Google Wave truly promised a lot when it first came about. A year of beta servicing later, Google Wave launched only to find that nobody noticed. Google’s experiment to reinvent email apparently failed. However while Google has conceded defeat and have noted that Wave would cease to exist a few months down the line, there is good news for developers who have aspirations to build similar services.
Google has announced that their next step would involve expanding their open source project to create a complete application called “Wave in a Box” that will let developers build local Wave servers and even build upon the functionalities to suit their custom business needs.
Google’s new project will involve
- an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system
- a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations
- a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)
- refinements to the client-server protocols
- gadget, robot and data API support
- support for importing wave data from wave.google.com
- the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration
As is evident, these functionalities will not be able to bring the full functionality that exists in Google Wave. But this will without doubt help build bigger and better applications moving forward.
No timeline of the release was given.