Google Wave Out of Beta 255
googlePLEXS writes "Google Wave is open to all users at wave.google.com, as a Google Labs product — no invitation needed. Google Apps administrators will also have the option to add Wave as a Labs feature for their domains, helping groups of people communicate and work together more productively." If you haven't played with it, it's worth your time just to try to think beyond the bounds of IRC/Email. It's not going to change your work flow, but I still think it's worth a bit of your time to see it.
Yay? (Score:5, Funny)
Now more people than ever before can not use Wave.
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It had a mountain of hype surrounding it, yet is less effective than a multiple person Chat Room, and 15 times as laggy/chunky/choppy.
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It had a mountain of hype surrounding it, yet is less effective than a multiple person Chat Room, and 15 times as laggy/chunky/choppy.
Oh come on, Wave is much more than that! The advantage is that you can spend all your time deleting what other people have written and replacing it with "I'm gay!" or other such witticisms.
At least that's all I've seen it used for. Luckily as you noted, Google have a built in feature which will stem the flow, as participants have to dedicate more and more RAM to their browser just to open the wave.
Heh... (Score:2)
Re:Heh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dupe? (Score:5, Informative)
Dupe? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/19/1721203/Google-Wave-Now-Open-To-All [slashdot.org]
Re:Dupe? (Score:5, Funny)
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Except that the summary links to the same press release from May 19th as the article the GP posted. And the press release states nothing about coming out of beta.
Stale (Score:3)
Except that the summary links to the same press release from May 19th as the article the GP posted. And the press release states nothing about coming out of beta.
This is a side effect of relying on readers to do the firehose filtering.
Stuff like this gets through instead of being flagged as stale, just because it's not utter spam like the vast majority of firehose submissions. It's probably a small price to pay.
How old is this news? (Score:3, Interesting)
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And nobody noticed-hence, it's still news to many people.
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually not difficult to see what it can be used with. Basically, anything you type can be a wave. Any content you create can be a wave. The problem is people see Google Wave as the product. Google Wave is just the interface. Gmail would be useless if Email wasn't as widely used as it is. The Wave protocol exists for a reason.
These comments here could all be waves. Facebook could be based on waves. Forums as well. You would still use the same interfaces as you do now, but you'd have the added benefit of a standard API to access that information, the way email works today.
Google Wave is Thunderbird. Wave is Email.
So why should I care? (Score:2)
Re:So why should I care? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can already send data through the US Postal Service, so what exactly makes email worth my time?
Sometimes we do send data like that (Score:4, Funny)
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Or Pigeons with SD cards on their legs.
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I'm not sure if you were trolling or being serious (haven't had my morning caffeine infusion yet), but here's a real-world example of pigeon-net doing exactly what you describe:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_6209735 [denverpost.com]
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Yes but the pigeon protocol is very vulnerable to hawking.
And the latency on resends is painful.
why you might care (Score:4, Interesting)
I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Real-time collaboration.
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But what you wind up with is something that looks like an interactive chat session - you can put together ideas that way but there's no structure to the end result.
If you're collaborating on something that, say, will eventually become a document, it's next to useless because you still need to re-write the fruits of your labour into that document. With a Wiki, that's a non-issue because you're working towards the final version.
More useful would be real-time collaboration integrated with Google Sites and Goo
extensions? (Score:3, Insightful)
But what you wind up with is something that looks like an interactive chat session - you can put together ideas that way but there's no structure to the end result
Isn't that where extensions would come in? I'd prefer that Wave itself not define what an end product would be and impose that on me.
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Even worse, you're "collaboration" will have a serious case of "data lock". Don't want it at Google? Tough.
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I wouldn't quite go that far:
http://www.dataliberation.org/ [dataliberation.org]
But Wave is a particular issue because it's not supported for data export right now.
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Umm, Wave is a protocol, with Google Wave being the reference implementation. The protocol supports what they call "federation" -- If my Wave address is Schadrach@Schadwave.com (a third party Wave server) and yours is numbski@googlewave.com, we can create a wave with each other invited, and it will maintain it on both wave servers. However, if everyone that is part of a given Wave is one the same server, that Wave never leaves that server. It is also possible to set a Wave server to not federate or to re
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Somehow I had the misconception that all API data went through Google. My mistake. Thank you for clarifying! :)
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I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Real-time collaboration.
I already have two options for this: a face to face meeting and a phone.
What's with this increased distancing we're doing to each other with technology, anyway? It's just like Facebook turning the meaning of 'friend' into some perverse economy of your status.
I thought tech was supposed to bring us together; now it seems we're using it to become more isolated from each other. I can see the application may be useful for remote, widely distributed individuals working in teams who absolutely need real t
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people can watch you type the email.
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Re:So why should I care? (Score:4, Informative)
I can already send any data through email, so what exactly makes Wave worth my time?
Real-time collaboration.
Wave isn't intended to have you compose a message and send it off. And then somebody else reads the message later and replies to you. It isn't intended for a thread-like conversation.
The idea is to have multiple people contributing to a discussion more-or-less simultaneously.
Kind of like if you were to cross email with AIM, Microsoft Word, and WebEx.
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I signed on and no-one else was on, and I couldn't think what to do with it, so it must be a really silly idea right?
Meh.
It might be useful.
I tried it out for a while. Tried to use it to communicate with some friends and family members. Didn't find it terribly useful myself. But I was really trying to use it more like chat and/or email. We weren't really collaborating.
Maybe it would be more useful if we were trying to accomplish something, instead of just chatting?
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Real-time collaboration.
yeah, like chat.
Did you know there are chat programs out there that send every keystroke? Turns out it's pretty annoying. It shows how bad of a speller I am.
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Real-time collaboration.
yeah, like chat.
Chat... With graphics... And multiple people typing simultaneously... And relatively slow refreshes through a web UI...
Did you know there are chat programs out there that send every keystroke? Turns out it's pretty annoying. It shows how bad of a speller I am.
I agree that it is annoying, though not really because I'm a bad speller. I just don't like to wait for someone to finish typing.
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How would the wave email stop spam?
And this may bee really basic, but please describe HOW wave is "more capable". What's it do?
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Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.(source) [wikipedia.org]
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If you can't see a reason for using it, you either don't understand how it works, or don't have a use for it. Both are valid reasons.
I use it a lot at work myself, and absolutely love it. For example, instead of sending an email to 5 people, each of them replying with different bits of information that I then have to collate myself, we use a wave.
Instead of sending the boss email updates on critical on-going tasks, I keep them in a wave the boss has access to and update that as I go along.
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It's actually not difficult to see what it can be used with. Basically, anything you type can be a wave. Any content you create can be a wave. The problem is people see Google Wave as the product.
No, most people see it as a solution in search of a problem.
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I just don't think people should dismiss it; I understand people not using it, which is a chicken and egg problem Google need to figure out and probably won't figure out, but don't dismiss it out of hand.
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I'm still a little lost, perhaps it's one of those things that isn't obvious until you've used it. But what advantage does creating content as a Wave have over just creating it normally? If it's just a protocol for information interchange that wraps around content which is what it sounds like from your description, then what was wrong with XML, or is it literally just a pre-defined XML schema for content?
Or I suppose to put it another way, what does it let us do that we couldn't do just as well already?
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It's a realtime protocol, not simply a document format. For example, the federated protocol uses XMPP.
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Second let us say you have a massive array of data that needed sorting, put it in wave and if you have enough participants it starts to magically solve itself in pieces before your eyes because its self organizing
Dude, really? This is the sort of fanatical starry-eyed bullshit which makes me doubt Wave so much.
There is no magic there. The "participants" are flesh and blood humans that would be trying to perform a mechanical turk version of quicksort. Why employ a host of people to perform menial tasks? Why not use quicksort? That would be the case if it's something that doesn't lend itself to discreet sorting, if it's s
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Am I the only one that is none the wiser for that post? What is a 'wave' supposed to be or do? Can someone explain in plain English what the purpose of Google Wave is?
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Can someone explain in plain English what the purpose of Google Wave is?
No.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
With wave, just click the "add another person" button, and they can see the entire conversation-- unless you want to keep certain parts private (which is easy to do)
With wave, the blog comments could be a wave, the forum threads each could be waves, and the slashdot comments be waves. You reply, and your inbox now reflects the subscriptions to each. You could reply from your inbox, while others reply from slashdot or the blog-- but its all one messaging system, which means that doing it mobile is now a lot easier as well (you just need a mobile wave client).
Point 3 is especially big. Its kind of hard to see the benefit until youve actually tinkered with it and seen what it can do. For example I created a blogspot account, set up a test blog, and embedded a wave with an embedded sudoku board, and added the "everyone" member. Within seconds, on my blog, i had about 3-4 people playing sudoku and leaving comments-- in real time and with no refresh. I could later check my wave inbox and see any changes that had been made.
THAT is a big leap forward IMO-- if we can have a better messaging system with unified contacts and a unified interface, thats huge. All of a sudden we dont rely on 30 different websites producing an interface suitable to a 5 inch screen; we can just look for a suitable mobile client.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only one that is none the wiser for that post? What is a 'wave' supposed to be or do? Can someone explain in plain English what the purpose of Google Wave is?
The best answer I've heard to date for this question is "It's something that's supposed to make young people understand the confusion that old people feel when they try to use a computer."
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That's beautiful yo. It's like you learned a foreign language of start-up bullshitese
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Yes, if only now someone who understands something about good interfaces came out with a Wave client, I'd be happy.
I love the concept behind Wave. But Google Wave is a close-to-unusable mess. And yes, I've tried pretty hard to use it, with several different groups of people.
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But if wave is email, and I already have email, why do I need wave?
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In other words, Google Wave is Gmail. I want a Thunderbird. Wave might not be so freaking slow if it were running on a native desktop client.
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I boiled down his explanation and it seems like it's a chat program, using chat protocols, where you can interject lines between previous lines. Which is neat, but not quite up to snuff with google's other tools.
Basically, anything you type can be a wave. Any content you create [by typing] can be a wave.
That's great. But what's a wave? And if you say some marketing bullshit like "it's a tool for collaboration" then I'm going to just tune you out.
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Moreover, just because it can be, it does not mean it actually IS.
Wake me up when someone has built an interesting application/solution using the Wave platform.
So far I see a bunch of applications that are nothing more than gimmicks.
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It doesnt have to be "interesting" to be phenomenally better or useful.
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I love wave (Score:5, Interesting)
last week my wife made a schedule for potluck plans, in a wave.
bulleted list of items, detailed dates and times, some friendly ribbing about doing the dishes, and a lot of things involving many other people.
she included me in the wave, but no one else at first.
some side bar sort of things got added, I sent some funny pics, we added a little "will you attend" applet, deleted the whole dishes thread, added the potluck menu items, and went back and corrected my spelling.
she looked over that, made a few more changes while I was watching this time, then added several other people to the wave.
they then looked at it... MORE side bar conversations happened,the potluck items started including pictures and diet information, and we got a rundown of who was coming.
an hour before the potluck, one person changed his rsvp, and several more people wanted to come, we added them to the wave, they saw the entire thread of events, and picked up complementary things from the store on the way over. we threw in a map. and used a sketching tool to draw on it.
I love wave.
the coolest thing about this is how seemless that all was. My mother in law, and several non-techy neighbors were able to puzzle out the entire thing and add to it with very little problem.
on a completely unrelated series of waves, I'm having political debates, discussing singularity related web-finds and running a hell of a mage game.
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It's exactly the same as Facebook, except it doesn't have any of your contacts on it.
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Doesn't Google's wifi van do that pretty well?
No email integration (Score:2)
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The Wave is a federated protocol. You could easily write an email gateway.
But Google themselves should do it, I agree.
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You miss the point: Wave should include email functionality so that people have a "one stop shop" not waves should be forwarded to email to read.
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2nd sentence: "I guess people trying to read via email would make all the amazing stuff that Wave does rather useless."
But yeah, Google should provide an open-source (who would trust them otherwise?) offline email reader that covers POP3, Gmail, Wave, Buzz & RSS with Bayesian anti-spam.
Sadly, the IE Frame for Wave is borked and hence only FF & Chrome support Wave.
Wave is superb though - best thing to happen to the internet since Slashdot. ;)
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No email integration == no future for wave.
Why would wave integrate with email? Or, rather, in what way do you think it should?
IRC doesn't integrate with email. AIM doesn't integrate with email. HTTP doesn't integrate with email. BitTorrent doesn't integrate with email.
Wave is a new protocol. It isn't really supposed to replace email. It's supposed to be a different way to communicate and collaborate. Somewhere between Microsoft Word and WebEx.
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Forwarding an email you've received to a wave email account to turn it into a collaborative discussion. Having a nice offline rich editor when no Wave desktop client exists is nice, too (Yes, I know Google Gears exists for that). Being able to set up mobile devices or programmatic scripts to be able to create waves would be simpler if an already-understood protocol could be used. Think of email-to-txt gateways as another example of why this is helpful.
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Forwarding an email you've received to a wave email account to turn it into a collaborative discussion.
I don't think I'd call that "integration" any more than I'd call it "integration" when Facebook sends me an email to let me know somebody sent me a message.
Still, it would be handy.
Although you could probably do something similar with copy & paste.
Having a nice offline rich editor when no Wave desktop client exists is nice, too (Yes, I know Google Gears exists for that).
Why can't you have a rich desktop client?
I realize that there aren't any right now... But that isn't really a failing of the protocol, is it?
Being able to set up mobile devices or programmatic scripts to be able to create waves would be simpler if an already-understood protocol could be used. Think of email-to-txt gateways as another example of why this is helpful.
So, what, we shouldn't develop new protocols because nobody understands them yet?
I understand that it would be handy t
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Email integration is a good idea for a server feature, not a protocol feature. I think you're confused.
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You're right about everything, but missed the key issue: adoption. It's not an issue with other protocols but it is with Wave. Extensions or notifications or any of that stuff isn't enough. Unless email integration (and for that matter IM integration) is native to wave people won't make the transition.
They would if it was compelling enough.
I don't think the core problem with wave is that it is a new protocol or that it doesn't integrate with existing protocols. I think the core problem is that it doesn't really add functionality that folks are looking for.
It may very well be incredibly useful for some folks... But I don't think it does anything that the vast majority of people need.
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It looks like the question of wave's future rests not on whether its better (it is) or its useful (it is) or whether it has email integration (it does)... but on whether people will respond with a "its new, I dont understand it, I'm not going to acknowledge its merit", or if theyre willing to actually give the thing a try, do a little research, and judge it on its merits or lack thereof.
How do I get others to use it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time I've tried to use it, the conversation dies off quickly and new ones go right back to Email. As a last ditch effort I even added a small paragraph at the top of a Wave that explained how to use it, and still the very first reply to it was sent over Email.
It's just not intuitive or compelling enough to replace anything with.
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We tried it a work, but it lasted less than a week before we went back to emails and skype. We couldn't figure out any advantage to it what so ever. It didn't replace anything in our existing work flow and it didn't add anything of value either. End of the day, Email for most stuff works and then we have skype for anything urgent.
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Email for most stuff works and then we have skype for anything urgent.
I agree e-mail works for most stuff - assuming you have threaded conversations (Outlook...I'm looking at you), collaborative documents (something like Google Docs), and an instant message/instant access program (Skype, Communicator, etc). However, Wave does fill a very nice niche for certain people. But, I think the major problem is that most individuals just don't understand, or can't grasp, how Wave might actually be used.
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I deal with some people who would rather wait a week to have a 30min phone call than have a short conversation over the course of a day via email between three people. Not for lack of trying, some people simply seem incapable and stuck in their old ways. I had hopes that Wave would give just enough extra interface over what email provides to make having these 3+ person conversations work for them, but it still wasn't enough.
Other than that, yea I didn't really know what I was going to use it for -- I'd ho
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I deal with some people who would rather wait a week to have a 30min phone call than have a short conversation over the course of a day via email between three people. Not for lack of trying, some people simply seem incapable and stuck in their old ways.
In my experience, that's actually something else. Some people simply are unable to express themselves in writing. They rather prefer to babble on via the phone for hours instead of stopping to reflect on what they're trying to say and write it down in a single easy to understand sentence.
It's not the technology itself. I have a co-worker who is like that, and we're even having these conversations via VoIP right there in a chat program. After such a conversation (the record duration was around 2.5h I think),
Re:How do I get others to use it? (Score:4, Informative)
Not surprising, at least, Gmail has a scroll bar. I mean, a real scrollbar, which apparently they are not cool enought for Wave.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
i think Google Wave is like the Apple Newton (Score:3, Interesting)
the Apple Newton is the Apple iPhone, 10 years too early:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform) [wikipedia.org]
in other words, Google Wave is where we are headed, yes. but its too early. it has to be the most painful of technology-related efforts: your passion is correct, your efforts are noble... but no one adapts it only because there is no critical mass of people to use the tech to its righteous, intended effect, just yet
or more exactly, Google Wave is like AJAX. everyone knows AJAX as the ascendent internet development model that pretty much came to public conscience with Google Maps: "you mean i don't have to click and submit a form and reload the page entirely every time? wow!"
but did you know XmlHttpRequest (the X in AJAX) was originally a Microsoft Exchange Plug-in for IE 5.0 in 1999?
and that Microsoft dominance in browsers at the time (and its noncompliance) made use of the technology feasible, and therefore other browsers adapted it? too many people believe standards drive technological development. when the truth is, everything starts out as nonstandard, the standards only lag behind, making uniform the popular feature sets of the time. standards do NOT drive innovation. if you want to do exciting groundbreaking tech: fuck the standards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History_and_support [wikipedia.org]
do you think Microsoft knew where their minor sideshow Exchange Server ActiveX tech was headed? Microsoft constantly lags in the innovation department: silverlight competing with flash, zune, their tablet technology upstaged by iPad, their moribund smartphone OS competing with blackberry, android, apple, etc.
and yet Microsoft actually had a truly groundbreaking world changing piece of tech on their hands... and they pretty much relegated it to Microsoft Exchange Server plumbing. hilarious
this will be the development arc of Google Wave:
1. eventually forgotten after the initial publicity blitz
2. then someone rediscovers it in obscurity, repurposes it, and reintroduces it
3. 5-10 years from now, Google Wave
wave blocked. (Score:2)
wave blocked at work.
As are all chat formats.
What I need is something like a chat client that uses emails as a basis for the chat.
The closed Beta killed this. (Score:3, Interesting)
I started using Wave in the Beta. At first my level of excitement was very high as I figured out ways that technology could be useful.
Unfortunately that excitement waned as I discovered I had very few people to share it with as invites were scarce and not many people I wanted to communicate with regularly had one.
Now the product is free and open but it has missed its opportunity to integrate itself into my routine. I think that Google might have lost a lot of community Evangelists on this one.
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Google Wave has been open since May 19th going by the date in the press release linked in the summary.
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It's like IRC, except the "channels" are all by private invitations (there's no public wave list), you get the messages even when offline, and it's way more media rich, and the servers are federated*
It's like email, except you can write in real time and collaborate in writing documents.
There's probably some more similitudes - but it's not quite the same as anything else. The thing is, is it useful?
*so like in email, you can use different Wave providers and talk to each other.
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Is that still true now that it's gone public? I thought they would open up federation at that point.
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What do you mean "now" gone public? It went public a month ago. This is just a stale story.
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I mean since a month ago. If it's still public, then I think "now" is perfectly appropriate. I set up a federation server and tried it out back when it was still closed beta.
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The example server they created loses all data on restart. The federation protocol works fine - write your own server.
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Gmail went out of beta July last year.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-launches-back-to-beta.html [blogspot.com]
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http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gmail-leaves-beta-launches-back-to-beta.html [blogspot.com]
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Let me try:
It's a real-time communication system that combines the good parts of IRC, Mail, Wikis and IM.