Earlier this month, Google stated that they plan to kill off their revolutionary cloud collaboration service, Google Wave, citing lack of user interest (and prompting some protest). In case you didn’t know already, Wave was a collaborative communications suite that effectively combined email, instant messaging, wikis, and blogging abilities into one software that you could update in real time.
It seems that Google has got the message that some people liked Wave and had found effective uses of the software, and don’t want it to die; because they’ve now announced their plans for Wave’s future. Quite simply, Google has said that it will be offering developers a reduced-functionality version of its defunct Wave application suite dubbed ‘Wave in a box.”
“This project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today,” said Alex North, a software engineer on Google Wave on the team blog.
“However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve.”
The company has open sourced around 200,000 lines of code, including an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration, support for threaded conversations and the ability to import existing Wave data. So your Waves can live on just like Wave itself lives on – just on someone else’s server.
I’m actually quite interested in this development myself. But what about you guys? As always, comments appreciated.