Google I/O 2010: Google Wave for Apps and New APIs

Google Wave is now open to everyone. Any user with a Google account can log into the service, create a new Wave or participate in an existing one. But that’s only half of the news at Google I/O 2010. Google is also introducing Wave for Google Apps. Administrators will now be able to turn on the service for their companies and the tool should shine in the enterprise sector, with small and large companies alike.

“Today – one year after first introducing Wave – we’re extending Google Wave (Labs) to businesses, schools and organizations to let more people try this tool and to learn how we can improve the Google Apps suite,” Greg D'Alesandre, Google Wave product manager, wrote on the Google Enterprise blog. “Since we began previewing Google Wave last fall, we’ve consistently heard that Wave shines in small group settings where teams need to discuss and debate as they create content together, like developing an engineering project plan, creating a trip itinerary or building an event invitation list.”

This is just the first step, Wave will be a part of Google Labs for now, but there are big plans for the product on the business front. Already, there are companies, like Novel, working on solutions based on Wave, or that use the Wave Federation Protocol. Others are integrating it with their products, like Salesforce.com. Google Wave enables real-time collaboration in a way that really lends itself to the business environment.

There are some announcements on the technical side as well. The development team has been adding new features ever since Google Wave was made available. It has launched a few more at Google I/O to complement the ones from the past few months. Specifically, Robots can now be run on any server, not just on Google Apps Engine. This change should appeal to enterprises the most. The developers introduced the Robots 2.0 API a couple of months back and also debuted the Active Robots API.

Google is also open-sourcing more parts of the Google Wave code to help the ones wanting to run a dedicated Wave server. This is a big part of Google’s strategy, which envisioned Wave as an open standard to be adopted and used by others independent of the company. Still, there are still plenty to do, so look forward to plenty of new features and functionality in the coming months.


Google I/O 2010

 - Chrome Web Store
 - WebM, Google’s Open Video Format for HTML5
 - WebM - A Technical Overview and Possible Legal Issues
 - Google Wave is Now Open to Everyone
 - Google Storage for Developers
 - Google Buzz API
 - Google App Engine for Business and VMware Partnership
 - Android 2.2 Froyo Is Lightning Fast
 - Google TV Set to Conquer the Living Room  
 - Music May be Coming to the Android Marketplace  
 - YouTube Leanback for Google TV  
 - Presenting the New Fonts API