While some early testers of the Waveboard app complained that it didn't do anything more than what the iPhone optimized website already offered, the next release of Waveboard may have those naysayers changing their mind. Waveboard 2.0 has a few new features, but the one that will grab everyone's attention is its ability to offer "push" notifications on the iPhone.

Quick Inbox

One of the new features of Waveboard 2.0 is something called the "Quick Inbox" view. Since Google Wave loads a little slowly on the iPhone - something developer Dirk Holtwick says is out of his hands - he's come up with a workaround for a speedier launch. The new "quick inbox" feature offers a fast-loading overview that displays the waves that have changed, as you can see in the following video:

Push Notifications

Even more exciting, perhaps, is the push notifications feature. In addition to displaying a badge on the app's icon showing the number of new waves, the push notifications feature will tap into the iPhone's ability to display pop-up alerts on your device. As new text is entered into a wave, the iPhone will display the additional text in a push notification message:

Of course, depending on the number of waves you're involved in and how heavily they're used, this feature could easily become an annoyance. Unfortunately, Google offers few control mechanisms for managing the waves you belong to at the moment - something that could lead to serious information overload for Wave users. For example, anyone can add you to a wave - even without your permission. This can lead to an inbox crowded with waves that you don't really care about following. For some, this feature is a key selling point for Wave, but for others it's just a chaos-inducing mess. That may change in future, though, when Google implements the "whitelisting" feature, which will allow users to create an approved list of fellow wavers, and only people on that list will be able to contact you.

There's no word yet on if or how you'll be able to manage the new push notifications feature in the app's settings. If there were configuration options that let you exclude some waves (like public ones, for example), then it would be even more useful.

In any event, the app will now have some value-added features that make it worth the $0.99. Stay tuned to the GetWaveboard blog in the coming days for more details on the new features and how they work.

Developers who want to run their own Wave server can find all the necessary information for setting up a Wave Federation Prototype Server in these documents. The server is written in Java and should run on Windows, OSX and Linux-based machines. In the documentation, the Wave team explains how to run the server as an extension to the open source OpenFire XMPP server, though any XEP-00114 compatible XMPP server should be able to talk to the Wave server.

The Google Wave team points out that this is not even close to the final implementation of the Wave protocol and that things will inevitably change. The team also asks developers to contribute to the development of the Wave prototype server.

As we pointed out last week, the federation protocol is an integral part of Google's plans for Wave. If Google wants Wave to compete with email, it will have to create a distributed network of providers and this is a first step in that direction.

The Google Wave we see today is only one part of what Wave is all about. Wave is also an open protocol that allows different Wave providers to run their own Wave servers. These are not just stand-alone Wave servers for internal use in a company, however. This protocol gives Wave providers the ability to exchange messages between different servers that are running Wave-based services, just like different email providers can pass emails back and forth thanks to standardized email protocols.

What The Google Wave Federation Looks Like

The Wave team likes to compare Wave to email - and just like email, Wave users will be able to exchange messages and share waves with Wave users on different servers. Right now, Google is the only Wave provider on the market. This will soon change. Wave providers will be able to use the Wave federation protocol to share updates and users only have to know the other users' wave address. A wave address looks just like an email address: <username>@<domain>.

To reach its potential as a ubiquitous new means for real-time communication, Wave has to be open and available to as many users as possible. If Wave only existed in Google's silo, it wouldn't be very interesting.

If you are interested in the technical background, Google offers a very readable White Paper about the Google Wave federation architecture. 

What Does This Mean for Users?

Because it's a federated protocol, you could soon run your own Wave server. No pre-packaged distributions that would allow a user or company to set up a Wave server exist at this point, but it's only a matter of time before these will arrive. Hopefully, some of these will also experiment with alternative user interfaces that will extend the functionality of Wave beyond Google's current implementation.

Companies will be able to host their own Wave servers and use them to communicate internally or with clients who run their own Wave servers. Many enterprise companies are still worried about storing their data in a hosted environment. If Google wants to make Wave palatable for this market, these companies need to have the ability to control their data and customize the experience for their employees.

For our thoughts about Google Wave use cases, also see our posts about Wave in education and arts and filmmaking.

Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let's start with the education sector. We'll explore other use cases in upcoming posts.

A quick reminder of what Google Wave is. In a nutshell, Google Wave is a new form of real-time communications. Google describes it as "equal parts conversation and document." In our first 'hands-on' post at the beginning of June, we described it as "real-time email with a big dose of IM built-in" - although we noted that "this only describes a small part of what Wave can do."

In a recent CNN profile, Wave creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen described it as making email "collaborative and instant."

Wave in Class

After searching some public 'waves,' we came across an educational wave. Entitled 'Wave in Class,' this wave was started by Loren Baum (a self-described "collaborative learning enthusiast" and graduate student at Ben Gurion University) and Sam Boland (a Politics student and "Tech Enthusiast" at Occidental College, Los Angeles).

The wave was started to explore concepts like "Collaborative Note Taking" and "Wave as a Debate Host." Nearly 100 people are included in the wave, ranging from teachers to PhD students to IT professionals to high school students.

This particular wave was framed at the start as being "a set of collaborative documents, supported by a chat."

As a note-taking tool, Samuel Boland wrote that "there appears to be a concensus that this [Google Wave] will work as a note-taking tool, the only disagreement is over how to implement it." Options for note-taking include voluntary extra-curricular groups, rotating in-class groups and small in-class groups.

A few users enthused later in the wave that "Google Wave combines a lot of the best features from different applications" - but with a real-time twist. It was noted that while Google Docs can be used to share notes and collaborate on assignments, with Google Wave students can collaborate in real-time. This could be important in education for things like notetaking, asking questions (a.k.a. a backchannel) and collaborative projects.

Another feature of Wave that would be useful for education purposes, according to this 100-person wave, is the play-back ability - "so instructors can see exactly who did what, and see the progression of ideas."

Will Wave Make Students Lazy?

One concern that seemed to pop up several times in the wave was that Google Wave could make it too easy for lazy students to get by. As Justin Neitzey succinctly put it: "I don't think kids should be allowed piggy back off the work of others."

This is a similar concern that some in the education system had with Wolfram Alpha, another innovative Web tool that is set to change the way education is delivered.

Manny Guendulay responded that "reading those notes and participating in the collaboration of those notes hold totally different of levels of thinking." He argued that "the person simply reading the notes (passively learning) has no chance to perform at the same level as someone who helped collaborate (active learning) on those notes, or even watched and read along while they were being created."

In other words, engaging with Google Wave - and the Web in general in fact - will lead to smarter, better performing students. That sounds reasonable to us, but time will tell for both Google Wave and Wolfram Alpha on that score.

Conclusion

Overall, it is clear that Google Wave has potential to be very useful in the education system, particularly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. Three students experimented with just that in a lecture; the resulting notes were said to be "more complete" than if Wave hadn't been used.

If you're interested in exploring other education waves, check these out:

• Higher Ed Directory (meta)
• Software Roles in Education - a structured, goal driven exploration
• Wave for Notes - about note taking
• Student-side Class Management: a Wave template

As reported by Australian news outlet ITNews, Wave has multiple levels of security which are designed to prevent email spoofing. Spoofing, meaning when you receive an email that claims to be from either a person or company you know but is actually from someone else - a hacker in most cases.

D'alesandre says the Wave protocol is more secure because it includes something he jokingly refers to as "crypto fairy dust." That's obviously meant to be a simple and fun way to explain the security complexities built into Wave which involve detailed authentication mechanisms to keep users safe from malicious attacks. In Wave, every bit of info you receive from another Wave user has already been authenticated as to its origin so you can be assured that they are who they say they are.

"You know you are getting the Wave from the person that is sending it to you and it has not changed mid-stream. This is a very big problem in current communication technologies - data can be changed mid stream and you will never know," said D'alesandre.

HTTPS Enabled by Default

For an additional layer of security, all Wave traffic is by default encrypted via HTTPS, a protocol for secure communications. That represents a big change in Google's standard policy regarding use of this protocol. It wasn't until July of 2008 that Gmail users were even given the option to encrypt messages using SSL and to enable it, you had to go into your settings and make a change - something that most mainstream users would never have bothered with. By the end of 2008, Google was only offering SSL as a feature in its other Google Apps programs if users were on either the Premier or Education editions. That meant that for non-paying consumer users, Google Docs, Calendar and other online offerings were only available via unencrypted HTTP sessions.

Today, little has changed. Still, only users of Premier and Education Editions have access to SSL and it's not switched on by default. The protocol is now available for Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Docs and Sites but not the Start page, Google Video or the Google Talk desktop client. Consumers using free Google apps like Docs still don't have SSL unless they type it in the address bar manually.

D'alesandre admitted that switching on encryption in Wave slows down the service a little (which probably explains the company's hesitance to switch it on in other products, too), but they ultimately decided that the security it provides was worth it.

Whitelisting Kills the Noise

A third security feature of sorts coming to Wave in the future is the ability to do "whitelisting." Wave users will be able to select which people they want to collaborate with and place them on a whitelist of approved persons. Only those who are on the list will be able to contact you via Wave and everyone else will be ignored.

That feature should certainly help to address the concerns certain folks have about Wave's "noise level," to some, an overwhelming amount of activity that led them to call out Wave as a distraction and a time-waster instead of the futuristic productivity product it intends to be. By allowing those who can't seem to embrace Wave's cacophony the ability to limit their collaborators, Wave could transfer from noisy attention killer to useful tool in an instant.

Of the three features, the first two are already in place. No date was given on the whitelisting feature, only that it will be "coming soon."

Also this week we published a list of 50 leading Real-Time Web companies, looked at the release of 100,000 Google Wave invites, compared Twitter and Facebook game plans, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

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Less Than 2 Weeks Till The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit

ReadWriteWeb's very first event is coming soon: The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit on October 15th in Mountain View, California. It's a 1-day event that will bring together some of the smartest minds doing real-time work for an industry-changing, face-to-face conversation.

In conjunction with the Summit, we'll be releasing our second original premium research report in October. Registration is now open for the The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we hope to see you there!

Web Trends

Top 50 Real-Time Web Companies

As part of our lead-up to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, this week we listed 50 leading companies of the Real-Time Web. Like any list, it is bound to be missing some worthy companies - so we invite you to add more in the comments. Our aim is to unveil the top 100 Real-Time Web companies at our event.

Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action

The Real-Time Web - it's more than just immediate delivery of Twitter messages to an always-on mobile device, disrupting the concentration that civilization is based on and bringing a rush to crazed social media addicts obsessed with the hottest new buzzwords. No, there are scores of companies building and selling systems today that deliver very real value via the real-time web.

We've interviewed 40 companies in the real-time web market in preparation for the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit and a companion research report. In this post are nine solid examples of real-time web technology that illustrate what it is and why it's important - and one possible future scenario that's important enough it has to be discussed as well.

What Early Birds Want to Know About the Real-Time Web

The real-time web is a broad and rich phenomenon emerging online. A wide variety of companies are building and using it in really diverse ways. Because this field is so new and is seeing such breadth of innovation, people have a lot of questions about it. In this post are some of our favorite questions that Early Bird registrants said that they want to tackle.

More Proof: Facebook for the Rich, MySpace for the Poor

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on - and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.

Kiva's Causemopolitan on World Tour: Social Media for Social Good

It's been a long and winding road for serial volunteer and social media philanthropist Sloane Berrent. Since her unplanned departure from an L.A.-based startup in 2008, Berrent has traveled through eight countries, documenting and publicizing the struggles of those in developing areas through her blog posts, tweets, images, videos, and her own presence at events at home and abroad. From post-Katrina New Orleans to a trash dump in Manila to a monastery in Burma, read on for her story of trying to achieve social good through social media.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations.

Trading Scarcity: Is This the Killer App for the Real-Time Web?

Most platforms gain traction through a killer app. In the second generation of real time, that killer app was market data for financial traders. What will it be in the third generation? Today, the real-time Web is associated with social networking status updates via services such as Twitter and Facebook. But whether this will be the killer app for this generation is not clear. The killer app matters, because the winner at the platform layer will be the company that hosts it.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

TechStars Investor Day Hits a Home Run

With bleary eyes and bellies full of coffee, a roomful of investors, journalists and young entrepreneurs gathered this morning for the Bay Area TechStars Investor day. The Boulder and Boston-based startup incubator pulled out all the stops as 13 companies took to the stage to plead their case for funding. In this post are the summaries of each.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

100,000 Google Wave Preview Invites: Everything You Need to Know

Google officially announced this week that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.

Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans

There is a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about the recent $100 million investment in Twitter at a $1 billion valuation, but most of it based on speculation. Twitter and Facebook are private companies. You cannot get the facts simply by typing a stock symbol into Yahoo Finance. Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to add to the facts, not just the speculation. Rather than posting confidential information that someone has leaked to us, we prefer to start with publicly available data. We could not refrain from a bit of game theory speculation on how this could play out, and we invited a specialist in startup deals to add his speculation as well.

2 Billion Downloads Later, Apple's App Store is Still Going Strong

Apple this week announced that a total of 2 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. There are now over 85,000 apps in the store, up from 65,000 on July 14, and the number of developers has grown from 100,000 in July to around 125,000 today. iPhone and iPod touch users now download close to 6.6 million apps every day and this number continues to grow.

Google and Best Buy Partner on Mobile Applications

This week major electronics retailer Best Buy and internet powerhouse Google announced a partnership designed to help the retailer compete in the mobile sales arena. In addition to other Best Buy strategies for ramping up their mobile division, one key aspect to their multiphase plan involves collaborating with Google on a series of exclusive mobile applications, the first one being a shopping app that helps customers find the item they're looking for within their nearest Best Buy store.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and Louis Gray are three tech blogger geeks that love to use new tools and all got to test Google's new real-time communication platform Wave today. It's possible that when the rush is over the Wave experience will seem less overwhelming, but the kinds of initial reactions these three had aren't good.

For a good introduction to Google Wave, see enthusiast hacker Gina Trapani's Wave Highlight Reel.

Steve Rubel summarizes his thoughts like this:

I have had a Google Wave sandbox account since late July. It's slick to be sure. However, what I keep asking myself is this: what problem does it solve? In many ways it's overly complex. In fact it's too complex for the era of the Attention Crash where all of us, especially knowledge workers, are crying for simplicity.

Robert Scoble is not a fan:

I just got my Google Wave invite. No, I'm already out, so I can't send one to you, sorry. But this service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.

See, the first thing you notice is that you can see people chatting live in Google Wave. That's really cool if you are working on something together, like a spreadsheet or a Word document.

But it's a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people. It also ignores the productivity gains that we've gotten from RSS feeds, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

Louis Gray has a long, detailed review that concludes like this:

I would bet that after the initial surge of curiosity, normal conversations and information exchange will eventually take over, so this initial spike may be an exception rather than the new rule. But if you're diving into this new technology, expect to be exerting a lot of energy to stay on top of it, because messaging just got accelerated.

Have you had a chance to try Wave yet? We have high hopes for the Real-Time Web in general, but in the many conversations we've been having with other companies in this broad market one concern has loomed large: user experience. Wave is an ambitious effort and is technically impressive, but user experience, strategic content filtering and concurrent/complimentary use of static information display are all important as well.

We got to try the Ribbit and 6rounds extensions first-hand over the last few days and they have turned out to be pretty interesting.

The Ribbit conference call extension allows you to quickly set up a teleconference in Wave. Calls can be routed to any phone, and you can use the wave simply to provide context for the call or to keep notes. Because Google doesn't currently give developers direct access to contact information, you have to type in your own number, but otherwise the operation couldn't be any easier.

While Ribbit focuses on telephone, the team at 6rounds has built a video chat gadget. Currently, 6rounds supports only one-on-one chats, but even given this limitation, the app builds nicely on Google Wave's real-time emphasis and allows you to watch YouTube videos or play games with your friends.

We didn't get to test the Lonely Planet, AccuWeather and LabPixies extensions yet, but they all look pretty useful as well. When we talked to the Wave team earlier this week, they especially raved about LabPixies Sudoku game, which looks to be quite addictive.

A Few More Things to Do When You Get Your Wave Invite

• Invite your friends. You will be able to nominate up to 8 of your friends for a Wave account. Wave is a lot more fun when you have somebody to help you test it.
• When you start a new wave, click on the Google icon. From there, you can add links and search and embed YouTube videos and images.
• Try to add a map (just click the Google Maps pin). As you scroll, everybody else in the wave will see a live update of what you are doing.
• Need to vote on where to go for dinner tonight? Try the Yes/No/Maybe gadget.
• Try the 'playback' feature - it replays a wave step by step. This comes in really handy if you want to check who has made what revisions.
• Invite a robot to your wave. Just add elizarobot@appspot.comto your contacts, for example, and you will have a robot shrink to chat with while you're waiting for your friends to sign up.

And a Few More Things to Remember

• Wave works in most modern browsers (and even runs on Safari on the iPhone), but it works best in Google Chrome (IE users will be prompted to install Chrome Frame).
• To add a contact to a wave, just start a new wave and drag and drop the icon from the Contacts sidebar to the new wave.
• The blue lines that appear when you scroll through a list show you where your reply goes. Just click on the line and a reply will show up.
• Pressing 'Enter' will take you to the next line in your reply - you have to hit "Shift + Enter" to finalize your reply.
• Private replies are hidden in the pull-down menu at the right edge of the message that you are editing.
• Stuff will break - remember that this is a very early beta!

Feel free to post a comment if you have additional tips and tricks (or favorite robots and extensions) you would like to share.

Even after using Google Wave for a few months now, it is still hard to describe exactly what it is. It's as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing documents collaboratively. It can also be used as a Wiki, to replace email and IM within an organization, or just to organize a pub crawl, as Wave's Lars Rasmussen points out in today's blog post. There can be no doubt that Wave feels oddly familiar, especially because of its typical Google design, yet it also represents an alien concept for most users, as it combines so many services into one extremely flexible package but still remains deceptively simple to use.

We got a chance to talk to the core Wave team, including Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon, last night. They were obviously quite excited about the launch and told us about some of the details regarding the invitation process, Wave's current features, and some of the team's plans for the future.

Highlights

We will look at the details of the launch below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Google will send out more than 100,000 invites tomorrow
• they will go to three groups: current users on the sandbox server, users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com over the last few months (first-come, first-served), and a few select enterprise users on Google Apps accounts
• more invites will be sent out as the team expands capacity
• users will not be able to invite their friends to Wave directly, but every Wave user will be able to 'nominate' 8 friends who will get to the front of the queue for new accounts
• all Wave accounts will move from the sandbox to the wave.google.com domain
• Wave's contact management system will be integrated with Google Contacts
• the Wave team will highlight robots and widgets from a select number of vendors
• Internet Explorer users will be prompted to install and use Chrome Frame

Wave.Google.com

While the early Wave testers were on a wavesandbox.com account, starting tomorrow, all of these accounts and all the new users will move over to the wave.google.com domain. If you have tested Wave before, don't expect any new features yet. The Wave team plans to add new features over the next few months, but the current focus in on making sure that the system can scale.

Nominate 8 of Your Friends

Unlike the Gmail beta, Google Wave users who get into the preview tomorrow won't be able to invite friends directly. Instead, they will be able to 'nominate' 8 of their friends for accounts. As the Wave team plans to continue to send out additional invites as it stabilizes the system and adds capacity, these nominated accounts will move to the front of the queue and should get accounts relatively quickly.

For tomorrow, Google officially says that it will send out about 100,000 invitations, though as the Wave team told us yesterday, it will probably send out a few more than that.

Google Contacts

Google Wave will be able to tap into your Google contacts (the developer preview didn't offer this feature). For now, it will only show contacts who are already using Google Wave, though.

Invite a Robot to Your Wave

On Wednesday, 100,000 users will also be able to use some of the robots and widgets that the developers in the preview wrote over the last few months. These range from widgets that allow you to play games with friends to sophisticated teleconferencing apps, with Twitter and blogging apps in between. We will have a close look at some of the more interesting applications tomorrow, but the featured apps will include a real-time, competitive Sudoku game, a Lonely Planet travel widget, and video chat from 6Rounds and a teleconferencing plugin from Ribbit.

For now, Google Wave will not feature an app store or marketplace for widgets and robots. Instead, every user will see a wave with a small number of featured apps in their accounts and be able to install these thanks to the new installer process the Wave team introduced just a short while ago.

Chrome Frame

When Google launched Chrome Frame, it's Internet Explorer plugin that can replace the IE rendering engine with Google Chrome, the Wave team already announced that it would support this feature. And indeed, when you go to the Wave homepage with IE, you will now be prompted to install Chrome Frame. As Lars Rasmussen told us, the team is very enthusiastic about Chrome Frame, as it allows the developers to focus on features instead of making sure that Wave runs in Internet Explorer.

In our own experience, Wave definitely works best in Chrome. It will work just fine in Safari and Firefox, though for the most fluid experience, Chrome is currently the best browser.

Still Some Kinks to Work Out

The Wave team stresses that there are still a lot of problems to work out before Wave can really live up to all of its promises. While there was some doubt that the Wave team could actually get the system scaled up and ready for a wider launch earlier this summer, our experience with the developer preview has been very positive over the last few weeks and we definitely noticed that the system became fast and more stable. Now that 100,000 new users will join in, we will obviously have to wait and see how well Wave can scale up to this kind of demand.

For now, chances are that Wave will still crash at times. For major updates, the team will also have to take the whole system down for a few hours now and then.

Missing Features

Some features, however, still need to be implemented. Some of these are quite basic, like the ability to remove users from a wave, while others are a bit more complicated, like the ability to set specific user permissions on a wave. According to the Wave team, many of these missing features will be implemented within the next few months.

How Will People React?

Overall, it will be interesting to see how the Wave infrastructure holds up tomorrow and how people will react when they first see and use Wave.

Wave Today: Stable, Faster, Ready for the Masses

Since we got our first hands-on look at Google Wave in June, the platform has matured nicely. While some early reviews panned it as buggy and slow, today's version of Google Wave is very stable and fast.

As Google puts it, "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where individuals communicate and work together in a multimedia environment - the wave itself." Users can, for example, write documents, but also insert maps, photos, web feeds, and widgets. Most of the usage we have seen so far has been more akin to a well-structured chat room, but once a more mainstream audience gets its hands on Wave, we will likely see a wider range of usage scenarios.

Google Wave has also managed to attract a large number of third-party developers by now who have programmed a wide range of new robots for Wave. These range from the weird, like a robot that translates every wave into Swedish Chef speak, to more useful features like URL shorteners and an anti-spam application.

During our test this afternoon, we also got to chat with Jens and Lars Rasmussen, who gave the first official demo last week. They stressed that the team is currently fully focused on getting the developer preview for third-party developers right, so everything we say here about the UI is still in flux and will definitely change before the final release.

Chances are that you have already seen some screenshots or seen the demo on YouTube (more than 1.5 million people have seen it already), but here is a short video of what a wave looks like in action.

What is Wave?

One thing we immediately noticed is that it takes a little bit to get used to how Wave works. The first thing new users will probably notice is that Wave always shows you exactly what your contacts are typing in real-time (if you ever used the talk command in UNIX, you know what this feels like). Even when adding a map, you can see how someone scrolls around it to mark a spot, for example. After using it for a while, we have come to think as Wave as real-time email with a big dose of IM built-in, but even this only just describes a small part of what Wave can do.

Giving it a Spin

As you have probably seen in the videos and screenshots, Wave features a sidebar on the left and two large columns on the right. Overall, the look (but not the functionality) is somewhat reminiscent of the layout you would expect from an email client or a three-pane feed reader.

The sidebar features the functions for navigation, as well as your contacts. The larger column on the left is basically your inbox. By default, this column shows recently active conversations, or, depending on what you want to look at, a history of archived waves, waves marked as spam (there is, of course, no spam on Wave yet), or all the waves initiated by you.

The most interesting column, though, is the one on the right, because this is where you type your messages. Here, you can initiate new messages and waves, but you can also easily respond to messages, add new contacts to a wave, and send private messages to select users. One nice feature is that you can pick a specific word or phrase and respond to that, instead of the whole message.

Doing the Wave

As you are typing a message, a number of new icons appear at the top of the column. Currently, the most interesting one here is the Google widget, which allows you to very easily search Google and add a link to the wave. You can also search YouTube and Google Images and embed videos and pictures with just one click. The Wave team will surely expand these offerings (there is already a link to search Google Books, though it is currently not active, yet). Another option here is to embed a map that you can extend by setting place markers and drawing lines.

To add a picture or any other kind of file to a wave, you just have to drag and drop it onto a wave from your desktop. Wave also features a nice, lightbox-style photo viewer that allows you to browse through all the images in a wave.

In the long term, all of these functions will be expanded by third-party developers who will probably come up with exciting new ways to make use of Wave. Given that the open APIs will allow developers to take Wave into new directions, and also implement its functionality in other places, we are very excited to hear that the team will open up Wave to more developers later this week.

According to the Rasmussen brothers, only a small number of third-party developers have access to Google Wave at this point. However, by the end of the week, this number should go up to almost 2000 - and judging from what we have heard and read, there is a lot of interest in the developer community and we will definitely see a lot of activity in this area in the next few months.

Not just Real-Time Chat

It should also be noted that the real-time chat is really only one aspect of Wave. There is no reason why the chat couldn't be used as an internal micro-blogging tool, for example. As Jens Rasmussen pointed out to us, it is this mix of uses in different scenarios that may be the most exciting aspect of Wave. While the real-time aspects of Wave are currently at the forefront of what people have been excited about, there is no reason why users couldn't use it as a replacement for regular email as well - or why they couldn't switch from one mode to another at will.

A Few More Thoughts

• Presence will be indicated by a green dot on users' avatars - very much like IM.
• One thing that got to us was that hitting the Enter key will just give you a new line, but to finish a message, you have to hit Shift+Enter, which takes a bit of getting used to.
• At this point, long waves with a lot of concurrent users can get a bit confusing. While the messages are timestamped, it would be great if there were some stronger visual clues as to which messages are new. You can easily get to new messages by hitting the space bar, but even then, sometimes it is still a bit hard to see what messages you are actually looking at.
• Unlike Gmail, Wave actually features traditional folders and you can filter out messages by keywords. In addition, you can also tag waves.
• It would be nice if you could turn the real-time aspect of Wave off and only have your messages appear in a Wave after it was completed.
• The playback function that was prominently featured in the demo last week is interesting, but we are not sure how useful it will be in daily use.
• Currently, the automatic spell-checker on Wave is offline, so we couldn't test it, but we'll update this post once it works again.
• We tested Wave in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer - as expected, it didn't work in IE but worked perfectly fine in all the other browsers.

Will Wave Revolutionize EMail?

The big question on everybody's mind, though, is if Google and the Wave team can hold true to their promise of 'reinventing email for the 21st century.' What we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg, but we can already envision how this could replace our internal chat room here at RWW, and how it could revolutionize the way employees in a company communicate. Wave definitely takes some getting used to, but once you get into the flow of things, regular email suddenly feels stale and slow.

Like any great tool, Wave gives its users a lot of flexibility and never gets in your way. If you want a Wave to look more like a document instead of a conversation, Wave will work just as well as when you just want to use it as a chat room.

It's still too early to argue about whether Wave can or will ever replace email (it's only a developer preview at this point after all). However, after using it for a while we were already wishing that we could add more of our contacts to our list so that it could become our default messaging system. Until then, though, we are back to Gmail and IM.

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Introducing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Our First Premium Report for Businesses

Recently we released our first premium report: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management. It's been in the works for more than four months and we believe it's unlike anything else you've seen. Businesses seeking to engage with online communities on their own websites or all around the social web will find the guide invaluable in getting up to speed on the state of the art and making sure their employees have the foundation they need to be effective.

The end product is in two parts. Part one is a 75 page collection of case studies, advice and discussion concerning the most important issues in online community. Part two is a companion online aggregator that delivers the most-discussed articles each day written by experts on community management from around the web. The Guide is available for purchase at a price of $299. (You won't be charged until you complete a few simple steps on that page.) You can download a free sample section of the report here.

Web Trends

Web Trends: What's New in 2009, Part 2

Last week we discussed some of the new trends we're seeing on the Web in 2009: open data, structured data, apps that filter content effectively, real-time, personalization, mobile (especially location-based), and Internet of Things (the Web in real-world objects). We asked for your thoughts on these trends, along with your suggestions on what we should add. Also we were interested to know what products you've seen this year that are doing something new and 'beyond Web 2.0'. In this post we look at some of your responses, to try to define further what defines this current era of the Web.

Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid

What are you doing? How about now? Has anything changed since you started reading this blog post? Every story has a who, what, where, when, and why - but the event-driven nature of the social Web may be putting such a premium on broadcasting about what we're doing, that software designed to help us answer important questions like who and why are at risk of being neglected. It seems quite likely that we're going to miss those opportunities because our software is focused entirely on doing (and advertising) instead of on helping us think as much as it could. Of course that's much harder to do.

ClearSpring Sees What 1/2 The Internet is Doing (API Coming Soon)

It's a little bit scary, but widget and sharing service ClearSpring said this morning that the company's media widgets and newly acquired AddThis plug-in are now seen by more than 500 million unique viewers each month, according to Comscore. That's half the people on the internet, the company says. That's a whole lot of information. ClearSpring sees not just what you're sharing, but nearly everything you're doing on the pages its products are on. (AddThis is on ReadWriteWeb, for example.) So what on earth is it going to do with all that data? Like they said in Spiderman, "with great power, comes great responsibility." We asked ClearSpring's CEO about these super hero-like responsibilities and his thoughts are in this post.

Report on Mobile Web Use Shows Apple/Android Usability Issues, Successes

According to a report released this week from mobile advertising company AdMob, smartphones accounted for nearly three times more use than their relative market share last month. The report also found that relative use of both mobile-specific websites and HTML sites was highest on Apple and Android devices. Results were based on user-generated requests for mobile ads during April 2009 as well as on a Gartner report on smartphone sales in Q4 2008.

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ReadWriteStart

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Working Booms and Busts to Your Advantage (Cyclical Trends)

Figuring out which wave to ride (secular trends) is vital. Figuring out when to get on and when to get off is also important. You will never get the timing exactly right. It is like calling the top or bottom of a market. If you do manage to make exactly the right call, it is probably luck. But you can get the basic timing right. It doesn't take a genius to see which cycle you're in at any given time. What matters is figuring out what to do in each stage of the cycle.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email

Google this week announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform; Google Wave. While some of the details are still a bit sketchy, Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

Bing It Is: Microsoft Rolls Out Its New Search Engine

It was no secret that Microsoft was getting ready to roll out a new search engine, and this week, the company began the official roll-out of Bing - the successor of the company's less than successful Live Search efforts. Formerly known as Kumo, Bing, which should become available worldwide by June 3, is Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. According to Microsoft, Bing, while providing a good general search experience, wants to focus on providing an especially good user experience in four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business.

Comparing Yahoo and Google's Voice Search Applications

At the end of last week, Yahoo! introduced an update to their iPhone application (iTunes URL) which now includes the ability to perform web searches using only your voice. This is the first real competitor to Google's Mobile App, whose voice recognition technology came to the iPhone back in November of 2008. Now the only question is how do these two apps compare?

PeopleBrowsr Launches Beta

PeopleBrowsr, the online dashboard for tracking the social web (previous coverage) left alpha this week and moved into beta. Although many people use the app for tracking Twitter, it's actually capable of tracking a ton of the top web properties including Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and even RSS feeds. You can also use the app to update multiple networks at once. The service was built more with the needs of brand managers, social media marketers, and other customer service professionals in mind than it was built for the casual everyday user.

Mir:ror: A Glimpse Into The Future of an RFID World

Mir:ror is an Internet of Things app from the company Violet (follow on Twitter @violetOS). As the name suggests, it is literally a mirror - but an Internet-connected one which detects the objects you show it, triggering applications and multimedia content on your computer. It works via RFID stamps, known as "ztamp:s" in the company's terminology. These are colorful adhesive stamps that contain a relay chip. When the user waves a stamped object over the mir:ror, a pre-programmed action occurs. For example waving a stamped coffee mug over the mir:ror might trigger your computer to read the news aloud to you.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Users will be able to create 'waves,' and add documents and collaborators to it. The system will feature concurrent rich-text editing, as well as email and IM-like messaging functions. Lars Rasmussen, one of the co-founders and lead engineers behind this project, especially stressed the real-time nature of Wave, where edits to a wave, be they new messages or edits in a document, appear immediately on the screens of all participants.

From what we have seen, Wave combines aspects of productivity tools, social networks, and micro-blogging. One of the most interesting features is that every change to a wave is captured and users can 'replay' how the specific wave developed over time. Wave will allow users to send private and public messages, and Google is heavily relying on HTML5 to make the product work well in modern browsers. We will have a more detailed look at all the features of Wave once we get access to the product itself.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Google is also making a set of APIs available to developers today. These APIs should give developers the ability to enhance Wave by building extensions for the core product, but also to embed Wave's features on other sites to make them more collaborative. One extension Google offers today, for those lucky enough to have access to Wave already, is a Twitter extension, and Google will also offer the ability to integrate OpenSocial gadgets into Wave.

Interestingly, Google is taking a very open approach with this new product. Not only will it give developers access to Wave's APIs, but the team also plans to open-source the protocols at the core of Wave, which really points at the greater ambition of the Wave team to see Wave and its protocols replace at least some of today's standard communications systems.