14 DAY TRIAL // There were a lot of announcements on the first day of the Google I/O 2010 conference and plenty of interesting new products and technologies. Last year, though, things were a little different, everyone was talking about one thing, Google Wave. The star of the 2009 Google I/O, Google Wave proved to be less kind to the communications platform in the following months. There were a lot of issues and most people just didn’t ‘get it.’ Google thinks that those problems are now gone and is opening up Google Wave to everyone after a year of invite-only access.
“Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave -- simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you are a Google Apps administrator at a business, school or organization, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost,” Stephanie Hannon, product manager with Google Wave, announced.
Google is confident Wave is mature enough to be used by anyone. Still, Wave will be part of Google Labs, for now, a sign that there are still plenty to be done. Since Google first demoed the product last year, a lot of things have changed. Google says it is a lot more stable now, crashes were common in early builds, and also significantly faster. These two aspects make it a lot more usable and useful.
That, for the most part, solves the technical part of the problem, but what about the other hurdle? Google Wave invites were a sought-after commodity when the service opened up to more users, but once users managed to get their hands on one, the disappointment would set in. ‘Google Wave sounds great, but what does it actually do,’ seemed to be the question on everyone’s minds.
Unfortunately, Google didn’t really know either. Wave was a one-of-a-kind product, and the developers were as curious as anyone to see how people would use it. They now believe to have a much better understanding of that. Wave, Google says, is great for group collaboration, specifically, it’s perfect for a smaller group of people working together to get something done.
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 for Apps and New APIs
- 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