Google Shared Spaces

What happens with all the Google Wave gadgets, now that Google Wave has been discontinued? They're available in Google Shared Spaces, a small Google Labs project that helps you collaborate with other people by adding information to a gadget. You can add placemarks to a map, draw on the same white board, play Sudoku, create lists, find the best budget accommodation, brainstorm, create diagrams and answer to polls.

"Google Shared Spaces allows you to easily create a space with a collaborative gadget and a chat box in it. The gadgets are based on the Wave gadgets technology, so there are already more than 50 gadgets across different categories, like games, productivity, and event planning. Anybody can create a new space by going to the gallery and clicking on one of the featured gadgets. Spaces can easily be shared by just pasting the URL into a chat window, an email or a content sharing platform like Google Buzz or Twitter. And if you know a little Javascript, it is easy to get started building your own real-time, collaborative gadgets and create new spaces based on those," explains Google.


Maybe Google Wave would've been more successful if it didn't have so many complicated features and ambitious goals. Google Wave could've been the back-end technology for many cool web apps, instead of trying to incorporate all the use cases in a single interface.

Google Wave to Be Discontinued

Google's blog announced that Google Wave, the innovative communication platform released last year, will be discontinued.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave's innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began."

Google Wave has a lot of interesting features, but the interface is confusing and difficult to use. While many thought that Google Wave will reinvent email, Google's service combined an online document editor with an instant messenger. Google Wave allows you to create "live" documents that are edited collaboratively in real-time, but it's more than a conversational version of Google Docs. It's based on an open protocol, so you can edit a wave using multiple services. It's extensible, so you can build gadgets and robots that add new functionality.

Google Wave had a lot of potential, but Google didn't manage to build a compelling user experience and define some use cases for the application. Instead of building a general-purpose interface for Google Wave, Google could've used the platform to create multiple applications with clearly-defined goals: a new version of Google Chat, a new version of Google Docs, a brainstorming app etc.

Now that Google Wave is discontinued, some of its feature will be added to other Google services (Gmail, Google Docs), but the platform will vanish. It's clear that Google doesn't want to invest in niche services, which is a big opportunity for startups. "We want to do things that matter to a large number of people at scale," said Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, in an interview.

Google Wave (Labs) available for Google Apps

Google Wave is a new web application designed to make groups of people more productive when communicating and working together. In Google Wave, everything takes place in flexible, hosted conversations known as waves. Waves are shared spaces on the web that update live as you type and support rich media and real-time gadgets.
Today, Google Apps admins can give their users access to the Google Wave preview through Apps. Domain administrators can turn Google Wave through the control panel and users can sign in at http://wave.google.com/a/[yourdomain.com].

Editions included:
Standard, Premier and Education Editions

Languages included:
US English (Next generation control panel)

How to access what's new:
Administrators can enable Google Wave for your domain from the administrator control panel by clicking on 'Add more services'.

To enable the preview of Google Wave:
1) Click "Add it now"
2) Confirm that you would like to enable Google Wave
3) Visit the 'Settings' tab to specify domain access controls and email notification defaults
4) Sign in to Google Wave at http://wave.google.com/a/yourdomain

Note: In ‘Domain Settings’, make sure that the checkbox ‘Enable pre-release features’ is also enabled. Google Wave for Google Apps is currently a Labs service and is not supported by the Google Apps Support team.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-labs-available-today-to.html
Help Centre: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=28653

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Google Wave, Available Without Invitation

At the Google I/O developer conference, Lars Rasmussen announced that Google Wave no longer requires invitation. If you have a Google account, go to wave.google.com and you can use Google's real-time communication service.

Google Wave is now available in Google Apps, so that businesses, universities and other organizations can improve communication flow.

"Anyone on a wave can edit or reply to any section, keeping discussion in context with relevant content. Everyone's typing shows up instantly, and Google Wave lets new participants get up to speed quickly with organized discussions and playback to see how a wave evolved."



Google Wave really shines at Google I/O, where it's used to view live notes, ask questions and discuss sessions. Here's a wave for today's keynote.

Google Acquires AppJet

Google buys yet another company: AppJet, the start-up that created EtherPad, an innovative online word processor. The EtherPad team, that includes three former Googlers, will join the Google Wave team. EtherPad will be available for the existing users until March 31, 2010.

"Other real-time editors like Google Docs work by broadcasting an updated copy of the document to everyone every 15 seconds. This creates a noticeable lag that gets in the way of collaboration. You start editing something, only to find 10 seconds later that someone else deleted it. Etherpad updates every copy of the document every half second. This 30x increase in speed changes the experience completely. Your edits hardly ever clash with other users'. So you work confidently instead of tentatively."  (from EtherPad's site)



{ via Paul Buchheit }

A New Batch of Google Wave Invites

Google Wave is about to open to new users. Starting today, Google will send 100,000 invites to some of those who were eager to use an early version of the service. Google's blog lists three categories of users that will receive invites: Google Wave Sandbox users, those who signed up and offered to give feedback on Google Wave and some Google Apps users. When you receive an invitation to Google Wave, you'll be able to invite other people so you can use Google Wave together.

"Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won't be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project," writes CNet.

Like Gmail's early version released in April 2004, Google Wave lacks many basic features: you can't remove someone from a wave, you can't configure permissions or write drafts. The interface is not very polished and some of the options are difficult to find, but it's important to keep in mind that Google Wave is just one of the ways to implement an open protocol. Gmail revolutionized email with an interface inspired by discussion boards: messages are grouped in conversations and it's easy to handle a large amount of messages. Google Wave wants to revolutionize real-time communication by extending a protocol mostly used for instant messaging, XMPP.

Combining email, instant messaging and wikis seems like a recipe for confusion, but Google Wave pioneers a new generation of web applications, where everything is instantaneous. As Google explains, each wave is a hosted conversation and users can edit the conversation in real-time.

A Slippery Slope

Now that Google launched a Chrome plug-in for Internet Explorer, users will see dialogs that suggest to install the plug-in. The first Google service that will show this message is Google Wave.

"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin. Or, you can use one of these browsers: Google Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5. If you want to continue at your own peril, go ahead."


I'm not an Internet Explorer user and I understand that developers hate it because they have to spend a lot of time finding workarounds for IE, instead of adding new features, but this message is misleading.

"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin." That's simply not true: Google Wave works in Internet Explorer, even though there are some features that require Google Gears or work better in other browsers.

"Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use -- each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations -- further complicates building rich Web applications. In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind," explains Google.

Just because you can't offer the same experience in all browsers is not a reason to mislead users. You can inform users that your application runs faster in Google Chrome or certain features are only available if you install a plug-in or a more recent browser.

It's a slippery slope and I hope Google doesn't drop support for Internet Explorer just because it's a good opportunity to promote its own browser. Especially now, when even Microsoft builds applications that don't require Internet Explorer.

"Graceful degradation is an important principle in Web design. It means that, when you put in features designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of newer browsers, you should do it in a way that older browsers, and browsers letting users disable particular features, can "step down" to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, though perhaps not as snazzy in appearance," explains Dan Tobias.