Where\'s the VoIP in Google Wave?

News of Google's WAVE platform is making quite a splash across the blogosphere. I find it very interesting that the peer2peer protocol lacks any VoIP capability.

It is impossible to think that it was simply overlooked; but rather that it must have been thought over. But why, especially considering that gmail already has VoIP built in?

Could it be that there are ambitions with wave toward mobile devices and that Google is being careful not to offend the carriers?

Reply from dean on May 30, 2009 - 09:05 AM

Quote:

Could it be that there are ambitions with wave toward mobile devices and that Google is being careful not to offend the carriers?

That's as good as any other reason I can think of...

Reply from fenlander on May 30, 2009 - 09:29 AM

There are a lot of ways you can imagine adding voice support to a wave. The obvious route is though a gadget you add to the wave that adds a 'conference call' to it. (Which is certainly something we'll be doing - we already have an opensocial voice conferencing gadget at http://clackpoint.com/gadgets/ ).

Taking a step back, waves are based on XMPP, so the protocol already has voice signaling in for form of Jingle, but the cunning part is going to be in extending the wave offline/online metaphor - escalating asynchronous 'voice messages' into live chat on demand.

Reply from martyndavies on May 30, 2009 - 12:23 PM

Perhaps they're thinking they've covered that base already with GoogleTalk? Wave looks to me more like a document-based collaboration frame work, i.e what happens when email meets Wiki and IM.

Which is not to say that VoIP couldn't/shouldn't be in there, just that it wasn't the core of the idea. A more bizarre oversight is forgetting VoIP in Android.

Reply from xpcomputers on Jun 03, 2009 - 11:04 AM

http://wave.google.com has an excellent 80min video demo-ing wave.. and it look very impressive.

They DO have intentions for use on mobiles according to that display. It is ALL browser based, and works on mobile browsers too. So the lack of voice could be to keep mobile carriers on-board.

But equally, when you look at what they have brought together so far it is VERY neat, so it might be an issue of developer resources & time. They have made a completely open & extensible framework that can hold any data. They might already be working on voice for the next wave of Wave, but not announced that aspect yet.

If Google don't add it themselves, then I'm sure someone else will very quickly!

I'm watching wave with great interest.

Reply from amascuba on Jun 03, 2009 - 10:45 PM

To me, it looks like a chat protocol on steroids.

Voip User Forum Index » The World of VoIP » VoIP News