Happy 1st Birthday, Google Wave!

Earlier today, we posted about our first birthday on the Official Google blog.

Here on our team blog, we wanted to add a big "THANK YOU!" to all of the developers, students, teachers, journalists, screenwriters, video producers, analysts, entrepreneurs, robot builders, musicians, dentists, gamers, community organizers, veterinarians, hotel managers, engineers and everyone else who have been using Google Wave and sharing feedback and stories to help us continue building and improving the product, platform and protocol.

Here's to you!

Wave on!

Posted by Anna-Christina Douglas, Product Marketing, Google Wave Team

Google Wave Available for Everyone

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 (more on our Enterprise blog).

We began previewing Google Wave with individuals and a handful of Google Apps customers six months ago. Since then, Wave has been used in a great many interesting ways. It's clear from the invaluable feedback we've received that Wave is a great place to get work done, in particular for teams working together on projects that involve lots of discussion and close coordination. Here are a few examples:

Business: Co-workers at companies large and small are using Wave, from writing software code at Lyn and Line and coordinating ad campaigns at Clear Channel Radio, to international project communications for Deloitte's As One project.

Education: University students and professors worldwide have used waves within and beyond the classroom to collaborate on Latin poetry translations, write academic research papers and even build new functionality with Wave's APIs. An ICT teacher also enjoyed having her 5th-graders do their class research in Wave.

Creative collaboration: From virtual art classes to writing the Complete Guide to Google Wave itself, waves make it easier for groups to review and critique multimedia content like images and videos. (We've heard that Wave is fun for gaming, too.)

Organizations and conferences: The Debatewise Global Youth panel explored climate change across 100 countries and waves at eComm (Emerging Communication Conference), LCA 2010 conference and HASTAC 2010 helped track speaking sessions. We are using waves in the same manner at today's Google I/O conference.

Journalism: Mashable used Wave to interview journalists on the future of journalism, and The Seattle Times experimented with a public Wave to develop their Pulitzer Prize-winning news coverage.

And here's a brief video to illustrate how groups can work together in Wave:

If you tried Google Wave out a while ago, and found it not quite ready for real use, now is a good time to come back for a second try. Wave is much faster and much more stable than when we began the preview, and we have worked hard to make Wave easier to use. For example, you can now get email notifications when waves change, easily navigate to unread parts of a wave, and remove participants added by mistake. We have also added permission management options and an extensions gallery.

Today, we are also launching several improvements to the Wave APIs and open sourcing additional components for developers building their own Wave services. Read more about these updates on our developer blog.

Wave on!

Posted by Stephanie Hannon, Product Manager, Google Wave Team

Discover your favorite extension today!

Since our introductory blogpost about the extension gallery, we've been thrilled by all of the useful and interesting Google Wave extensions coming out of the developer community. With every enhancement we announce, developers find inventive ways to create handy extensions.

Accordingly, the number of extensions is growing, and we would like to introduce a few improvements we've made to make it easier to discover, browse, and sample extensions for yourself.

Starting at the top, you will notice we replaced the previous Extensions link with a dedicated Extensions section. This section lets you check out "Featured" extensions that our team would like to highlight -- the Wave team occasionally selects these extensions because we think they're particularly useful, user-friendly and "Wave-y." You can also browse many other extensions in our gallery via the "All" link.

We also overhauled the gallery view itself, allowing you to see each extension's icon and description, at a glance

Additionally, we've made it easier to start using an extension. If you see a particular extension you like and want to quickly take it for a spin, you can simply "Try It Now" -- even without installing it. If you like it and want to use it later, just go back in your browser and click "Install." Please note that not all extensions support this feature at the moment, but we hope more will add this option in the near future.



We hope you find these improvements useful as we work towards providing a first-class extension experience within Google Wave. Stay tuned for more advancements in the future. If you're a developer, you can get started building extensions and then submit them for the gallery.


Posted by David Byttow, Software Engineer, Google Wave Team