Google unveiled Wave, its online platform for unified communications and collaboration, last year at its I/O conference to much fanfare. The company gradually broadened availability of the service, but many users remained confused about what, exactly, Wave did, and Google kept the project in invitation-only mode.
Fast forward to today, and the search giant is announcing at this year’s I/O show the general availability of Wave, highlighting new features and open sourcing more production code. Datamation has the story.
Google Wave, the search giant’s experimental online collaboration and communications service, is now available to the general public following a year of invitation-only beta testing.
Wave is Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) ambitious effort to recast online collaboration in a real-time setting while roping in more traditional IP-based communication channels like instant messaging and e-mail. Using a single, shared online interface, Wave enables users to communicate and collaborate on a single topic in real time, offering a set of controls to fine-tune how information is shared across the group or to the public Web.
Touted by some as a Microsoft SharePoint killer, Google Wave made a splashy debut last May when the company announced the service and invited a limited set of developers to access the open source project and suggest improvements. Then in September, Google announced plans to broaden Wave’s availability by putting it in invitation-only mode for the public, steadily expanding the number of test users it allowed into the service.