A: Well by my reckoning quite a lot.
I'll start with my definition of Google Wave: a messaging system. Pretty simple huh, mind you people could argue that it does so much more as a collaborative work tool and that is just the start. On the other hand I have heard it described as Instant Messenger done badly. At its core however it is a messaging system.
Q: So what is radical about that?
A: Nothing really except that it is Federated.
That is to say that it allows multiple systems to talk to each other. This is as opposed to Instant Messenger (IM) which works by connecting through a central point. When you use IM you do not connect to your server you connect to the IM service. Pretty much all of the really popular messaging services work like this except for Email which is the ultimate in federated systems and is the killer app so far of the Internet age.
Q: So is Federation better than Central?
A: In oh so many ways......
The great success if email has been that it does one thing well and in a simple way. It has allowed anyone to set up their own email server and an email server program is often a default installation for server software. This has allowed it to be universally accepted and used as everyone (well the software people anyhow) can tailor it to suit their needs relatively easily. Federation is what has allowed this to happen. Furthermore if your email system fails there are many that will keep going, so federation has built in redundancy. Also, as you not asking one system to do the whole dang you can spread the load and handle loads more traffic, scalability.
These benefits can all apply to Wave as they have already to email.
Q: So why not just stick to email then?
A: Well that is the key question.....
Essentially there is no reason to move to a Wave type setup except for the following reasons, which do not apply to wave alone.
With Wave you chose to be part of a conversation. You are not forced to receive like you are in email. This means less spam.
It allows you to have linked conversations more easily straight out of the box rather than having to open individual emails and remember what was going on in previous ones.
You can have groups on the fly which can as easily die afterwards with no penalties.
The messages are sent to you rather than you ask to see if there is something new, this is a technical thing but very important since it cuts the amount of network traffic.
You can set up security on it pretty easily as instead of trying to decide who in the whole wide world you might not want to receive from you can decide who you want to be able to see it. This is far more focused and effective.
These may not seem far reaching but I think that they are. What is most interesting to me is that they do not apply to Wave alone. They could as easily apply to an open source version of twitter or facebook for example. They key is federation.
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