Google relaunches Wave, no invitation necessary

[Jos]

Google's real-time collaboration platform, Google Wave, was unveiled roughly a year ago amid a ton of hype at the I/O developer conference. Although it seemed quite promising at first, combining the functions of email, instant messaging, wikis, and blogs in a framework that facilitates communication, since launch users were put off by its complexity and apparent lack of focus. The excitement over Wave quickly died down and most users just forgot about it.

Today the search giant is using the same venue to announce a revamp of the service, making it available to any home user or Google Apps customer without invitations as part of Google Labs. Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for the product, said he is confident Wave is now ready for primetime as the trial period has served to make it faster, much more stable and easier to use. If you haven't tried it in a while, among the new features are email notifications when waves change, easier navigation to unread parts of a wave, permission management options and new extensions.

They've also included a collection of templates that should make it more obvious what Wave can be useful for. It will be interesting to see how Wave fares this time around, with less hype and more functionality built into the service.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/39012-google-relaunches-wave-no-invitation-necessary.html

 

[matrix86]

I'll have to try it out when I get home tonight. I was one of those who used it and forgot about it. I used it for 2 or 3 days and then it just kind of slipped my mind....I didn't miss it, lol.

 

[yukka]

Wave is one of the biggest time sinks I have come across in the work place. A simple email chain is substituted with something people can add, edit, insert graphs, insert tables and votes. Before you know it you have 2 or 3 waves on different subjects and you spend half the day checking each one when there is a change.

Honestly its a good idea but for the workplace it has to be heavily moderated by someone.

 

[Guest]

@yukka "A simple email chain is substituted with something people can add, edit, insert graphs, insert tables and votes"

Exactly. As anyone that has worked in a business environment that lives and breathes email everyday, you want less mail not more. Wave gives TOO MUCH input.

If I wanted that much input, I'd rather call a quick meeting or better yet, just use sharepoint. Or maybe "wave" would work better as some outlook plugin tied to sharepoint. I don't know.
Wave is a complex solution looking for a problem.

Sometimes Google has too many geeks in the kitchen, not enough "normal joes" to bring them back to earth.