ReadWriteWeb

Last month we looked at why companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook want your email. The post looked at a presentation by Jeff Hardy of SmarterTools, given at HostingCon 2011.

Now the presentation is online and SmarterTools has come up with an infographic to summarize the relative size and value of email versus other communication modes.

You know there's a slight problem somewhere when a developer uses words like "hell fire" to refer to a project. When it comes to Etherpad, the popular collaborative editor, it's not the concept that's problematic, it's the delivery.

Thankfully, the Etherpad Foundation has put two years into delivering a kinder and gentler version. Called Etherpad Lite, it streamlines the original into something more manageable to install and run."

While most companies are scrambling to attach "cloud" to any product they can, Novell is turning out the lights on its Vibe Cloud service. Instead, the company plans to focus on its Vibe OnPrem hosted solution, and is giving customers until September 30 to land. While bad news for the small group using Vibe Cloud, it might be a good policy for making existing Novell customers happier.

Google has quietly launched a new Labs project today - Google Shared Spaces. Based on Google Wave gadgets technology, Shared Spaces is designed to be an easy way to create and share collaborative applications.

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

It looks like December 31, 2010 will not mark the end of Google Wave after all. The Apache Software Foundation, the non-profit organization responsible for supporting Apache open source projects, has accepted Google Wave into its incubator program.

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.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it appears that rumors of Google Wave's death may be greatly exaggerated. Google announced that it was ending development on the project back in August. But some of Google Wave's developers have submitted the code for what's now known as Wave in a Box (WIAB) to the Apache Software Foundation.

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.

When Lars Rasmussen announced on Friday that it was his last day at work at Google, he joined the ranks of a number of prominent Googlers who have recently announced they're switching teams and heading to Facebook.

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.

Google Wave is far from dead, and developers, early adopters and enterprises will be glad to hear it. Today Google announced it will expand on the code it has already open sourced, building Wave into a functional application that will allow users to run wave servers, host their own waves and build bigger and better applications with the real-time collaboration technology.

"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.

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.

When it launched a few months back, online collaboration suite Flowr was touted as something of a white-label, private Facebook for enterprise companies. It's really more like the Facebook News Feed on steroids, and with a freemium pricing structure, it's an ideal solution for businesses large and small alike.

In some ways, it's more akin to the now-defunct Google Wave, in the sense that it offers a vertically-flowing interface for real-time communication and collaboration.