Wave server. Google doesn’t think it will ultimately succeed if they control every bit of it, so opening up the federation protocol could help drive its long-term growth.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
what do you mean by federation?
Alan — Read the quote in the post for info. It essentially means that companies can build their own Wave servers and talk to each other, without necessarily having to go through Google.
Kind of like Gmail is a great way to use email, but companies can email others without needing to use the Gmail servers.
What is wrong with the term ‘Intranet’ that ‘Federation’ replaced it?
Ergun — They’re very different things. Intranets will still have a place, and that’s a completely different discussion from creating a Wave server.
I wonder if Wave will be adopted by major companies. I doubt it, Wave seems more like a consumer product.
I think once companies see how much better it is to work with a Wave environment and Wave can be integrated with systems like SAP there will be no stoping.
The biggest issue is people break the Microsoft addiction to the illusion of safety, specially managing executives. Once they get guts to change the system/corporation habit Wave will go sky high, so will productivity.
Let’s just pray that Google will keep treating us good, let’s face it….they’ll have the world by the nuts.