Google Wave

Google Wave was a collaborative communications tool introduced by Google at the 2009 I/O Conference.

The technology combines real time chat with wiki-type editing of any "blip", or individual wave segment. There are also "robots" that automate tasks inside waves. They are hosted at Google App Engine right now (which means you are necessarily limited to Java and Python), but in the future any website correctly set up for robot hosting will work. There are also "gadgets". A gadget is a small application that runs within a client. The gadget is owned by the wave, and all participants on a wave share the same gadget state.

On May 19th, 2010, Google Wave became open to the public for anyone with a Google Account.

In late 2010, Google Wave usage dropped, triggered by Google Buzz.

In early August Google announced that they were halting development for Google Wave due to the lack of user adoption. Google has promised to keep the site running until at least the end of 2010, but was still up as of late February 2011. A petition site, Save Google Wave, was set up and and has over 47,000 supporters. Google has handed development of Wave over to the Apache Software Foundation who are currently developing Wave in a Box. On November 25th, 2011, Google mass-mailed Wave members noting that the service would be read-only from January 31st, 2012 and shut down on April 30th, 2012.

Videos

 * What is Google Wave -
 * Introduction to Wave -
 * Google Wave Overview -
 * Getting Started with Google Wave -
 * Beginners Guide To Google Wave -
 * Google Wave: 15 features -
 * First Impressions and Walkthrough -