Yeah, it looks a lot like XMPP to me, too: "The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to XMPP core [RFC3920] protocol..." (From the first par

Yeah, it looks a lot like XMPP to me, too: "The Google Wave Federation Protocol is an open extension to XMPP core [RFC3920] protocol..." (From the first paragraph of the draft spec.) Whatever your feelings about XMPP, I challenge you to point to a standardized, interoperable protocol that you think would be a better fit. It may not be ideal, but it's extensible, already supported by a large number of clients and servers, and doesn't require starting from scratch when building interoperable software.