Google Mini Wave Quietly Washes Ashore

Have you ever received an e-mail with critical information about an event but an unrelated subject line? If you didn’t flag it and needed it a few weeks or months later, you could end up wasting quite a bit of time digging for it. 

Solving this problem by keeping all related conversations in one chronologically organized spot was the genius behind Google Wave, the social networking platform Google launched with much fanfare last year. While many saw its potential, adoption was minimal causing its development to be halted and its code to be open sourced in a stripped down version renamed Apache Wave.

I was intrigued to learn this weekend that Google Labs was quietly debuting a new product called Shared Spaces, using Google Wave technology. According to Google Lab’s official about page, here is what it is meant to do:

A shared space is an easy way for you to share mini-collaborative applications, like scheduling tools or games, with your friends or colleagues.

Shared Spaces seems to be basically Google Wave gadgets that exist outside of Google Wave. Under Shared Spaces, you will be able to quickly create a “space,” grab a gadget from the gallery of 50 that already exist, and then paste the Space’s URL into a chat window, e-mail message, tweet or any other content-sharing platform you normally use.

This is a big improvement over Google Wave, which required you and your collaborators to create and use special Google Wave accounts and e-mail addresses to use it. It’ll be interesting to see if these changes help Shared Spaces, which so quietly washed ashore, turn into the next wave in social networking  or even the tsunami Google Wave was hoped to be.

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