HTTP is Dead, Long Live The Realtime Cloud

Last week Google announced a new service called Google Wave. Loosely it can be thought of as a realtime communication and collaboration platform & protocol. The platform is based on hosted XML documents (called waves) which focus on supporting massive concurrency and low-latency updates on top of a decentralized XMPP architecture. It's taken me a few days to fully understand what this announcement really means and the importance it may have in terms of the future of the Internet and how we use and consume it.

The Internet for all intents and purposes is a living organism, continually adapting and changing. It has evolved from a somewhat static medium where content updates were typically pulled from fairly simple syndication and transfer sources to a network of realtime data sources continually changing at an ever quickening pace. Combined with the ability to semantically describe millions of new data sources through powerful on demand cloud based computing platforms -- we are in the midst of a realtime computing transformation. One that is fundamentally different then the hyper text based Internet that was first described more then 26 years ago.

In Google's announcement what I found most fascinating was the protocol they choose for the basis of their new realtime vision. It wasn't HTTP but instead XMPP was selected as the foundation for this decentralized and interoperable vision. What this means in very simple terms is Google has declared the HTTP protocol is dead, an inefficient relic of the past. A protocol that was never designed with the requirements for the reality of a global realtime cloud.

Among HTTP numerous problems is it's requirement that a user's machine poll a server periodically to see if any new information is available. For a few data sources this may seem like a small burden, but multipled by millions or even billions of constantly changing sources and you have a major problem on your hands -- enter the wonders of decentralization & XMPP.

XMPP is the ultimate interoperability layer, letting one server send messages to any other XMPP server that it is available to receive new information. When another user sends new content through the XMPP server, the message is passed on immediately and automatically to all recipients who are marked as available. Building upon this core, Google's XMPP based Wave federation protocol goes well beyond by including the additional auto discovery of IP addresses and ports using SRV records (Service record is a category of data in the Internet Domain Name System specifying information on available services). As well as TLS authentication and encryption of connections. The great thing about TLS authentication is it's unilateral: only the server is authenticated (the client knows the server's identity) but not vice versa (the client remains unauthenticated or anonymous). Basically Googles vision for XMPP is everything HTTP should be, but sadly isn't.

Googles ambition with Wave goes far beyond the creation of a new kind of messaging or collaboration platform but instead seems to be an effort to fundamentally re imagine how the Internet itself is managed and used.