Google Wave: Testers line up for the love-in
100,000 sea dogs get early splash around
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Google is inviting 100,000 testers to preview its hippie-on-stilts communications platform - Wave - from today.
Mountain View has extended its testing pool in preparation for pushing Wave out to many more users at some point soon. For now, though, Google isn’t revealing when the platform will be pumped out to the mainstream.
Instead it’s simply repeating the fact that Wave “isn’t quite ready for prime time”.
The company unveiled its new-age web platform at its I/O developer love-in back in May this year.
Wave crossbreeds email with IM and document sharing, and exhibits a particular talent for near real-time interaction.
In order to plump up usage of the platform, Google has already declared its intentions to open source Wave's underlying protocol as well as a big heap of its client and server code.
Following the project’s launch, Google pointed out in a blog post yesterday that wrinkles still needed to be ironed out of Wave before the platform is made available to everyone.
Google’s engineering manager Lars Rasmussen and group product manager Stephanie Hannon said its developers had been working on scalability, stability, speed and usability over the past few months.
“Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky,” they said.
Meanwhile, Wave is still missing a few key features such as draft mode, user permissions configuration and group definitions. All pretty integral stuff, you might agree, for a platform that isn’t dressed in orange and chanting with drums and cymbals quite yet.
Rasmussen and Hannon noted that all of those features are expected to be added to Wave over the next few months, but again was unable to be any more specific with its roadmap.
Separately, Hannon wrote on a blog post for developers that Google was mulling ways of making money from a wave extension store, presumably in the mould of Apple's Apps store.
"To help foster a strong developer ecosystem, we're exploring plans for a monetisable wave extension store," she said. ®
COMMENTS
Sharepoint with a decent Interface
I think a lot of people seem to think Wave is aimed at the individual. It's not. It's target audience is organisations that for example want to use Sharepoint without the huge cost involved. I see so many applications this could be used for.Also being mostly open source there will be a huge developer community. The I/O demo needs to be watched to understand the potential for Wave. I'd jump at the chance to get this into the workplace. Incredibly easy sell if you have multiple sites which requires real time communication.
It's not Facebook, it's SharePoint
Really, it's not that hard to understand; they took a look at SharePoint and said "that's cool when it works; let's do a version that is cloud not intranet and works properly and is free and isn't tied to Office".
And they did, and it was pretty good, if not perfect, which tends to work well when the alternative is the price that SharePoint is.
Missed the point
Most of the comments have missed the point about what Wave really is.
Yes, they have written some nice email / social site / groupware software however, the real inventive step is actually the messaging protocol
What they demonstrated is that you can collectively manage and update some arbitary XML in a completely peer to peer maner, with differnet security permisions on parts of the tree.
Now they may have demonstrated this using email and instant messaging, but they COULD have implemented ANY multi user distributed application. Google Wave has the potential to make it easy to implement large scale distributed applications
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