Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it different to WiFi Direct? Aren't there quite a lot of these wifi-without-base-station standards, but they never seem to work or take off?
WiFi Direct differs from WiFi Awareness in respect to the presence of the access point. In WiFi direct, there is no access point, and the devices connect directly to each other. With WiFi Awareness, an access point serves as a middle-man, but it is not necessary to access the Internet.
Seems Google is leaving it up to the app devs to come up with services, to expect a whole lot of silos to sprout, balkanizing the system.
On that note, i seem to recall Mozilla tried to build something similar into their Firefox for Android at some point. But i can't relocate it now because i can't recall what "catchy" codename they had on the project.