14 DAY TRIAL // Google Wave is coming out later today and quite a few new users will get their hands on the spanking new Wave accounts. Several categories of users will be granted access and if you're lucky enough to know a friend with an account you may get in as well. This is actually the first step in the launch of the new communications platform and the project is ready to move out of the sandbox to its permanent home at wave.google.com.
“Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky,” Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager, and Stephanie Hannon, group product manager, the Googlers who have spearheaded the project, wrote.
Not only is Google Wave still quite buggy but a lot of the features are missing, even some that may seem like basic. Working with multiple users still lacks a bunch of functionality, users can't be removed from a Wave once they get in, user groups or permissions can't be created and the draft mode hasn't been implemented yet. The developers hope to get this all sorted in the coming months but, knowing Google, there is still plenty to do and plenty to see in the new Wave.
Besides moving to its new and permanent home, Wave also has something new for existing users as well, as the launch will also include the release of Featured Extensions, which the company hopes will show what can be done with the Wave API, a very important component of the project. Developers have been working on these extensions for several months now but the ones featured are nice and polished and ready for the prime time. Interestingly there are also plans for an extension store, think Apple's App Store, in which developers will be able to sell their gadgets.
In preparation for the launch, Google caused quite a stir last week when it launched the Chrome Frame plugin for Internet Explorer, effectively allowing users to run Chrome inside IE. The reason it did this is because Wave uses several technologies that IE doesn't support yet and may not support for quite a bit of time. Being a Google app, Wave is very much web-based and will work in any 'modern' browser, codeword for Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
It will actually work in Internet Explorer but significantly slower, partly because of the JavaScript performance, partly because it lacks support for features like web workers from the proposed HTML 5 standard. Google’s answer was to create the Chrome Frame, which, despite Microsoft's loosely backed up claims of being unsafe, brings a significant performance advantage.