last update : 21 August 2011

In August 2010, Google announced that Wave would no longer be developed as a standalone product, but that the Wave technology would survive in other products. The following informations refer to the initial plans.

The Google Wave product is currently available as a developer preview. It’s an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop. Google Wave can also be considered as a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. A wave is shared. A wave is live.

The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the “live” concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, Google intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Users can request an invitation to Google Wave Preview and developers can request an Wave sandbox account.