Google falls off the Wave

Google Wave was first shown at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It was designed as a new web platform that would merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It also included a host of advance "real-time" collaboration features, as well as spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages and numerous other extensions.

In September Google kicked off the official launch of Wave by issuing 100, 000 invitations. This invitation only system resulted in a lot of hype and people in the tech community were frantic to get involved. I personally had given out over 60 invites by the end of October (as people were biting my arms off for them).

Although Wave had a great start, the service never quite lived up to the hype. Even after several months of minor enhancements and bug fixes, it still felt very "beta", with many standard features that people had come to expect from other services (such as gmail and Facebook) still missing. It also struggled with a lack of direction, as users were not really sure where or how they should be using Google Wave.

With these challenges continuing into Google Wave's second year of existence, the number of active users began to fade away, which is a disaster for a service designed around social networking and collaboration. As a result Google silently announced today that development of Google Wave would be stopped and the service would be closed down by the end of the year.

My hope is that Google will take many of the great features built into Wave, such as real time collaboration and translation and put them into other services such as gmail and the yet to be announced (but heavily rumored) Google Me, which is expected to be Google's answer to Facebook.

Google Wave Gadgets and Robots

After a long wait, Google Wave invites are finally starting to flood in! As a result more and more developers are beginning to make use of the service and create new custom gadgets and robots. DownloadSquad have put together a couple of "Ultimate Lists" to help you make the most of the new features.

What are Gadgets and Robots? "Gadgets change how you interact with waves, whereas robots process your input in some way or pull in data from another service (such as Twitter or Wikipedia). Robots are generally more powerful, but Gadgets are more fun." (DownloadSquad).

DownloadSquad Google Wave Gadgets

DownloadSquad Google Wave Robots

Google Wave Giveaway

To follow-up on my "Getting Started with Google Wave" article, I now have an additional 30 invites to giveaway. If you would like one simply drop a comment below, including your e-mail address in the appropriate field (I promise it won't be shared or spammed).

Update on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 9:31AM by Matt (LifeinTECH)

Invites have been sent to the following people:

Max, DCS, Lucy, Luke52, Jaz07, Pavel, Adam S, IT, mo, dakerj, fards, Sander, marc, Wasan, Castun, Mauricio, James, mb, Felix, Paul C, Airchalk, rebel, Jon H, Astrosquirrel and Matt.

Enjoy!

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

Still struggling to work out Google Wave? Gina Trapani and Adam Pash from Lifehacker have the answers.

Adam writes - "Wave is a young, complex, and frankly incomplete web application and technology. It's also an ambitious project that has the potential to change how we work, collaborate, and communicate on the web. That's why Gina and I decided to pour our time and attention into Google Wave and pull it all together into this book".

I highly recommend all Wave users head over to completewaveguide.com now and add this site to your bookmarks. I promise you will be needing it to get the most out of Google Wave.

The book will also be available in print from January 2010. Be sure to keep an eye on Lifehacker for more details.

Google Wave and Fluid

For those running Mac OS X there is a great application called Fluid that is the perfect companion for modern WebApps, such as Google Wave.

Fluid is a site specific browser (SSB) which allows you to create and run each of your favourite WebApps as a separate application. The advantage of this is that you get an isolated, streamlined window that only connects to a specific WebApp, making it look and feel like a full desktop application.

An SSB is not required for standard websites, such as blogs etc. However is very useful for WebApps that you use regularly and keep open for long periods of time, such as Google Mail, Facebook and of course Google Wave.

Installing and Setting up Fluid

For this example I am going to use Google Wave as my WebApp.

The first thing you need to do is download and install Fluid. This process is the same as any other Mac OS X application.

Once installed open the application. You will be prompted to "Create a Site Specific Browser".

You need to specify the WebApps URL, provide it a name and location for installation and finally an icon. For Google Wave I have used a 256x256 transparent .PNG file that can be downloaded here.

The Site Specific Browser will then be created and added to the location you specified during the setup process. As it is a WebApp I use quite often I also added it to my Dock.

You can now open your new application.

If you have setup Google Wave with Fluid the first time you open the application it will display a warning that your browser is not compatible. This message will only display once and you can click to proceed anyway. Fluid is based on WebKit, which is the same browser engine as Safari and Google Chrome, therefore you should have no issues.

For a full list of features check out the "Fluid Feature List".