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 }