Google Wave has been available for a wider audience for about a month now, to mixed impressions, but it's still far from being mature enough for a complete roll out. Still, things are moving forward fast and Google has just announced that the Wave protocol and implementation is currently available for anyone to deploy on their own servers. This is a very important step as Wave was designed from the beginning to be completely open and allow anyone to run their own implementation.

“When we first unveiled Google Wave a few months ago, one of the fundamental concepts we discussed was the vision for wave as an open communications protocol. We are happy to announce that the developer instance of Google Wave is now available for experimental interoperability testing with other wave providers. This means that if you are interested in building a service that uses the Google Wave Federation Protocol, you can begin prototyping with a tool like FedOne against WaveSandbox.com,” Google announced.

Because Google wants Wave to be the next-generation communications platform, it knew it couldn't compete with email unless it provided a protocol that any company or organization could deploy on its own and which allowed all of the different installs to intercommunicate. While this was very important both for the principle but also as a clear necessity in order to ensure its popularity, actually developing and implementing it is a very though technical challenge. Nevertheless, Google is now ready with the first step towards the full federation of the platform.

Shortly after the company revealed Wave, it launched a sandbox implementation allowing select developers to get familiarized with the tool and start creating apps for it. About a month ago, Wave was rolled out to a significant number of new users and it also moved to its permanent home at wave.google.com. Now, the sandbox previously used for app development will be used to start testing the federation protocol in a real world scenario.

Developers with access to the sandbox can currently install a local Wave server and have it sync with the sandbox one and potentially with those deployed by other developers. The Wave Federation Prototype Server is written in Java so it should run on any Windows, Linux or Mac OSX machine. This is a very early stage implementation of the federation protocol and things are very likely to change over time.