Google Wave News & Articles

“Imagine a virtual war room,” says SAP (news, site) of their upcoming potential Google Wave competitor. The private beta version of the cloud-based application (codenamed Constellation) is called 12Sprints, and promises to expedite the decision making process for business users with pre-defined tools.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• MSN Gets Redesigned, Adds Twitter/Facebook
• Twitter's Cost to Businesses: £1.4 Billion?
• Yammer Powers 50,000 Enterprise Micro-Blogging Networks
• Run Your Own Google Wave Server

The Cold War warriors will remember "glasnost" -- the term coined by the USSR's last head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev, that stands for transparency and openness -- as signaling a gradual end to the threat of thermonuclear Armageddon. Now, Glasnost 21 is the clever name for a new U.K.-based collaboration suite to open up those fusty communication channels.

Right now, most document management solutions work under the idea of many people making separate edits, locking the document to prevent edits stepping on one another. But what if you could all edit a document at the same time like you can in Google Docs and similar tools? That, in some ways, is the promise of Google Wave (news, site).

Yesterday Google Wave made headlines once again as Big G began to send out the 100,000 preview invitations they promised. The real time communication and collaboration tool's preview release will reportedly be hosted on the platform's own website rather than in the separate "sandbox" developers have been using since the platform's release to developers in May. 

"In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs when they signed up," said Google Wave Project Manager, Dan Peterson.

Will Google Wave be the next step in communication as so many like to imagine it will? Or the viable alternative to traditional e-mail that Google themselves planned for it to be? Well, we're about to find out. If you didn't help report bugs and are feeling lousy about it, don't worry. Google wave is expected to be officially released for public use early next year. Alternatively, you could comb the net for someone who was invited, as each of the 100,000 chosen also received 5 invited of their own. 

In any case, keep up with the movement here. 

Tweet, tweet! If you were to believe even half of what you read, the launch of TransMedia’s Glide Engage is going to kill off Twitter (news, site).

No, really. At least at the time of the launch that’s what many people were saying in the rush to be the first to announce the demise of a service that has an estimated 40 million users.

But a week later – and you all know how long a week is in social media - people have finally come to their senses, calmed down and have, to a large extent, recognized Engage for what it really is – a microblogging platform, with emphasis on blogging, rather than micro.
 

Oh, shush now. What's in a name anyways? A wave by any other name might be just as wonderful, no?

Microsoft's absolutely random decision to use Microsoft Wave as the name of a new project -- not long after the Google Wave announcement -- confuses many and irritates more. But it sure does generate some publicity. Here's what the splash is about.

E-mail: It’s fast, it’s convenient, it’s simple, it’s…outdated?

Zenbe, promoter of enlightenment and inner-peace via e-mail overload solutions, operates under this belief. Their newest offering is called Shareflow, and is described as an answer to the question: What if we could create a separate conversation, invite a specific audience to that conversation, and make it accessible on the Internet?

Basically, it’s a real-time collaboration service that combines e-mail, instant messaging and social networking. Sound familiar? Probably.
 

Hey, remember when Big G revealed Google Wave at this year's Google I/O? The uproar the announcement caused in the blogosphere was so great that unless you're a cave-dweller, then yes, you probably remember. The highly anticipated ecosystem for communication and collaboration has certainly turned many heads with its innovative nature, but whether or not it'll make waves or become a natural disaster, webverse style, no one knows.

Today, we're a teensy bit closer to finding out. After 6,000 active developer accounts and 20,000 more reportedly rolling out over the next month, the job is yours. Google plans to pass the baton to 100,000 users on September 30th.  

Two weeks ago, everybody was talking about it. It manhandled the blogosphere, was a trending topic on Twitter, and whispers of it could still be heard coming from the mouths of various Gilbane SF attendees last week.

And, OK, we admit it; Google Wave romanced us a little, too. But now that the smoke has cleared and Wave has had ample time to settle into the ‘net, the inevitable troop of naysayers has surfaced. Let’s check out what they have to say:

Modera (news, site) has been talking about plans for their next generation web framework for a while now. But if you want a peek at what changes are coming that will affect their web content management and customer relationship management products, then read on.

Both e-mail and instant messaging are pretty basic ideas. Originally designed back in the ‘60s, the two electronic earth-shakers were made to replace what we had back then: the telephone and snail mail.

Consider what we have now: blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. Is it possible our faithful forms of communication are outdated? Google (news, site) thinks so. In an attempt to infuse old ideas with new technology once again, Google Wave is born. The communication service is a sort of e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging, networking mashup, and Google’s idea of what e-mail would look like if it were designed today.

As per usual for Big G, the tool is already making waves.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Baby Boomers Turned Off By Facebook?
• Google 'Waves' To Unified Social Communication
• Social Media And It's Affect On Corporate Websites
• Twitter May Start a TV Show