Researchers claim that Tech companies fail at Social networking.  But that doesn’t mean all the innovation goes waste. So far, so true, for Google.

Google Wave is one the most innovative collaboration tools on the web. Despite all the killer stuff it has been cooked with, it all bottled down to how well the product was marketed. Google Wave could be declared as the one of the biggest Failures Google ever had. But Google likes to celebrate its failures, coz there aren’t that many.

The search giant says the technology behind its ill-fated collaboration tool will live on in new products that have not yet been announced. While the speculations have already started, Google isn’t giving any hints. CEO Eric Schmidt recently said the Wave team would be moving over to other products that are “like Wave but applied in some other areas,”

Google may not say it, but the industry has been talking about The Facebook competitor: Google Me.

It is said that Google me would be a hybrid of all the previously unpopular products: Google Buzz, Orkut, and Google Wave. All of them are incomplete, but together, if merged nicely, can challenge Facebook’s capabilities.

All the hard work that has gone into Wave, lives on with Future Google Apps. The extensions built on wave would work, as is, on Future apps. Developers who’ve already put time and energy into developing for Wave Extensions have nothing to fear all those apps would get into a new social network that could include apps for travel or event planning, games and image editing, and what not.

Live Gmail, Google Docs? Why Not!

Wave could re-invent popular google products like GMail by giving it some awesome REaltime collaboration features. Imagine replaying a threaded conversation, Google Docs or even as a photo-sharing tool in Picasa.

There’s nothing bad about Killing apps

“This is typical Google-like behavior. They aren’t shy about killing projects that don’t hit their expectations,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “I don’t think that users really got it when it came to Wave. But this was a good learning experience for Google. They now know they need to bring a more fully baked product to the market. They also have to clearly articulate why users should jump on board. I don’t think this is Google’s last run at social networking. There are rumors about a new product – Google Me — that looks to be their next shot at this market.”

Can Google Takeon Facebook?

Everyone would welcome new set of Features knocking the doors of  existing popular Google Apps. But what happens to the new Social network, Google Me? Will Google Takeon facebook?

“Why not? Facebook is making itself an easy target,” says Enderle. “I think Google will go down this path and it’s probably closer to what Google should be doing anyway. It’s a Web property. The social networking aspect of the Web is more closely related to search than almost any other successful thing out there.”

In contrast, it isn’t as easy as it might look at the first sight. Social networking is a tough vicious Game. When Google launches this new Social network, it will have to have a feature-packed tool that is easy to use, secure, and be highly scalable. Last part is not ahrd for companies like google, but what happens to other points?  Building this ground is much harder than it seems. If it had been that easy, Today you might have seen 100s of Facebooks, already beating the original.

Will Google be able to make a difference? Lets hope they do.

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Like me, most people love to use Thunderbird at work instead of crappy Outlook. After all, Thunderbir is pluggable. Adding to the delight, here comes a hack to inject Google Wave into Thunderbird, so that you never stop collaborating.

How To:

Open Error Console window (Tools > Error Console) and copy/paste the following code:

Components.classes['@mozilla.org/appshell/window-mediator;1'].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIWindowMediator).getMostRecentWindow("mail:3pane").document.getElementById("tabmail").openTab("contentTab", {contentPage: "https://wave.google.com/wave/?nouacheck"});

When done, hit Enter. Now Google Wave tab opens up. Simply login and starting Waving.

Thunderbird 3 saves all tabs when closed, so you won’t have to go through the steps again when you start another session of Thunderbird.

Checkout more tips Below:

We are happy to announce that AppJet Inc. has been acquired by Google. The EtherPad team will continue its work on realtime collaboration by joining the Google Wave team.

After Google Wave, EtherPad is the only Online tool that enables multiple users simultaneously edit a document. By adding EtherPad to Google Wave, we would see much more richer interface in the Google Wave. Some of the features of EtherPad like history, multiuser editing already finds similarity with Wave therefore integrating it to get new features, killing the competition makes sense.

Now I see how serious Google is on changing online collaboration.

What do you think?

One serious concern: It’s an unofficial 3rd party app, hence not built, authorized or in any way endorsed by Google.

Thanks to Stuart Dredge for pointing out out in the wild. Surprisingly, the unofficial Google Wave iPhone app was able to get passed Apple’s rigorous quality assurance (iTunes link).

However, on searching for ‘google wave’ there appears another app called Waveboard,another unofficial google wave app.

The Google Wave iPhone app is developed and maintained by CLapps. Their older record doesn’t have any promising value for money.

The app may cause trademark violations coz it uses google’s logo and a name that might get mis-interpreted by users. Expect the app to get renamed or vanish. I seriously won’t recommend trying this app at this time unless you are very desperate to do so. However, I plan to buy it soon and review it.

So make sure you stick with us by following us below:

Wave a complete Collaboration tool, that let’s you do everything in REALTIME! we had discussed allt he potential usages, benefits of using Google Wave:

How Google Wave is a Killer App for Converged Email, IM, Forums, Social, Enterprise

Then to promote Google wave, we opened up 100+ invites. Now the next step, Making your Google Journey smooth with some useful Extensions (rather than fun) and Widgets.

Wave is a completely extensible platform, like Firefox. Wave extensions come in two flavors: gadgets and robots.

A gadget is a piece of rich content that you can add to a wave. A few example gadgets are available in the Gadget gallery.

1. Tweety

Short Description: Tweets wave blips to twitter, and displays tweets from it.

Why it’s Interesting: The ability to tweet from Wave can update non-Wave participants thus eliminating the need to add 100’s of Wave participants.

2. Blogbot

Short Description: Organizes related waves (blog posts, FAQ, etc) in a central Table of Contents wave.

Why it’s Interesting: Try organizing hundreds of Waves!  It won’t be easy, but this application should make it easier.  Now if it came with analytics I’d really be interested.

3. Polly

Short Description: Creates a Wave to poll recipients and store their answers. Users are able to dynamically alter their choices.

Why it’s Interesting: Poll your employees, customers and suppliers to learn more about your company.  That’s always a good idea.

4. Dr. Maps

Short Description: Dr. Maps Robot allows you to get a map from an address. Give it an address and it will insert into the wave a mini-map locating the address and a link to the Google Map locating the address.

Why it’s Interesting: Adding an address to a Google Map is only the beginning of why this application is important to the enterprise.   Think about all of the use cases around supply chain management, demographic targeting, and crowd sourcing location content.

5. Embedded Search Results

Description: This simple robot allows you to quickly and easily perform a search and have the results embedded in your Wave. Currently supports Google & Flickr Searches.

Why it’s Interesting: Marketing and Sales teams can track customers and prospects automatically (Google Alerts for Wave).  Similarly, Operations and Finance can track strategic suppliers (risk management).  Teams then collaborate and share opinion about the information.

6. Wikify

Description: Convert your Wave talks into Wikipedia’s content by adding Topics.

Wikify Address: wikifier@appspot.com

7. Dr Weather

It is a weather related extension which gives you an idea of weather in the city. Add Dr Weather using following address.

Dr Weather Address: shiny-sky@appspot.com

Need More? follow here

So you need the Google Wave. Don’t worry we can invite 100+ people at this time. So all you need to do is  the following

1. Follow us on Twitter and Retweet “RT @taranfx is giving 100+ Google Wave Invites http://bit.ly/1Dbl2i“
2. Join Facebook Fan page.

When you are done, leave a comment below. The Nominations will be given within 1 day of completion of above points, then depends on Google to send them out (usually comes within 3 days, and this is the fastest way you can get anywhere). Hurry!

Next Steps:  How Google Wave is a Killer App for Converged Email, IM, Forums, Social, Enterprise

Update: We are already near half-way. The early birds availed the benefit, “Invite within one day”. Rules change if we get more request than no. of invites we have.

Wave a complete Collaboration tool, that let’s you do everything in REALTIME! In other words it’s a LIVE communication platform that will converge your Email, IM, Docs, Apps, Videos, Photos, wikis, Office Collaboration(Bugs, Reviews, Meetings, Discussions,etc.), Social Media, and any type of External tools (using Extesnions which are easy to integrate) to build one elegant, in-browser communication and Extensible to Desktop client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss or share all the stuff described above.

Describing Google Wave in a single Blog is way to impartial. I`ll try to cover as much as possible, but at the end of the day, it’s much more extensible than that.

Google Wave has alot of innovative features, here are few that have been exposed by Google, till date:

- RealTime: Everything you do in Google Wave is REALTIME. For Instance, you can see what the other party is typing, character-by-character. You can edit/modify the same document along with the other users. This was never possible till date. The Integrated Search is also REALTIME. The moment other party creates a draft or message that matches your search query, it pops-up immediately.

- Advanced Spell Check and SMART Correction and Translation: You no longer have to worry about grammatical, or spelling mistakes. It not just finds mistakes but also fixes them as you type – to the most intelligent word that suits the sentence formation – including the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly, from the large no. of available languages. It’s the industry’s most advanced spell check and decision cum Translation engine.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website and it will still work in the same way, everything is in Realtime, all features same.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots that does some routine task like search something on twitter automatically and popup to your inbox to complex real-time Multi-player games.

- Collaborated-Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave, when shared to all or a list of people, can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation, all in realtime. Imagine a document being reviewed by 10 different people, all at same-time, while they see what others are doing.

- Open source: The Google Wave is developed in web’s most advanced tool, Google’s Web toolkit (GWT), and the code will be open source, to encourage innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- History and Playback: For everything you do, a History is maintained. At anytime, for anyone, you can playback any part of the Wave to see what was said. This functionality is inherited to everything that runs inside Wave i.e. from a Game to a Review conversation.

- Drag-and-drop Sharing: No Browsing, No attachments; All you need to do is drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access. You can share your Photos, no longer need of opening Picasa to do it. Share your media on the fly. And coz it’s realtime, thumbnails will appear for everyone else as they are uploaded. And if you publish them on a blog, and update Photo comments later, they are automatically updated on the blog aswell.

- HTML5: What Makes Wave even better is, it’s all on the upcoming open standard HTML 5. Currently, Google Wave can run independently on the Desktop using Google gears, but in future, with HTML 5 standard getting matured, it will be inbuilt in browsers.

- Mobility: The same experience is available on mobile web browsers on most smartphones like iPhone, Androids. No modification of code is required for that. In case you write new plugins, you have to just take care of layout, that only eats 5% of the effort.

- Hosted Service/Independent Servers: This is the best thing. Google let’s you modify the original code and let’s yu run it independently as a competition to google. A more practical use it to use it within an Enterprise or an Organization that may or may not want to share the data on the public Internet. You can take your own server, database and host it inside your premises, independent of the world and still let them integrate with other Wave applications around the globe( if you want to). This will encourage Enterprise’s Web 2.0 to be more effective than before becuase of the collaboration tools discussed above.

Google Talks about their plan for Open sourcing the protocol to enable Entriprise 2.0, Extensibility, Inter-Operatability.

Google quotes:

Google Wave introduces a new platform built around hosted conversations called waves–this model enables people to communicate and work together in new and more effective ways. On top of that, with the Google Wave APIs, developers can take advantage of this collaborative system by building on the Google Wave platform. We want to expand upon that platform, which is why we’ve put together the initial draft of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.

Yes, that’s between wave providers: anyone can build a wave server and interoperate, much like anyone can run their own SMTP server. The wave protocol is open to contributions by the broader community with the goal to continue to improve how we share information, together. If you’re interested in getting involved, here are a few things you should check out on www.waveprotocol.org:

Draft Protocol Specification — This is an early draft and will definitely change

Community Principles — Understand how this open source project works

Architecture White Papers — Learn more about the components of Google Wave

Google Wave is much more than all this. You really have to checkout the Application to feel the Excitement.

Because, It’s not yet launched to public, for the meanwhile you can watch the Video and Screenshots below:

Screenshots:

A conversation in Wave:

How you add someone to a Wave:

Contextual spell-checking in Wave:

How to get it?

Currently, Its not available. Though if we you want to be among first who get hands-on, signup for an invite at http://wave.google.com. Google will be giving out invites as early as September 30th.

so go ahead and grab one.

VERDICT:

20 years back when Email was invented, we never thought it would become a mandatory thing in life. And if it had been invented today, definitely it had been something like Google Wave. It will replace all othermodes of communication that we use online today. Though it’s not wise to say this but it will challenge Social media sites like Facebook aswell. Why would I go ot Facebook when I can do the smae thing on this Converged Application.

Google Wave is the future of Converged communication solutions for the web. I would expect Google Voice and VOIP (GTalk voice) Integration in future which will make it THE KILLER APP.