DanZimmerli.com

Update on Google Wave

8/04/2010 02:00:00 PM

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, 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. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

It's a sad day when Google announces this. I've used Wave since it was early in the beta and it's come a long way. News like this makes me think people are content with internet messaging as it is and don't want for any new innovation. I'm going to keep using Wave as long as it's there. If you have a Wave login, what do you think about Google's decision?

Example Wave

Don't let my kids see this!

America wake up, the government under the current administration passed the health care bill, they control your life, they now passed the financial reform bill, they control your money, next they need to control the media, they're already part way there with their influence, once they pass a law giving them control over the media, they will control what you see and hear. They have taken over too much already, restore our liberty, remember November.

Well, what took them so long? I know people who have made VGA cables really long using Ethernet cables, only logical to use them for TV. It's all going to be fed by the internet eventually anyway, look at GoogleTV and NetFlix. Now if only my TVs were upgradeable.

I've been using LogMeIn for some time now and I really like what it can do for me. I was surfing the ghacks.net site and spotted this. I'm going to give it a spin. Who knows, maybe this could be the LogMeIn killer?