“to believe that we are going to have a zillion alternatives (i.e. analog to mail) is not realistic:
there are going to be some major players (google, yahoo, ms, apple, etc) but in end effect google is going to have the majority of all users:”

Personally I see that at least medium to large size companies are likely to roll out their own internal wave servers. They aren’t going to want all of their corporate communications to go onto public servers (like Google’s) and yet they’re going to want the real time communications that a wave offers.

Google will likely gain the lion’s share of individual wave accounts, but I definitely see that there will be plenty of people who don’t care to have Google run their personal communications, and will choose smaller providers. It will take time, but I think that this is likely to be as ubiquitous as email. Once people understand that they can have the real time communications that the wave offers, they won’t want to go back.

(oh and as regards Street View: They are only showing things that you would have seen if you drove down the street at the same time. I don’t see where the harm is in that. – I find far more potential for harm coming from law enforcement cameras everywhere than Google taking pictures of the outside of buildings and streets)

sure, the wave protocol is open, if it was not open, they would not have a chance to gain majority of the traffic, to believe that we are going to have a zillion alternatives (i.e. analog to mail) is not realistic:
there are going to be some major players (google, yahoo, ms, apple, etc) but in end effect google is going to have the majority of all users:
they are the ones that have the means to drive the most user friendly alternative, and hence it will drive people there.
I.e. analog to anyone that attend to get an email address
“hm, should i get an email address at my provider with 5 Mb limit and no web access, or should i get Gmail?”

if google did NOT provide it as an open protocol, it would never gain a huge popularity, to provide it open is just a means to make it popular so we get a new market where google already are lightyears ahead of the competitors.

the “we are not evil” slogan is something people keep on believing, because google (analog to apple) refuse to comment anything negative, which keeps negative stories on a low because the news-value is not high when there is only one part of the story (i.e. the story sounds like hearsay).
Apple has a similar image, “it is safe, no viruses, no security problems”, simply because they refuse to make any statements regarding their security issues, and hence there will be no press about it.

Dont get me wrong here; google makes nice products, as well as apple (i am an apple user myself), but i think both are evil in their arrogant ways, and i do not believe in the google “we are not evil” way, i think it might started out as something they believed in but then the company got too big. There are numerous examples where they run over the majority of people by doing stuff that the majority do not want, e.g. street view where 85% of all people are recognizable (sorry, at its best it manage to blur the face of someone a bit, but if you know that person he is still recognizable)

Suddenly Microsoft shines like a “good guy” in comparision; they are having a more open conversation over their goals and problems.

Arnold, are you scared to use gmail? Google has a huge offering in that product, but they sure don’t control the market.

This is far from a play for google to take over email and IM. If it was they wouldn’t be publicly releasing the protocol as a standard, and providing the source code to us so we can build our own.

Google does own a lot, and that should cause concern. However, the wave protocol is open so if you wanted to run something based on wave, you could create it (or Yahoo could for that matter). Technically, the idea is similar to how mail (or SMTP) works, so they will not see your traffic if you do not mail someone @gmail or use gmail itself.

Regarding the big brother idea, this does not change anything. If a government wants to tap all traffic through the country they will do it. Wave is no different than SMTP in that sense. It is a spec only, not a full control thing.

What they havent got so far is control over email and IM.
In its current form they would never get full control over that, that is where google wave comes in.
When people start moving over to google wave, google will get almost 100% control over all internet communication(!).

All this “dont be evil” crap aside; this is a big brother system that tany countrys government would love to get in on, and I would be suprrised if the US not already tapped into it.