[jerf]

One's (very nearly) a socket, the basic communication primitive used by almost everything to implement higher level protocols.

The other is a high level protocol that sits on top of a socket and does all kinds of various presumably-wonderful things, but is not itself a socket. Trying to replace sockets with Wave would be a major step backwards; the reason we need websockets in the first place is that the high-level HTTP protocol embeds assumptions that are not always correct for a given application and therefore gets in the way; Wave would be even worse about that.

Google Wave is one of the many protocols that can be built on a socket. Wave and HTTP are peers, sockets are the foundation they both sit on, WebSockets are as close to sockets as the web will let us get.

(It should be pointed out that WebSockets still are not the ultimate in flexibility; the TCP that WebSockets sit on itself makes assumptions about applications that are not appropriate to all applications, which is why not every packet on the internet is a TCP packet. I've glossed over some other details too, which in my judgment would only confuse at this point.)