Can Google Wave do what Bill Gates couldn't?

David M Williams
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 15:27

Opinion and Analysis

Among the problems of sender ID was a failure to cater to people using forwarding services. For instance, I have an e-mail address at linux.com. I don’t have a mailbox there, just an e-mail address which is forwarded on to my underlying Internet Service Provider (ISP) address.

I don’t want to advertise that ISP address because I might change ISPs in future. By setting the linux.com e-mail address in my mail client I remove any reliance on the ISP address. People write to me via linux.com, people receive messages from me stamped with my linux.com address. However, my ISP mail account is used as the underlying mailbox.

In situations like this sender ID would reject messages I send as spam because it checks if the e-mails are coming from the servers associated with the domain they purport to come from, but yet I am sending them through my ISP’s servers.

I'm far from uncommon. Many people do precisely this same thing.

Bill Gates did not achieve his goal of wiping out spam. The intention was very good but the proposal was flawed. Some part of this is because the model chosen had failings, but the biggest problem was undoubtedly because the solution was striving to twist and fix a 40-year old e-mail standard that is embedded throughout the reaches of the Internet.

What Google is doing in Google Wave is proposing an entirely new platform that encompasses and unifies e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, collaboration, wikis and other forms of online communications as they exist today.

As such, while it provides an e-mail experience, it does not seek to bolt something ancillary on to the aging e-mail protocol. It will not suffer from legacy matters or a need for backwards compatibility.

Here is an opportunity for Google to stamp out spam in the bright future of wave-based online communications.

Already it is evident that waves are not single, one-off messages transmitted from an anonymous sender to a recipient, but rather a hosted living document that requires both the wave sender and receiver to be authenticated entities.

No doubt spammers will be watching and seeking exploits to continue pushing viagra-fuelled messages but at the same time Google is engineering their new protocol with spam in mind, bolstered by an extensive knowledge of spam techniques through their experiences with Gmail.

Google have hit a winner with Wave; it’s the future of online messaging and it has the real opportunity to provide spam-free communications by starting afresh.