Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. However, Google today announced some significant updates to its social network, Google+, among them that Google Apps users can now sign up for G+ — the integration is finally live.
And one of these features launched today… → Read More
As we first reported late last week, Lars Rasmussen, the father of both Google Maps and Google Wave, has left Google is heading to Facebook. As we suspected, part of the reason is that Google pulled the plug on Wave barely a year into its existence. “It takes a while for something new and different to find its footing and I think Google was just not patient,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald over… → Read More
When Google put their faith in Wave, an ambitious new project last year, they knew it was a gamble. But a big part of it was the team behind the project. A team led by Lars Rasmussen, the engineer best known as the co-creator of the hugely successful Google Maps. And now he’s left the company. And from what we hear, he’s heading to Facebook.
Rasmussen confirmed his departure on his Facebook page. → Read More
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the new Facebook Groups. It seems well-thought-out (yes, despite the sometimes annoying opt-out aspect) and well-implemented, but I’m just not sure what my use case for it is going to be. I want to use it, but I can’t figure out a reason to just yet.
Oh my god, it’s Google Wave all over again!
Okay, it’s really not. Instead, it almost seems like what Wave… → Read More
Yes, Google Wave is dead — but it won’t fully flatline until some time in 2011, Google confirmed in a post today. Well actually, their words were that wave.google.com (the front-end product) “will be available at least through the end of the year.” But yes, you can probably expect them to shut it down sometime in 2011.
But before that happens, Google is also promising that “there will be ways to… → Read More
When I first heard the news that Google Wave was dead last week, I was surprised. I wasn’t surprised because it was a thriving, successful product (obviously, it wasn’t). I was surprised because of the gushing I heard about it from within Google leading up to and immediately following its introduction. To hear them tell it, this was the future. So I was obviously surprised that they only gave the… → Read More
As you may have heard, Google Wave is dead. But why is it dead? Google CEO Eric Schmidt took some time today after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA to answer that.
When BBC reporter Maggie Shiels asked about the reasons behind the product’s demise, Schmidt noted that Google liked the UI and a lot of the technology behind the product, but it simply to take off. “We try… → Read More
Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.
Wave, a real time messaging platform, was unveiled in May 2009 to an enthusiastic crowd of developers at the Google I/O event in San Francisco. It would “set a new benchmark for… → Read More
It was one year ago at Google I/O that company unveiled one of its most ambitious projects to date: Google Wave. Sadly, ambition doesn’t always equal success. In fact, you might say Google Wave was too ambitious. It was promising to be too many things — it needed focus. And it needed polish. Now, all this time later, Google believes it finally has both.
Today, Google is announcing that Wave will… → Read More
Remember Google Wave? No, not Google Buzz — Wave, that other social information pump that Google launched last year. It’s hard to blame you if you don’t. While Google’s goals are ambitious with Wave, many users couldn’t figure out what to do with it, or why they needed it in their lives. Perhaps more importantly, it was basically impossible to know if someone was talking to you in Wave unless… → Read More
During the Q&A session today following the Google Buzz event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed something both humorous and interesting. When asked a question about practical uses for Google Buzz, Brin noted that he actually used the service to help him write his op-ed about Google Books that ran in the New York Times last year.
Brin noted that he was having difficulty with the article… → Read More
See our live notes from today’s Google Buzz event here.
Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even… → Read More
Love it or hate it, Google Wave is proving to be a great way for people to express themselves creatively in the form of videos. We’ve seen it with Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. We’ve seen it with the Declaration of Independance. And now we have a 2009 year-in-review Google Wave video.
There’s not much to say other than this is really well done. It was created by Whirled Interactive, the… → Read More
The first time you go surfing, it’s a pretty significant achievement to just stand up on the board and ride a wave. Most people never leave their stomachs, or when they do, they fly face first into the wave. Google Wave, it seems, is not entirely dissimilar.
On its Google Wave Blog today, the company announced a very significant milestone for the young service: A million invites have been sent… → Read More
Apparently, like everyone else, the Seattle Times is very interested in trying to figure out what to actually use Google Wave for. But while most are trying to use it for either fun, realtime chats, movie reenactments, or inner-business workings, the Seattle Times have tasked Wave with a larger goal: Catching a killer.
This public Google Wave has been set up to involve the community by offering… → Read More
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp… → Read More
This guest post was written by Martin Seibert, a German Internet media consultant.
Google Wave is a hot topic at the moment. The ambitious group collaboration and micro-messaging platform started rolling out in beta via an initial batch of 100,000 invitations two months ago. Many people still want invitations. Among those who’ve tried it, some criticize it, some praise it. For now it has a lot… → Read More
Now this is cool. Some of the hype over Google Wave has died down over the last few weeks, in no small part because most people have absolutely no idea how to use it (no, the 80 minute long video demo doesn’t help). Now it looks like the Wave team has another idea up their sleeves to show people the power of Wave: they’re using it to recreate famous documents.
This time they’ve reconstructed… → Read More
Do a search for Google Wave on the App Store from your iPhone or desktop client, and you’ll see an application called just that pop up, ready to be installed as soon as you fork over $0.99 (or €0.79 in my case). One caveat: it’s not built, authorized or in any way endorsed by Google.
Spotted by Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment, the unofficial Google Wave iPhone app seemingly slipped… → Read More
“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.
Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email… → Read More
At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the… → Read More
This morning, Google is making a slight update to Wave to help users unclog their inbox from public waves. Previously, you could see public waves in your inbox, which was fairly annoying. Now for a wave to appear in your inbox, you need to “follow” the wave.
When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. But when you see a… → Read More
ThoughtWorks Studios, a software development startup, is launching a new version of its project management tool, Mingle, and is rolling out integration with Google Wave.
Mingle has been upgraded to feature a communications platform within the application, called “Murmurs.” A mix of an IM and Twitter-like microblogging format, Murmurs allows anyone involved in a software project to have online… → Read More
We already knew Waveboard was bringing Google Wave to both the desktop and the iPhone with two dedicated clients, but you’ll be interested to know the iPhone app is now live on the App Store and available for less than a buck (iTunes link).
As you can tell from the short demo video below, the app does exactly what you think it does: it displays ‘waves’ and lets you search historical ones, start… → Read More
Everyone is still searching for what exactly Google Wave’s role will be in the web going forward. We think it’s still too early to tell, but one man, Joe Sabia, has put together maybe the most impressive Wave demonstration yet. Is he doing something extremely useful? No. He’s using it to reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. The result is brilliant. → Read More
Google Wave, the search giant’s latest experiment in post-email communications, is hardly out the gate, with some of the first 100,000 private beta testers still waiting for their invites. (I just finally got mine today, two weeks after launch). But Google Wave already has a few secrets. The one that surprised me is that even though not that many people can use it yet, Google Wave already works… → Read More
We’re now a little over a week into the extended roll-out of the preview build of Google Wave. This is an important time for the service because many people can now finally start using it as they eventually may — which is to say, with their friends and colleagues. Of course, the backlash is also already in full-swing, as expected. But I can’t help but wonder if this backlash and the hype that it… → Read More
As we’ve noted several times, Google Wave is a service that is fairly hard to explain. And for many people, it’s also hard to understand. That seems somewhat reasonable given that it’s trying to be a new form of communication and that it is still very early in its life span. But just how hard is it to understand? A new website brilliantly takes a look.
Easiertounderstandthanwave.com pits Wave… → Read More
So now that some of you have your Google Wave invites (I know not all of you, I don’t even have one for my personal account yet, if it’s any consolation), and we’ve gotten some of that inevitable backlash out of our system, it’s time to figure out just what Google Wave is. And more importantly, what it will be used for.
I tried to answer that on TV the other day, but the truth is that as a new… → Read More
Google Wave is roiling the collaboration space as it moves out of the sandbox and into a wider beta. The ripples are being felt by vendors ranging from IBM to Cisco and even Google itself. IBM is challenging Google Apps with an iNotes offering undercutting on price (as well as features, as Google quickly points out.) Cisco is buying small business videoconferencing assets to bolster its… → Read More
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