As the new champions of cloud computing, Google introduced Google Wave — a mash-up of instant messaging, collaborative tools, and document sharing. It was hyped as a better way of working, chatting, and collaborating in the cloud workplace.
Announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. Most people never got that far with it though. To the general public, it was nothing short of a chatroom.
The Google Wave: A chatroom project that died a natural death
It had strong collaborative and real-time potential, supported by extensions that can provide, for instance, spelling/grammar checking, automated language translation , and other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. Google accepted most requests submitted starting the 29th of November 2009, soon after the September extended release of the technical preview. On May 19, 2010, Google Wave was released to the general public.
Our experiences with the Wave, are not spectacular to say the least — lag times and lockups were a norm. Cloud computing in general seems to require relatively good bandwith, and a computer system free of hang ups. If you’re into cloud computing — Google Apps, for instance — make sure that aside from strong bandwith, you clean up your system by backing up data. This is where a good external Blu-ray burner will come in handy (like our DIGISTOR USB Blu-ray burner). Back up huge media files into 25 GB Blu-ray blank discs. Or go portable and pack your data into portable USB hard drives.
I’m sure Google will have other forays into cloud computing, but the Wave was an exercise doomed to failure.
I never got to use Google Wave anyway, so good for me, right?
Bye bye Google Waves..