Remember Google Wave? Last year I was pretty excited to get an invite to join what was suppose to be Google’s hot new social networking platform. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves (kind of a cross between chatting and threaded discussions on a blog).
Like many people, I didn’t end up doing much with it (in my case due to a lack of collaborators), so I wasn’t too surprised when Google officially halted Google Wave development last August and open-sourced the code in September.
I did see a lot of potential in Google Wave, however, and was happy to learn Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit that supports the open source server software Apache, is taking Google Wave into its “incubator program” renamed as “Apache Wave.” Google made the announcement in the Google Wave Developer Blog on Monday:
“The creation of Apache Wave will serve to accelerate the growth of the existing community with strong open-source processes. If you’d like to get involved, please join the Apache Wave mailing list (send an email to wave-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org). We’re looking forward to working with you,” Google said.
Google stressed that Apache Wave won’t have full Google Wave functionality, but it will give developers and users a way to run Wave servers and host waves on their own hardware.
Who knows? The broader open source community might ripple Google Wave into something bigger than a trickle—or even a wave—yet! Only time will tell. Stay tuned.
Do you see an Apache Wave tsunami or trickle coming? Please share your thoughts below.
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