So here's the deal with Wave:  If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you'll miss the boat.  And it's a big boat.  If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture.  Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.

I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code.  I haven't done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you're going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.

Reading through the Google Wave specs this weekend, I realized that Google has really accomplished something wonderful with the security model baked into the Wave protocol.  (Not the CLIENT, specifically, but the extensions Google made to the XMPP PROTOCOL.)

Usually security is done one way, in just about every application on earth:  you create the thing you want to secure, whether it's a file, or an email, or a piece of content, or a financial transaction, then you find a security button somewhere that usually looks like a big lock or something:

You click that button, and from there you can select the users who you want to have access to your thing.  This is all fairly standard, and there are very few deviations from this.  Entire companies have been founded to make this process a little less painful.

I don't think I've ever looked at an application's security model for the first time and thought "wow, that's really easy", which is the way EVERY feature SHOULD be.

As part of my recent love affair with the iPhone, I've gotten very interested in augmented reality. 
I LOVE a novel and engaging way to present data to people--it's been my job for pretty much the last 7 years, so it's really cool to see some genuine innovation in this area.

I've mentioned augmented reality once or twice before, and the buzz on it has been building lately, not many people I've talked to have heard about it yet.  So I figure I'll drop my 2 cents on the matter.

Augmented reality is simply overlaying digital displays on the real world, typically using a mobile device as the viewport.  So instead of a completely virtual world you have the real world with virtual overlays.  This video actually describes it much better than any explanation could:

Not only can this type of overlay be done on top of public areas and rooms, but you can also overlay virtual objects on well-defined spaces, such as on a piece of paper sitting on your desktop:

Augmented reality is much closer than I would have imagined even a year ago, I totally missed the significance of having direct access to a mobile video stream.  There are a few technical hurdles to application development, mostly around the speed of mobile devices, but those are being attacked and solved one by one every day.  The image processing and recognition, 3D virtual browser displays, and toolkits are now available and can be used in real applications today.

The iPhone OS isn't scheduled to support direct access to the video feed until the next release, and that's required for augmented reality apps.  (Although I understand that several of these apps are already available today on Android devices.)  I suspect that after that release hits you're going to see a flood of these applications, and I'm really looking forward to it. 

I'm looking forward to integrating the real world into my apps as well.