Document Management Software

No, this is not Star Wars but if you take the one and half hours required to watch the Google Wave preview video at wave.google.com you will hear talk of the Federation towards the end of the video presentation.

This is a little technical and more geared towards those programmer geeks who cannot read enough about new technology.

Google is offering their API as open source so others can run Wave servers and become Wave providers, thus forming a federation. Google Wave users from different providers can seamlessly communicate with each other and share waves.

As part of the open source API Google has created the Google Wave Federation Protocol which I am sure someday soon will have an acronym the same as SMTP and SMS.

SMTP is the protocol that all email uses so that people using many different email providers can still communicate with each other and the Google Wave Federation Protocol is a similar sort of communication protocol.

It is an extension of the XMPP protocol which is an open source protocol invented by Jabber.

Everyone from corporations to individuals can run Wave servers. If you want to have a wave server for just your family, you can set one up. All you would need is a server, the Google Open Source server software and, let’s face it, some technical knowhow.

There is a wiki outlining how to set up and install your own Google Wave server at http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/wiki/Installation.

For more in depth technical information about Google Wave check out the developer’s forum at http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/.