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Google took an important step on Monday in the development of Google Wave, opening its servers up to outsiders who want their own waves to communicate with the outside world.

Wave servers belonging to Acme and Initech can now talk to each other with the opening of Google Wave federation.

(Credit: Google)

A "wave" is a stream of messages that blends traditional e-mail, instant messaging, file sharing, and workplace collaboration tools. There have been plenty of supporters and detractors of Google Wave, Google's bid to reinvent e-mail as a combination of such services. But Google's implementation of Wave is going to be only one part of the story: outside developers will have the opportunity to build their own wavelike services using the Google Wave API set.

And those outside implementations will be able to communicate with each other using the Google Wave Federation Protocol, now that Google has opened up federation of wave servers. This means that if Company A built its own wave servers, it could interact with Company B's wave servers through a public peer-to-peer network facilitated by Google.

At the moment, this is just confined to the developer preview sandbox that was the initial proving ground for Wave. Since its launch, Google has opened up Wave to a wider audience for further testing and bug squashing, with a formal launch not scheduled until early next year.

Wave's complicated interface has not been a resounding hit with early testers, but the combination of external development and a federation service means that others could create more compelling ways to use the technology.

Ribbit puts a conference bridge inside a Wave message.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

It's becoming clear that Google Wave, which is slowly emerging from closed beta, has potential to be much more than a text-messaging platform. As the telecommunications platform company Ribbit shows, and as does a frothy little videoconference app from 6 Rounds, Wave's architecture makes it a compelling platform for real-time streaming communication.

The Ribbit team recently showed me their prototype widget, which lets Wave users quickly set up a conference room inside a "wave" message on the service. Once you add the Ribbit conference widget to a wave, everyone in it becomes part of a potential voice chat. Users need to enter their phone numbers, which remain hidden from other users. Then anyone in the wave can call all the participants at once to start a conference. (Users can also call only particular people in the wave, if they wish.)

The cool thing about the Ribbit integration into Wave is how easy it is to get a conference going that's clearly related to a document (a wave) that a team is already working on. You also get a dashboard view of your conference where you can see who's on and who's not, and drop callers mid-stream.

Future additions to the service will include options to record calls and transcribe them -- for a fee perhaps.

6 Rounds is conceptually related to Ribbit, although with more of a focus on fun videoconferencing (with silly video effects and everything) and the sharing of YouTube videos. But the idea is the same: Within a de facto group on Wave, you can quickly add a conferencing widget to bring people into a conversation. See also Zorap from Demo, which is similar, although without a Wave widget.

It looks like both of these apps blend perfectly with the Wave experience, which is part e-mail, part IM, part groupware. They show how, in a modern communications system, the barriers between text and voice and video communication, and more interestingly between asynchronous and real-time communication, really do begin to dissolve.

What's not clear is how or if Google will integrate Google Voice into Wave. That's a big shoe that has yet to drop.

Click to see video demos of Ribbit, 6 Rounds, and other Google Wave extensions.

Google Wave is ready for wider testing.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Google Wave is ready for its next step: a more thorough test of its scalability and stability as more than 100,000 new users crowd onto the service.

As promised, Google plans to open Google Wave beyond an extremely limited preview on Wednesday, granting access to users who have signed up in hopes of getting a chance to try the service. Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won't be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project.

Google Wave is an attempt to re-engineer Internet communication, blending elements of e-mail, instant messaging, social networking, and workplace collaboration software into a single Web application. It was first unveiled at Google I/O in May before Web developers who were a bit dazzled by the possible uses of the technology.

At present, however, Google Wave is one big bug bash, perhaps half a year away from launching as a stable product. Google engineers have solved many of the more persistent bugs that were hampering the product a few months ago, but there is still a long way to go and Wave should not be considered anything but a "preview," Rasmussen said. Still, that's better than "developer preview," the status previously attached to Wave that implied only hardcore techies should venture within.

In addition to the developers and waiting list, Google also plans to open Wave up to a limited number of Google Apps enterprise customers for testing, Rasmussen said. A few companies, such as SAP and Salesforce.com, have already started playing around with the technology but Google is seeking feedback from other organizations on how Wave might work within their environment.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Lars Rasmussen sighed, half an hour into a demonstration of Google Wave, the company's audacious attempt to reinvent Internet communication: we'd found another bug.

Rasmussen had patiently worked around other minor bugs during the demo Tuesday at Google's headquarters, but when images dragged into a wave wouldn't load properly, he asked his brother Jens, seated at the conference room table, to get an engineer on the issue right away. It's about two months before Google opens up Wave access to a larger audience, and there is a ton of work to be done.

Google's Lars Rasmussen demonstrated Wave for the first time in May, and is now focused on stamping out the bugs.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Google Wave was unveiled in May at the Google I/O Developer conference, and dazzled attendees with its goal: a combination of real-time communication with social-networking and search capabilities built into a familiar interface. Wave is more than just an in-box on steroids, however. It's also a communications platform that developers can use to build their own applications, something that many were excited about in the early hours of Wave's life on the public stage.

Behind the scenes, the reality is sobering for the Rasmussens and the 6,000 or so people actively using Wave. Job No. 1 for the brothers Rasmussen--who are managing the Google Wave project--is making sure Wave is stable enough to accommodate 100,000 new users that will start doing the Wave after September 30, when Google opens up the limited preview to a wider audience.

At the moment, around 25 percent of all Wave sessions end in a crash, Lars said. That's obviously not acceptable and, in an ironic twist, the highest priority bug on Google Wave at the moment involves search.

"I would imagine in six months this will be fast, slick, stable and usable," Lars said. "Right now, you have to be a super early adopter (to use Wave). By September 30, an early adopter."

Wave has been in the works for about two and a half years. The original prototype--constructed in nine months to pitch the concept to CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page--was actually discarded in favor of a system that provided better scale, Lars said.

Much of that time has been spent simply designing the workflow of Wave: how to add people to a wave, reply to a wave, add pictures, and create rules. Wave shares some basic infrastructure with Gmail, but is essentially a completely separate undertaking and has been a bit of an "organizational experiment" for Google in terms of giving an important project a great deal of autonomy, Lars said.

Google Wave is designed to be a next-generation Internet communications application and platform. When it works.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

So why go public now, with so much yet to be accomplished? The brothers Rasmussen have heard the shouts of "vaporware," and actually chose the opposite launch strategy for the product that launched their Google careers: Google Maps wasn't unveiled until it was complete.

The difference with Wave is that Google believes developer feedback is crucial to its evolution as a product. "We wanted to get people thinking about how we're going to use it and what people are going to use it for," Lars said.

For now, however, Wave is carefully labeled as a "developer preview," a status that doesn't even rise to the level of one of Google's ubiquitous beta projects. While Google still has no formal process for determining what projects are previews as opposed to betas as opposed to full-blown products, the goal for Wave is reduce the number of crashes to less than 1 percent of all session starts, at which point the "beta" tag can be more confidently applied.

When introducing Wave in May, Google said it hoped to open the service up to the general public some time in 2009. That seems unlikely when viewing Wave in late July, but launching a product that has been hyped as much as Wave with anything even close to the number of bugs currently present would be a disaster.

Lars knows this. "Google can be a cushy place to work; we're not going to run out of payroll anytime soon. But we're putting a lot of pressure on ourselves."

Waiting to get your grubby mitts on Google Wave? You'll have to wait just a little bit longer.

While about 6,000 developers got their hands on Wave Monday, a post on the Google Wave developer blog says the company isn't planning to open it up to everyday users until September 30th. At that time, some 100,000 users will be let into the program. To be a part of that first run, users will have had to have signed up to use the service on Google's invite page.

Along with a hard date on the semi-public beta test, Google also highlighted a few developer creations using Wave's API. One of them, called Waves in WordPress, lets bloggers quickly embed an entire Wave conversation into a blog post, which lets readers view and interact with it. Similar tools that let you do that with other social and blogging can be expected as Wave's API matures.

First introduced at the Google I/O Conference back in late May, Wave is Google's re-imagining of Web e-mail, and a sibling of Gmail--the company's current Web mail product. It blends live chat and e-mail in one service, and is one of Google's most experimental creations yet. Google says it still has some more work to do on the project before it's ready for beta testers to start drumming on it, including how fast and stable it is.

Related: Debating the power of Google's Wave

We've had about a week to absorb the Google's pitch for Wave, its new experimental communication platform, and about a day to try the actual early "sandbox" build of the service. See our hands-on review. But there's more to talk about with Wave. It's not just an app, it's an important evolution in the philosophy of written communication.

People will see Wave in different ways. For some, it's a clever take on e-mail. Others will see it as instant messaging with new features. Developers will look at Wave's open specs and APIs, and see a framework for new collaborative apps. But is it really any of these things, or just a crazy experiment from Google's Australian outpost?

Is it better than e-mail?

CNET Editor Rafe Needleman: In some ways, it really is. With Wave, you don't reply to a message with a new message, you instead add your reply to the message itself. When there are multiple people involved in a conversation, this can prevent a lot of confusion. There's only one "wave" in a conversation, not a volley of messages flying around that repeat each other.

CNET Senior Writer Stephen Shankland: Gmail users accustomed to conversation view, which stacks the back-and-forth discussion into a single view, will have an easier time adjusting to Wave's ways.

And just as Gmail works best if you only deal with one e-mail at a time, Wave is good at only one wave at a time. That's fine for a lot of IM-like chats, but if you work in depth on multiple waves simultaneously, think about opening multiple browser tabs. There are boldface indicators of new activity in your inbox, which tell you who's active, but with multiple tabs you won't always see them--especially if your inbox gets crowded with new waves.

Needleman: It's fun to play with now, but we don't know what using Wave will be like once we start getting overflowing inboxes of waves.

Shankland: Right. Every Net communication technology goes through a honeymoon period where just you and your close contacts use it. Then the whole Net discovers it and your little paradise becomes just another conduit for spam, inane jokes, and trivia. Expect the same issues with Wave.

Needleman: The thing everyone is going to make a big deal of in Wave is that you can interrupt someone who's carefully writing a message to you. You can barge into a message before they're done with it, demand the writer's immediate attention, and force them to shift from composing to replying. There will be a way to hide your real-time activity in Wave, but the default mode is real-time. It's interruptive and very different. There will be people who hate it.

We used Wave to write this story. It worked pretty well.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Shankland: In my misspent youth, I used a Unix terminal command, talk, that was something of a precursor to instant messaging. I quickly grew to loathe the fact that every keystroke was visible. How many times have you had second thoughts about an instant message or e-mail? Think before you type.

Needleaman: I'm in trouble. I don't only think before I type. I think before, during, and after. My mother taught me that "writing is re-writing." I hope Wave doesn't prove her wrong.

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Google just opened up to a limited audience its very interesting communications experiment called Wave (news stories). Our hands-on evaluation: there's a lot to like. It really is a more contemporary take on communications. But it will knock many e-mail users off-balance.

Even Wave's own Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen told me, "It takes a little getting used to," and, "We're still learning how to use it." Imagine how everyone else will feel.

If you want to try Wave, you'll have to wait. Google is making access to the service available to some developers and press, but full availability will not be until "later this year," Google says. The version we tested was very raw, still in development. Many features were not implemented and the system threw us a few errors. But the framework and philosophy is clear to see, and that's what this evaluation is based on.

Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail...

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

What's Wave?

Wave is real-time e-mail. What that means is that when you're writing a reply to a message (or "wave") that you receive in the system, the recipient can see what you are typing as you type it. It will come as a relief to most that the real-time feature can be disabled if you click on the "draft" button (not working in my trial) while writing. But real-time visibility is the default.

You can put your replies anywhere in the message. You can also do this in regular e-mail, but in Wave, your comments are easy to pick out since the app bounds reply text in colored boxes with authors' pictures embedded in them. Those of us who prefer to reply to e-mail messages at the end (or the beginning) and not piecemeal can just reply as usual. But when you want to write a surgical point-by-point reply to a message, Wave makes it easy.

You can drop pictures straight into Wave messages (a neat trick in a browser-based app, made possible by Google Gears), and smart assistants will let you convert addresses to maps, automatically fix spelling errors, and expand contact names.

But Wave is not e-mail. In this image, I am watching co-developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen type replies to my query. The teal tag shows that Jen is typing right now; Lars, who just finished typing above Jens, had his own, separate color.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But it's the reply-anywhere feature combined with the real-time function that's most interesting. It makes Wave the first useful blend of e-mail and instant messaging that I've seen. Unlike Google's previous attempt to meld the two communications modes into one app (Gmail has Google Talk in its sidebar), this one really works. An asynchronous e-mail conversation between two people can can stay that way, or it become real-time when both parties are online, and the dialog stays in place in the e-mail for later viewing. Switching between the e-mail and IM mode is seamless. In fact, the concept of the two different modes vanishes in Wave.

Wave's message handling really shines when a conversation is between more than two people. Using Wave and its specific, color-coded replies, a group of people can have an actual discussion in e-mail, in real-time if wanted, without getting bogged down in long multi-message discussions--or worse, in threads that end up forking so that different people are discussing different things.

The Wave in-box pane shows you when there are new messages in your threads by bolding the subject lines, and when somebody is actively typing in a wave, you can see the text come in live, in the two-line preview every message gets. That's really cool, although it can be overwhelming.

Speaking of being overwhelmed, the first time I had two people replying to me in an individual message at the same time, in different places in it, my head almost exploded. It's a lot of raw information coming it at once, and it's very different from the old e-mail or the instant message experience.

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In a recent story about how Google creatively destroys markets, I said that only Google will run the servers for Wave, its re-think of e-mail. I was wrong about that, as Google reps took pains to tell me. I want to set the record straight. What Google is doing with the Wave communications architecture is important enough that it merits its own story, not just a strikeout in the original.

Google has said it will "federate" Wave. That means it will make it possible for anyone to operate their own Wave server and have it communicate with other Wave servers. This is just how e-mail works today: Anyone can run an e-mail server that can send messages to and receive messages from any other e-mail system. The Internet routes messages from server to server.

In contrast, only Google runs the Gmail servers.

Google's Wave architecture does not rely on Google servers. Click image for link to Google's whitepaper.

(Credit: Google)

I was told that anyone will be able to "build their own Wave server without involvement from Google." That means corporations and governments will be able to deploy their own instances of Wave inside their secure firewalls if they like, and decide how or if they want to open up their servers to the outside world. For businesses with strict data retention and auditing requirements (e.g., all public companies, governmental agencies, health care businesses, etc.), this also means that they'll be able to write in software to meet their needs; or that other companies will be able to create and sell Wave servers. (If, that is, business gets behind Wave at all.)

However, sources familiar with the intricacies of building a real-time synchronization engine, which is what Wave is, tell me that it is incredibly challenging to make such a system work "at scale." Showing off a Wave demo is one thing. But a successful, well-performing, wide-scale rollout requires advanced technology that few companies have the chops to write, and it's hard to keep performance up as the size of the user community grows. This may be why the original planned release of Wave to developers outside Google has been delayed by several days.

Wave will be based on (and extend on) the existing messaging standard, XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). So a lot of Web developers will be able to get started quickly on writing Wave extensions and apps, as well as building their own servers to run Wave or back-end services for their Wave plug-ins.

Wave may represent new thinking about packaging real-time communication, but it's not based on 100 percent new or proprietary technology, so we might see some interesting third-party extensions to Wave very shortly after it starts rolling out to the public.

I stand by the rest of my story, especially my main thesis: Google destroys entrenched markets. That's not a bad thing, though. Especially when it comes to e-mail.

For those who are having a little trouble understanding exactly what Google Wave is all about, seeing it in action might help you wrap your head around the concept.

Google has released video of Thursday's keynote speech at Google I/O in San Francisco, where the company publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time before about 4,000 developers. Google Wave is an ambitious, if incomplete, attempt to reinvent e-mail and Internet communication in general.

Developers are just starting to get their hands on Google Wave to try it out for themselves, but the public is not expected to get the same chance for several months. We hope to post a hands-on review ourselves in the coming days, but for now, check out the video if you'd like to see Google Wave in action. Be forewarned, it's long (90 minutes).