I have been asked several times where I see Wave go. The last time I was asked where I see Wave in 5 years time.. not Internet years. What I did was look hard at Wave for what it does, and look at Google for the kind of things it has been doing.For me, Wave is an environment where the functionality of e-mail, chat, wiki comes together. What we have done in the MediaWikiWave project is provide Wave with a publishing back end. This is something that MediaWiki does really well. I expect that Wave will continue to integrate parts of the puzzle that is computer software and data.
Google is getting into operating systems with its Chrome OS. Add to this Moore's law and in five years time a computer with Chrome OS, with over a terabyte of storage is not a wild idea at all.
When something like a terabyte is used for caching, I can imagine that this cache is maintained by Wave. In this cache you find e-mail, Wavelets, Wiki pages and other information that is of interest to a user. Wave being Wave, will cache this information and updates it in the background. This information will be available on request.
Wave in its architecture allows for multiple servers. It is not necessary to know on what server a particular Wavelet is available. I think that a user is not that interested in any particular server, he is interested in the data being available. Only when the data is manipulated is there a need for immediate feed back to servers or other computers.
I think this is doable. Part of the cache is already there in Google Gears and this makes this vision evolutionary progress.
Thanks,
GerardM
