Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Google Wave becomes Wave in a Box

news
Sep 3, 20102 mins

The recently canceled social networking service is being revived as application bundle for real-time collaboration

Google Wave, the social networking service canceled by Google, will morph into an application bundle for real-time collaboration, a Google engineer said this week.

In a blog post, Google Software Engineer Alex North, from the Google Wave Team, said the company had received many inquiries about the future of the open source code and Wave federation protocol. The company has cited a lack of adoption as the reason for Google Wave’s discontinuation last month.

“We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we’ve already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and Web client into a more complete application or ‘Wave in a Box,'” North said.

“This project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run Wave servers and host Waves on their own hardware,” North said.

The project will feature an application bundle with a server and Web client, supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave System, North said.

Other capabilities include support for threaded conversations; refinements to client-server protocols; gadget, robot, and data API and support for importing wave data from wave.google.com.

“While Wave in a Box will be a functional application, the future of Wave will be defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve,” said North.

This article, “Google Wave becomes Wave in a Box,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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