In August, Google announced that Wave would no longer be developed as a standalone product, but that the Wave technology would survive in other products. Today, I am happy announce the launch of Google Shared Spaces in Google Labs as one of those off-shoots.

A bunch of us who had been working on the Wave APIs were brainstorming about what it would take to just run a Wave gadget. Developers had been doing wonderful stuff --building real-time mini applications--and rather than let that effort go to waste, we wanted to create a new way for people to continue to use these tools and games. Google Shared Spaces is exactly that. A shared space turns a (Wave) gadget into a standalone collaborative application. Just click on the gadget you're interested in to start a new shared space, and then simply send the URL around to share it with your friends and colleagues. You don't need to sign up for a new service - if you have a Google, Twitter or Yahoo account, you're good to go.



Each shared space comes with a chat area (which is just another Wave gadget) for extra interaction. So take Shared Spaces for a spin: Use the Waffle gadget to pick the date for a night out with your friends, annotate a shared map with your favorite places and vote on where to go using any of the polling gadgets. Or if you'd rather stay in, hit the games section and challenge somebody for a good old game of chess. To learn more, check out the quick presentation on our about page.

It's still early, but give it a try and send us feedback through our discussion group.

Posted by Douwe Osinga, Software Engineer, Google Shared Spaces Team

As we announced back in August, we are not continuing active development of Google Wave as a stand-alone product, but have been working hard on the open source Wave in a box project and on making waves accessible through Google Docs.

We wanted to let you know that we will keep wave.google.com running past December 31, 2010 until a suitable replacement to host all your waves is available. In the meantime, you can now use the new export feature to download a zipped version of up to ten waves at a time. Learn more in the Google Wave Help Center.

Additionally, Wave in a Box, the project to make it easy for anyone to host their own wave server, has made significant progress on both functionality and community growth. Just last week, the Apache Software Foundation accepted Wave into its incubator for new projects.

Thanks yet again to all our users for giving Wave a try with your schools, businesses and organizations and to the developers who are working on the next steps for the open source project!

Wave on,

Posted by David Wang, Software Engineer, Google Wave Team