As Shared Spaces uses Wave technology, there are already 50 different gadgets available, including shared maps, scheduling tools, polls, Sudoku games, and drawing boards.

So, will more folks adopt Wave in this format?

According to the description on the Google Labs site, Javascript developers will be able to build their own gadgets in order to build more Shared Spaces tools. However, the link to Shared Spaces via the Google's Labs page returns an error message, so perhaps Shared Spaces - (oh dear) much like Wave - isn't quite ready for prime time.

(Here's the direct link to Shared Spaces.)

Google announced in August that it was ending development of the real-time communication and collaboration project due to low user adoption. Since then, it has been working to prepare Wave in a Box, a standalone version that would give developers the functionality of Waves and the ability to run them on their own server.

Alongside community development, one of the initial goals of Apache Wave is to migrate the codebase from code.google.com to the Apache Software Foundation's infrastructure.

The project will now be a candidate to become a Podling in the Apache Incubator, the first step in becoming one of Apache's open-source projects.

Many of Wave's components are open source, so others can and do continue to work on the project. According to the Apache Incubator proposal, "We anticipate early future committers coming from places like Novell, SAP, companies related to the US Navy's usage of wave, startups in the wave ecosystem, and many independent individuals."

The initial goals of the WIAB project include migrating the codebase from code.google.com to the ASF infrastructure and then continuing the project's development and growth of its developer community. ComputerWorld cites Dan Peterson, one of the developers on the project, as indicating that a vote from the Apache Software Foundation on whether Wave in a Box will become an Apache Incubator Project may come as early as next week.

Rasmussen is probably best known as one of the creators of Google Maps, the success of which arguably led Google to support him in another engineering endeavor, the now defunct Google Wave.

Getting Things Done - or Not - at Google

Rasmussen describes Google as "unwieldy." And while the energy at Google is "just amazing," that the size of the company makes it difficult to get things done.

In part, Rasmussen describes his decision to leave Google in terms of the opportunities elsewhere. The offer - one that came in the form of a personal pitch from Mark Zuckerberg himself - was "too good to refuse." And Rasmussen says that he feels as though Facebook has more to offer, not just financially but in terms of the work to be done.

"It feels to me that Facebook may be a sort of once-in-a-decade type of company," says Rasmussen. It may be, that a decade ago, that is how we would have described his former employer.

Photo credits: Andrew Quilty

"Since the beginning, it has been our vision that the Google Wave protocols could support a new generation of communication and collaboration tools," engineer Alex North wrote on the Google Wave developer blog.

Wave In A Box will not have the "full functionality" of the Gmail-integrated Web app, but it will feature threaded conversations and support importing data from wave.google.com.

The release of Wave as an application could be a big deal for developers, especially at businesses that want to take advantage of Wave for real-time collaboration and discussion (see our post, 5 Services That Leverage Google Wave).

Wave was always intended for people to run on their own machines, but this release will make the process much easier. Developers and enterprise users that have been eyeing Wave will be more likely to take the technology into their own hands and build things like feature-rich Web forums, productivity tools and apps to facilitate collaborative projects.

Google did not specify a timeline for the release of the new code, but it has said that wave.google.com will be available at least through the end of the year.

Google may have killed Wave (prematurely by some accounts), but it has added a little bit of real-time collaboration to one of its flagship offerings, Google Docs, with the addition of collaborative highlighting.

The difference here is that it is all happening in real time. As we both look at the document and go to make changes, we see one another highlight text and add commentary. It's a step-by-step process rather than a completely asynchronous communication. It's the difference between chat and email and it makes all the difference in the interaction between writer and editor, or even editor and editor if you're collaboratively editing a document.

Wave may be dead, but we hope that Docs will begin to see more real-time collaborative tools introduced in its place.

What do you think - what other uses could you see for this sort of real-time interaction? And what other bits of Wave would you like to see revived in Docs?

Why did Wave fail? Maybe because if you don't call it an "email-killer" (and you shouldn't) then you'd have to call it a "product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration." That's daunting and proved accessible to too few people. Still, with a rumored 100 Google engineers working on Wave to date, a call from Google for more engineering collaboration less than a month ago, and such high hopes - it's a bit of a shock to see it come to an end.

When Wave launched, respected enterprise analyst Stephen O'Grady wrote a long post answering questions about the product. " If Google Wave is successful," he wrote, "it will mean that Google will be the vendor defining the next generation experience for millions, potentially tens of millions of users, worldwide. Next to that prospect, the threat of Google Apps is but a trifle."

That adoption inside of companies never took off, though. Gartner may have foreshadowed some reasons why in a June, 2009 research note. A team of analysts there argued that Wave would be challenged by its "large aggregation of features, which can daunt users," "dependence on the latest Web browser technologies," and "likely overlap with multiple areas in an enterprise's IT environment."

"Wave shows that workplace offerings will eventually have to combine Internet standards and a decentralized, federated architecture," that note continues. "Whether or not Wave ultimately succeeds, the Web will win."

Does it still feel that way? Was Wave just too far ahead of its time?

Was it perhaps too confusing? The hour and a half long demo video Google released probably didn't help. Gina Trapani, who cut that video up into bite sized highlights, later went on to write a collaborative manual all about using Wave.

Proponents of the service say it wasn't that complicated and was remarkably powerful. Maybe this failure should be chalked up as another example of how Google "doesn't get social" in terms of user experience or successful evangelism. After an immediate explosion of hype, it never felt like Google was really trying very hard with Wave.

At ReadWriteWeb, we found that Wave was very useful as a live blogging tool. So we're sad to see it potentially go.

It will take time to figure out exactly what happened, but it's a little shocking to hear that it's over. It had so much potential. Clearly potential is something that's easier to summon than it is to execute on. I hope this vision succeeds, someday.

Update: CNet's Ina Fried caught up with Google CEO Eric Schmidt today and got some interesting quotes from him on the demise of Wave.

According to a post on the Google Wave Developer Blog, the Google Wave team already open-sourced Forum Botty, a Google Wave extension that creates a forum-like experience inside Wave, and now it wants to "continue developing this code base into a powerful and generic extension for running forums in wave, and we're hoping that other developers like you will join us in this project."

The post on the developer blog is written by David Crane, an external Wave developer who is involved in the development of the Debatewise extension. With his work on Debatewise, Crane has already used Wave in holding mass discussions, so he already has some experience in the realm of creating a Wave-based forum. Crane writes that Wave is better than a standard forum right from the get-go:

Google Wave offers a number of benefits over traditional forum software, with just its native functionality. However, by incorporating some of the tried-and-tested features from forums into a robot, we could turn Google Wave into the ultimate platform for forum-based discussion. A forum could be a killer app for Wave. It's a tool that people already use in huge numbers for specific purposes, are used to keeping separate to their email, and will dip in and out of as required. Wave is similar enough for them to jump in quickly and different enough for them to get, and be hooked by, the benefits. A forum removes the need for people to find things to use Wave for and means they could use it even if none of their friends did. Wave could enhance and improve upon some of the most important features of a forum and through acclimatisation, will encourage them to use it for a world of other purposes.

Crane says that there are three areas in need of developing: a way of organizing waves around subject matter, a method of encouraging participation with rewards and the development of "trust mechanisms so people can determine who to rely upon or ignore".

To this end, he says that they are looking for "Python, Java and Javascript developers, QA testers and anyone with an interest in forum software, community building and online discussion". The resulting Wave-based forum will be licensed under the same open-source license used for Google Wave, meaning it will be open for others to implement and modify.

But Internet technology has done more than make research easier and more timely for teachers and students. Educators are using the real-time Web for a variety of innovative purposes, both in and out of the schoolroom.

It may be cliche to emphasize the world wide aspect of the Web, but Internet technologies have lowered the proverbial walls of the classroom, giving students access to information that far surpasses the print-bound copies of encyclopedias and periodicals that were once the standard for K-12 research projects. As technology-educator Steven Anderson argues, these technologies "really make the world smaller for our students and show them that they can find the answers they need if we equip them with the tools and resources do to so." But in addition to simply making information more accessible, real-time technologies including Twitter, Skype, and Google Wave have shaped the types of lessons teachers can create and the types of projects they can assign to their students.

Skype Joins Classrooms From Around the World

via Around the World with 80 Schools

Google Wave for Latin Translation

via TeachPaperless

While these examples demonstrate how real-time technologies are incorporated into the curriculum, some teachers have also found ways to funnel side-conversations and back-of-the-room commentary from the classroom into a backchannel, of sorts, through both texting and Twitter. Rather than simply banning phones and PDAs outright, teachers are incorporating these "disruptive technologies" into the classroom and demonstrating that kids' own tech tools can be used in the service of education.

The Real Time Web and Teachers' Professional Development

To say that these technologies have lowered the walls of the classroom doesn't mean simply that more and different types of content can be incorporated into the curriculum. Many classroom teachers have long faced isolation, quite literally stuck most of the day in a room with 30 some-odd students, effectively cut off from others. The Internet not only brings the world into the classroom for the students' sake, but gives teachers access to others in the field, beyond just those working in the same school building.

The real-time Web gives teachers and administrators almost instantaneous feedback on lesson plans, leadership skills and instructional practices. To this end, teachers have developed a personal learning network (PLN) primarily via Twitter that helps them with real-time course content and pedagogical issues.

Silvia Tolisano's third-grade students found an unidentified animal skeleton on the playground, for example. Rather than taking a picture and enlisting the help of parents or the school librarian, Tolisano uploaded the photo to Twitter, soliciting help from those in her PLN. The skeleton - a raccoon - was identified within a few hours.

As Steven Anderson notes, this sort of thing has a twofold effect. "First, the teacher can use the 'Power of the PLN' to continue a great conversation in their class that otherwise might go stale if it waited a day. But they also showed the students how it is alright not to know everything and how to use the resources you have at hand to find answers. And I cannot think of a more powerful resource than the real-time web."

Educators have organized a weekly informal meeting on Twitter, utilizing the #edchat hashtag, in order to regularly discuss topics pertaining to teaching and learning. (Tuesdays at noon and at 7pm EST.) As Kyle Pace, a K-12 instructional technology specialist, contends, "You cannot buy this kind of professional development." Pace, Anderson and other educators believe that this informal and self-motivated learning network may be the direction in which professional development in education is heading. Indeed, 78% of teachers responding to the NCES study said that they found independent learning the best way to learn about new technologies (as opposed to 61% who said that in-district training was the best way to gain new tech skills).

As technological skills become synonymous with literacy, it is imperative that students learn to use emerging real-time technologies for research, experimentation, problem-solving, collaboration and creativity. Tech-savvy teachers are already taking advantage of these very technologies to build their own skills and lesson plans.

Top photo from Flickr user Michael Surran.

When we talked to the Wave team yesterday, the project's co-founder Lars Rasmussen noted that since the launch of the invite-only beta, group collaboration in businesses, education, news organizations and at conferences has emerged as the sweet spot for Wave. That will be the use-case that the Wave team plans to highlight during the general launch and in the next few weeks.

Why did Google decide to open up Wave now? According to the Wave team, the service is now stable and fast enough for a mainstream audience (crashes were a very common sight in the early days). During the invite-only testing period, the team added numerous new features that its early users requested. These include email notifications of updated waves and access controls for waves, as well as making it easier for users to reply and edit waves and find unread material in a wave. The team also introduced templates that make getting started easier for new users.

Updates for Developers

Besides opening up sign-ups for Wave, the team announced a number of developer features at I/O today. The next version of the Robots API, for example, will not only untie Wave robots from Google's App Engine, but also allow developers to create "active" robots that can generate waves and update them. Google is launching improvements to the Embed API, including the ability to give readers anonymous access to waves.

Maybe the most exciting update is that Google is releasing a new Data API that will allow developers to create lightweight Wave clients. For now, as Rasmussen noted in our interview, developers won't be able to create full-fledged Wave clients yet, but the team has started to define a client and server protocol that will soon make it a possibility.

In order to help developers create their own applications on top of the Wave APIs and bootstrap the Wave developer community, the team is open-sourcing the real-time Wave rich text editor.

The Wave team has also made progress in getting companies like Novell and projects like PyGoWave, Ruby on Sails and QWave to support the wave federation protocol. The latest company to sign on to this project is SAP, which will use Wave in its StreamWork product.

Join Our Discussion on Wave

At first glance, this looks like a minor update, but for the first time, you can now easily embed waves on your own site. Google notes that you could use Wave for real-time RSVPs with the Yes/No/Maybe gadget and to publish documentation via embedded waves. For us, however, the real potential here is live blogging with Wave.

The interesting thing about using Wave as a live blogging platform, of course, is that readers can see what a blogger is writing in real time. Live blogging doesn't get more real time than that.

Wave allows users to easily style text and embed images and videos. Adding additional writers to a wave is also as easy as adding another contact to the wave.

Wave Elements: Embedding Waves Made Easy

Until now, embedding Waves took a bit of work and users who weren't logged in to Wave weren't able to see your updates. Thanks to the newly released Wave Element tool, however, embedding a wave is now simply a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript into your site or blog post. To make a wave public, you also have to add the public@a.gwave.com account to your wave.

You can see an example of what an embedded Wave looks like below.

One Caveat: Doesn't Work With Internet Explorer Yet

The Wave team, however, also points out one major deal-breaker: the embedded waves don't work with Internet Explorer yet (even with Chrome Frame). The team plans to resolve this issue soon, however.

• Wave Sudoku (play Sodoku with friends in a Wave)
• Extension Installer (for developers only)
• Colcrop (game)
• Yellow highlighter (highlight text)
• Napkin gadget (for doodles)
• Waffle (date-picker)
• Iframe gadget (embed webpages in a Wave)
• Yes/No/Maybe gadget (for polls)
• Map gadget (insert maps)
• Video Chat Experience (chat in Waves)
• Phone Conference (call your friends)
• Mind Map gadget (collaborate on diagrams)
• Likey gadget (like/dislike a topic)
• Pollo gadget (for surveys)
• Take-out gadget (for ordering out)
• AccuWeather (weather forecasts)

Will Extensions Bring You Back to Wave?

With Google Wave soon becoming a member of the Google Apps family of products sometime this year, it's good to see development work continue on this innovative, if somewhat confusing, real-time tool. Although members of the tech community have expressed mixed feelings about the product in its current state, what Google has presented is definitely a unique service and one that may still be useful in several niche scenarios, if not as the email replacement some hoped it would be. For example, small teams in the workplace needing to collaborate with one another may find Wave a better option than sending multiple emails back and forth.

That being said, traffic to Google Wave has been declining sharply since November or December of 2009, depending which analytics service you use. Looking at the numbers, it's clear that Wave has been abandoned by many of its earliest adopters - users who were once clamoring for invites in ways that haven't been seen since Google first launched Gmail. (On that note, we actually have several spare invites sitting around - if you want one, comment and ask.)

Will extensions actually bring those one-time Wavers back? Probably not - at least, not for longer than a quick look at most. On the flip side, however, Wave advocates feel that there's great potential in this experimental project. Still, even most of those folks have to admit there's a lot of work that needs to be done before Wave could attract a mainstream audience.

So will Wave ever replace email? Perhaps not. But we wouldn't be surprised if some of the innovations developed in the Wave playground ended up in our Gmail inboxes one day. And for that, we'll keep one eye on Wave...even if we're not entirely embracing it just yet.

Google Wave: Innovative, Confusing

The technologies at the core of Google Wave are impressive. With an HTML5-enabled interface and real-time protocols for instant interaction, Wave was highly anticipated among tech enthusiasts prior to its launch. However, once beta testers gained access to the redesigned inbox experience delivered by Wave, the results were those of confusion, feelings of being overwhelmed and apparently, eventual abandonment.

That's not to say Google Wave is a failure. The service is just a little too raw right now for everyday use by a majority of internet users. The problem with Wave stems from its overcrowded inbox of "waves" - threads of conversation updated in real-time. Within a wave, users can have IM-like chats, share and edit documents, and even "replay" a wave to see a history of the changes made. At launch time, anyone using the service could add any other user to a wave - even if that other user had no interest in participating. This led to an inbox filled with waves, only some of which may have been relevant or interesting. In addition, communicating in real-time, while nice for IM, may not be as productive when attempting to share the sort of longer thoughts and instructions typically sent out via email. 

There are ways Wave could be streamlined for better ease-of-use, though. Whitelisting and blacklisting tools could lock down waves to invited participants only and better filtering mechanisms could help high-priority waves rank higher than others. Not all of these tools are available yet in the current version of the product, though, and some may never be.

Google Apps Users to Become Beta Testers?

Google is also investigating how to integrate some of Wave's features into their other products. According to Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard, the company is "trying to learn and see what sort of use cases evolve from it and how it changes." Yet even he admitted that Wave is "not nearly at the level of understanding and readiness of the core Google Apps services."

So why is Google rushing to roll it out this year? The answer may be that Google simply wants a larger test bed to help them generate ideas for improving the service. Although we've highlighted several use cases for Wave in the past, a good many people still say they don't see the need for it. But all the effort and development that went into building a product like Wave isn't likely something Google wants to abandon so soon.

We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.

This is one case where the hype was as noisy as the app - and both were deafening. We have to hand it to Google's publicity team; we don't know one geek who wasn't positively salivating for a Wave invite. The ReadWriteWeb back channel was a complete melee when the first invites were rolled out to team members. But once we got there and saw the new tech tricks, like watching one another type, we started thinking about use cases. And the more we struggled to understand and use this product, the more frustrated and bored we became. Blame it on the steep learning curve. Blame it on our misunderstanding the product. Mount whatever feeble defense you like, but techies know Wave was a flop.

The TabletPads Went to the Deadpool

All we wanted was a $200-500 flat piece of glass and plastic with some fancy gizmodgery inside so we could look at the Internet from the comfort of our couches. And what did we get? Rumors, Photoshopped gadget porn, promises - lies, all lies. We'd have been better off if we'd spent those months drawing the Yahoo! home page on an Etch-A-Sketch. Although the Crunchpad has resurfaced as the JooJoo, the price has been marked up considerably, and the whole project just seems wrong to us now. Moreover, five will get you ten that Michael Arrington, father of the Crunchpad and a former attorney, is fixing to get litigious right about now, which might significantly delay the product's appearance on the market.

Powerset Resurfaced as Bing

In 2008, Powerset was one of the stealthiest, sexiest startups on the Silicon Valley block. About five minutes after launching, Powerset got snatched up by Microsoft to the tune of $100 million. When everyone had retrieved their dentures from the ground and changed their pants, they noticed that Powerset's ever-so-sexy tech had been folded quietly into the Borg for assimilation. And about a year later, Bing was born, reportedly from the tech that Microsoft scraped off the infant carcass of Powerset. And Bing sucked. We had such high hopes.

Twitter Failed to Innovate

While some of us had our money on a Twitter sale in 2009, others were simply waiting for the company to debut a radical, interesting, mutually beneficial revenue model. At the very least, most users were hoping that the scalability issues and downtime that made Twitter the tragic heroine of 2008 would be put to rest.

Twitter's failures this year were less about the headlines they made than the ones they didn't make. Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, Twitter didn't capitalize on their massive adoption increase (a.k.a., their Oprahtization) and sell. Worse yet, they didn't buy. When one recalls the purchase of Summize and then contrasts it with this year's explosion of excellent Twitter apps, one wonders why none of these small startups or one-off side projects were acquired. Perhaps this was a case of "Hey, we can do that!" as Twitter certainly seemed intent on pilfering features (such as lists and retweets) from third-party developers. Too bad the "official" Twitter features suck a lot more than the original third-party designs.

But worst of all, we are still consistently experiencing downtime at a level that is unacceptable for any major web app. Google couldn't get away with this kind of failure; why should Twitter be allowed to do so?

The Great Firewall of China Drama Continued and Worsened

To date, China's "Golden Shield Project" restrictions on Internet use are throttling traffic from that country to websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Bing, and many, many more. Banned sites include news organizations that cover controversial events, pro-democracy sites and blogs, any site acknowledging the existence of Taiwan, YouTube, most blogging websites (Wordpress, Blogger, etc.) and anything the government deems to be obscene or profane. In countries where creative self expression and the ability to browse, learn and make decisions independently are freedoms too often taken for granted, these restrictions are indeed unthinkable. The project began in 1998 and still made plenty of headlines this year for its renewed affronts to freedom on the Internet. For example, in June, the Chinese government announced it would be rolling out censorship software on every new computer sold in the country.

Microsoft Dumped Don Dodge

Not too long ago, we at ReadWriteWeb were shocked to learn from startup guru and longtime Microsoft ambassador Don Dodge that the Big M had given him the kiss-off. Dodge was seen by many as an intelligent, approachable personality in front of a huge, out-of-touch, unpopular brand. It was the tech industry equivalent of FOX cancelling the Simpsons. It's been noted that Microsoft makes its paper from the enterprise, not startups, which would make Dodge a natural candidate for the chopping block. Still, the move was hugely criticized by bloggers, VCs and others. Microsoft's PR plot thickened a few days later when Google snatched up the briefly unemployed Dodge.

Spotify Didn't Launch in the US... Yet

It tops our list of Most Highly Anticipated Products Yankees Can't Get Their Mitts On. Streaming music service Spotify is changing the world - with the exception of the United States. We've already got a crowded market of players here, including Pandora, Last.fm and Imeem. Call us greedy, but we want the new hotness that is Spotify, too.

The Web 1.0 Comeback Campaigns Were Embarrassing to Watch

Now, we at ReadWriteWeb have no desire to kick a company when it's down, but a couple of the mastodons of the mid-nineties dotcom boom have been valiantly attempting to stage comebacks, some more successfully than others. Yahoo! did some good things for developers this year, but AOL/Aol's rebranding was pitiful. And don't get Dana Oshiro started on the affront to end-user dignity that is Friendster.

Oracle Acquired MySQL

Open-source geeks have been sporting metaphorical black armbands for the loss of MySQL, the world's largest open-source database, to Oracle, the largest pay-to-play database, following that company's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. We reported last week that MySQL usage is expected to drop by around 10 percent over the next 5 years. Here's another handy stat: Oracle also this year raised their own prices by 40 percent. Will MySQL remain free-as-in-beer and open source? Or will it succumb to corporate lameness?

And the Worst Fail of 2009... LeapFish Made a God-Awful Promotional Video

Tonight, we dine in hell! LeapFish's bombastic promo clip (which you have to watch in 10-second segments to avoid waves of misplaced inspiration alternating with waves of nausea) is as horrifying as the company itself is sketchy. The startup says it made $10 million before it even launched, and the CEO Ben Behrouzi is an infamous contrepreneur with a background in lead generation and threatening employees.

So, there you have it: our list of the worst tech-related disasters of 2009. What did we omit? Let us know in the comments below, and don't hold back. Clearly, we didn't.

And to the companies mentioned in this report: 2009 isn't over yet. You've still got three weeks to make it right with end users.

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.