Looks like the people behind the “Save Google Wave” site have succeeded. Google’s given it to the Apache Software Foundation, where it’ll be known as Apache Wave. High fives all ’round, nerdlingers! [Google Wave Blog]
Google’s made some grave errors in the past year (Wi-Fi snooping and Buzz, to say the least), but vice president Marissa Mayer’s picks of their three worst are surprising.
Google has announced that despite Wave’s demise as a Google App, its open source code will continue to be developed into a fully-functional application available to anyone with the desire to host it.
Writing on the Google Wave blog yesterday, Lars Rasmussen from the Wave team spoke of its scheduled death, confirming that Wave.google.com “will be available at least through the end of the year” and that “there will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year.”
When Google announced that it would be closing down Wave, hardly a tremor was felt across the land, but seemingly some people out there were using it, as close to 28,000 people are supporting the Save Google Wave website.
While I know that it was useful during manhunts and that Lifehacker loves it, I still don’t really understand Google Wave. But no more worrying about this particular lack of knowledge though, because Google appears to be abandoning the project:
There’s a lot of under-the-hood changes to Wave to make it faster, more stable and more extendable with new APIs, among other improvements, but the big news for most people is that now anybody can use it with their standard Google (or Google Apps) account – it’s just going to live in Google Labs for the time being. [Wave]
All this time I thought people weren’t using Google Wave because it was generally unwieldy. But this College Humor video helped me understand: people don’t use Google Wave because it’s specifically unwieldy, for cyber sex.
