Marathon with Google Wave father Lars Rasmussen

On November 26 and December 2, 2009, a wave question-marathon with the “father-developer” of Google Wave Lars Rasmussen was held in Wave.

Marathon organized by KyivGTUG
Marathon team: Vladimir Ivanov (elGephest), Maxim Vasilyev (qMax), Oleg Bozhenko (mrGALL), Vadim Barsukov (vadbars).
Wave-Marathon announced on the official blog of Google Ukraine
Basic electronic resource: Ukrainian Khvil
Media Partner: Google Wave Russia
Information sponsor: ITC.UA
Prize Fund Sponsor: Habrahabr

In the first part of the Kiev-Sydney marathon, on November 26, Lars answered questions previously collected by the marathon team. Over 200 people participated in the wave and more than 50 questions were received.
The original text of the marathon in English can be found on the Ukrainian Hvil blog.
On December 2, the second part of the marathon took place, where Lars Rasmussen answered the questions of the Wave participants online. Its text was published in the blog of Vladimir Ivanov .
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Do you feel like a Dane or an Australian in Copenhagen? And who do the Danes perceive you?

Dane! Danes perceive me as a Dane with a funny American accent, which uses slang from the 1980s (I lived in the United States for more than 10 years and left Denmark in 1990).

What place will take Wave in the hierarchy of Google services? What are the planned integration tools with other services?

We do not know yet. Wave was developed as part of an organizational experiment: what happens if you let the team pretend that they are a separate startup, not part of Google. Can they move faster? I think the answer is yes, but now, of course, we do not know the answer to the question of integration. We'll see. Integration with other services is the second most frequent request for new features to us (after “give more invitations”).

Google Maps - the path from the idea to the popular Google service. Do you continue to work on the project?

No, I left the team at the end of 2006 and, at best, since then I have been offered counseling. It’s hard for me to work on something just a fraction of the time. In addition, the Maps team is damn strong, they don't need my help.

At the origin of Google Wave - how was it? - “I come to Brin and say to him:“ Sergey, have an idea ”?

:) Jens and I wrote a letter to Larry, Sergey and Eric, that we have an idea in the field of e-mail. We suggested that we try to run the project as a startup-type experiment inside Google, because we knew that they were trying to do similar experiments. They quickly said "yes", as I believe, because of our success with Google Maps. We spent our days e-mailing. It would be much easier in Wave!

Is it difficult to start a business in Australia? (for example, compared to the United States or Denmark)

Truth be told, I never opened a business in Australia. My map company was technically in the States, despite the fact that most of the work was done in Sydney. We were unable to raise money in California and eventually sold to Google.

When will it be possible to connect the Wave service to Google Apps?

Yes, it is already possible. We have already connected about 100 domains as part of the preview. When we come out of the previews, all Google Apps users will get access to the Wave as part of a package of services.

Will there be a native Wave client for Android (like Gmail or Google Maps) or will this service remain a web application (like Google Reader)?

There are no plans now, but "never say never." Wave is very web oriented.

Why is Google Wave still not supporting Opera browser and are there plans to add support in the future?

Sorry, but we have no such plans during the preview. Opera has a very small share of the global market, although I think it is higher in your part of the world.

I would like to know whether some means will be implemented to control access or moderation of the “waves”? Now there are a lot of problems when deleting messages due to the mistaken addition of robots, etc. One feels that one Playback is obviously not enough here.

Yes, we know that Wave is weak in this area. I can not promise any deadlines, but we are working on:

• 3 types of participants: reading / writing, only reading, and intermediate - “comments only”, which can add “waves”, but edit only their own.
• Ability to cancel (Undo) the results of the participant after its removal from the "wave". (We still lack the ability to delete a member; you can still only delete robots.)
• Premoderation (when the content that I add to the “wave” can only be seen by the moderator until he approves it) will be somewhat later, but subsequently doing something similar in Wave will be very good.

Will it be possible to work with Wave accounts from other servers via Google Wave, just like you can now work with several e-mail accounts through Gmail?

Maybe. This will require a standardized server-client protocol, on which we are not yet working. It is very difficult for us to get a working server-to-server protocol. You can read more at waveprotocol.org .

How do you plan to deal with spam in public "waves"?

Combined user control (for example, the ability to delete, block, and cancel an attacker's activity) and automatic detection.

Is versioning being planned that is more advanced than Playback? Namely: the ability to roll back to the desired version, tagging, branching - that is, elements of the functionality of VCS or at least wiki history?

Yes! As well as playing sections of the "wave" and showing who changed the current state of the "wave", without the need to play. And rollback of the fragment without the need to return to this version (in general). Many, many, many good works have yet to be done with reproduction, but we will need time for this.

The search lacks morphology. It is fundamentally that it is not?

Yes, in the search now a lot is missing. No spell checker. Many, many, many good works still need to be done (sorry for repeating myself like a broken record :))

Will there be a possibility in the Wave participants list (at the top of the right column) to visually separate robots from people, for example, to put robots at the end of the list and mark them somehow or smaller. And in the list of "waves" (the middle column by default), first of all display the icons of people to the left of the "wave" data, and robots, only if there is room?

This has already been proposed, but we have not yet decided. I think we will use a small icon in the lower right corner where a human user has a dot indicating his presence.

What is the maximum amount of "wave" in megabytes (including all attachments) and the number of messages? (for example, if you use the wave as a photo gallery).

We do not know yet. I think now every “wave” can be 100 KB, and each investment is 20 MB. But these are quite arbitrary restrictions and they can be changed. Please note that we still have problems with long “waves” that are too slow when opening and manipulating.

How realistic is it in the future to use the “waves” to work together in a format that goes beyond the scope of discussions and discussions? That is, the evolution of Wave into a wider collaboration platform.

I hope so! The wave infrastructure is very flexible: in principle, we let the user manipulate the XML document, and the extensions can interpret it in various ways.

Is it supposed to write a specification for developers of clients for Wave (like those that w3c wrote for browsers)? Approximately as Wave Conversation Model, addressed to developers of Wave servers. In other words, is the Extension Manifest evolving into a specification that defines in some way “standard” actions / hooks and client behavior? Or will it remain in the form of a “cheat sheet” for this particular web client?

We hope that it will develop as you say. In particular, we would not want the extension developers to be tied to any single Wave provider client. There should be more flexibility. As with the server-server protocol and model specification, it all depends on the development and participation of organizations and individual developers. This involves a lot of work, but I believe that it will be done.

Users are used to forums where there are separate “topics” (discussions) and “sections” (discussion groups). Also in the mailing lists there is a grouping of topics / chains according to different lists / conferences. In Wave there are no own funds for grouping “waves” into groups / sections, in the same spirit as in the forums, but only individually, keeping search queries by tags. However, users are not accustomed to this approach, and as a result, all the topics fall into one wave of global scale, such as “Novosibirsk Wave”, “Zaporizhia Wave” and even “Bulgarska Vylna”. After some time, this inertia of thinking inevitably leads to the difficulty of using such “waves” with which the only thing that can be done is to drag carefully (so that it does not open) to Trash. Attempts to write a robot that would allow grouping “waves” in the likeness of forums seem to have failed (the groupy-robot is very buggy and unfinished).

Yes, we are working on native support for bands in Wave. Initially, we will support groups built on Google Groups, and later we will create an interface within the “waves” to build and support groups.

Are there any plans to internationalize Wave (the web client itself, as well as internationalization tools for gadgets and robots)?

Yes, we are working on it. Hopefully somewhere around the first quarter of next year, we will support 30 or more languages ​​in the user interface. We have already done a great job - say, users can enter non-Latin characters in the editor.

How and when will user privacy protection be implemented? Will the Wave user be protected from undesirable for him to communicate with a specific user / group of users / generally everyone (except the selected ones)?

You're right. In particular, because anyone can add a wave to your Inbox. This will change soon (hopefully by the end of this year). Only users from your contact list can add waves to your inbox. If the user is not in the contact list, the wave will not appear in the inbox, but will go to the "requests" folder. A special wave will contain “such and such wants to talk with you,” and you will be able to block it, or see its profile, ignore the request, or add it to contacts, and then its waves will move to the incoming.

Will the user select the information that is visible to the rest (mail, nickname, that and the other)?

You now have one profile that is visible to all Wave users. In the future, you will have several profiles and the ability to indicate, for example, that one is publicly visible, and people from contacts see another. And you can choose what information to make available to whom. But we still have a lot of work in this area.

Lars, tell me, how old are you at Google? And what prompted you to this?

In 35 years. Google bought a company of 4 people, which was founded by my brother. We made a prototype of what later became Google Maps. I was already a big fan of Google and was thrilled that they bought us.

How much does the behavior of real users differ from what you expected / planned when creating Google Wave? Now, when people come to Wave and start using it, do you notice any interesting methods of using it that you haven’t thought of before?

The most amazing thing we saw was public “waves”. We mainly thought about relatively small groups of people working together at Wave, and added public “waves” only as a hacking method for users to find each other in the early stages when there were few people here. But so many people really liked using Wave in this way, even though there are no management tools. Fortunately, we are growing, and our group will have more time to develop these tools, and I think that public “waves” can become a really interesting tool in the long term.

Any plans to integrate Wave with Google Docs or Google Calendar?

There are such plans, but for now they are rather vague. We are developing Wave as part of an organizational experiment: my team works as if a startup is separate from Google. This gives us the opportunity to move quickly and do some crazy things, but it also means that we do not have answers to questions like this. Notice that Wave and Google Calendar have a very rich API that may allow third-party developers to create excellent integration.

What means do you use to communicate with your family? Now is it just a wave? Any others strictly prohibited? Or are "old school" mail and messenger still in use? Do you use Wave to plan your upcoming holidays?

Still a mixture of waves and mail. Not all of my friends have switched. And frankly, I do not think that Wave is a mature enough product that I would like to offer them. Although my family and fans have a lot (all prejudiced, of course :)). And yes, we use Wave to organize holidays! This year, about 12 family members are coming to Sydney, and there is a lot to coordinate. A very good way to use Wave!

Did you write letters to Santa Claus? Do you think modern children will use Google Wave to find Santa Claus and pass on their wishes to him?

Not me personally. Someone needs to write a Santa robot that will make it accessible to children. By the way, we invited a group of 3-4-5 graders [schoolchildren of 3-5 grades] to try Wave at very early stages, and they loved to use it for writing stories together.

Who can I contact with the idea of ​​creating completely new services within Google’s capabilities? How does this even google? What I want to offer, in my opinion, no one is better than Google itself.

The Help link at the top right will take you to a page with a link to feedback. Honestly, we have too many good ideas to read right now! If this is an idea that can be implemented on the API, write about it in a public “wave” or on the API forum and see how it will interest others.

In GMail, there are experimental functions, of which especially useful ones later became included in the main functionality. Will Wave support a similar testing system for new features? Is it possible that some robots or gadgets will be fully included in the main functionality?

Perhaps when the product is more mature. It will definitely be useful!

Will it be possible to delete private answers to individual Wave participants? When will the Draft input mode work?

We hoped to do this this year, but we do not fit. Hopefully early next year. In perspective, we have good solutions for the Draft mode, including the ability to make a draft and edit existing “waves”, or work together on a draft online. Moderation is closely related to this, it will be possible to send a draft for confirmation by the moderator.

Is it possible to receive from official sources information about changes or announcements of upcoming innovations?

I'm afraid not yet. As the product becomes more mature, and the team grows, we will post something like that. This is important for attracting developers to both the API and the protocol.

Who painted the Google Wave logo and why were these colors chosen for it?

The logo was developed by one of our colleagues. The colors are taken from the main Google logo. Here the link is a good explanation. wavemonster.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3

Google Wave heavily loads your server? How do you manage to handle such traffic? Where are your servers located - directly in Sydney?

Well, in recent years Google has been quite well able to serve many, many users. You can read publicly available documents about systems like GFS, BigTable and MapReduce, which form the basis of our distributed systems. Data processing live-by-character is a very interesting challenge, which my team’s main efforts have been making over the past 2.5 years.

In our systems we use optimism and recovery to reduce the load. For example, when a character arrives at the server, we send it to all interested clients without storing it in the database (optimistically assuming that we can save it later). And only after a lot of characters have accumulated in the memory of the server, we write them to disk.

Of course, problems arise if the server dies or somehow falls off and there are unsaved characters, and this requires recovery mechanisms.

Is your team interested in collaborating with Google Wave sites and blogs? What forms of cooperation do you see?

We hope that we don’t need a partnership with most blogs: they can use our embedding API (like the Google Maps API). We may have to charge for some very massive sites (again, like Google Maps).

Do you plan to insert a .doc / rtf document into Wave?

Now only as binary investments. Later it will be possible to import the contents of such files into Wave, and continue working on them there. And of course, also export them back to these formats.

How fast do you think Google Wave will have competitors?

Very soon. We opened more than 6 months ago, and we work in a fairly rapidly growing industry. I hope, however, that our competitors will join the Wave Federation. I would like to see many competing Wave providers, but only if we can cooperate! If others start releasing their own competing systems, but making them closed (like IM) will greatly grieve me, and I hope that users will reject such attempts.

The second part of the marathon - the answers of Lars Rasmussen online December 2, 2009