Google Wave has switched from an invitation-only offering to one open to all interested users, the popular service announced Wednesday.
Google also announced a batch of special features and tweaks to Google Wave, which allows real-time communication online. Google introduced the project in May 2009 and put out a limited preview release in November. Some educational institutions have used the service as a way to do collaborative work more efficiently.
Gregory D’Alesandre, product manager at Google, said one of the biggest changes users are likely to notice is more user-friendliness, so that new users can adapt quickly to the service. Google Wave plans more changes meant to cater to new users in coming months, although Mr. D’Alesandre declined to give specifics.
Google Apps domain administrators at universities and businesses will now be able to enable Google Wave for all their users. Other, smaller changes can be seen in a presentation from the Google I/O Conference taking place through Thursday.
Mr. D’Alesandre has worked with a number of universities using Wave for classroom projects and research since the service began.
He cited his work with an Irish-studies class at the University of Notre Dame, which collaborated with a university in Ireland using Google Wave. During one debate the classes worked together on, students supplemented their arguments by uploading videos and documents. Mr. D’Alesandre hopes that more educational institutions will be able to use Google Wave now that it is widely available.
“The reason we think this is really interesting and useful and important for education is because these small groups naturally occur in the educational context,” he said.
One Response to Google Wave Has Officially Opened Its Doors
arrive2__net - May 20, 2010 at 5:08 am
There’s a good introductory video on Google Wave at http://wave.google.com/about.html. It looks like a good productive software that could have a role in supporting online or on-campus collaborative class projects, but from the video its not clear how Google will profit from it. It clearly has high potential but using it for a class could be awkward if advertising is introduced, or in the unlikely event that Google would pull the plug on it in the middle of the course. Apart from those relatively small potential glitches it looks to be the kind of application that could cause a teacher or work-group-leader to reconsider how some course or project is being done, and restructure it considering the potentialities in the software. Bernard SchusterArrive2.net