Google Wave becomes Wave in a Box

Google Wave, the social networking service canceled by Google, will morph into an application bundle for real-time collaboration, a Google engineer said this week. In a blog post, Google Software Engineer Alex North, from the Google Wave Team, said the company had received many inquiries about the future of the open source code and Wave federation protocol. Citing a lack of adoption, Google Wave was discontinued last month.

"We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and Web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box," said North. The project will feature an application bundle with a server and Web client, supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave System.

Other capabilities include support for threaded conversations; refinements to client-server protocols; gadget, robot, and data API and support for importing wave data from wave.google.com. "While Wave in a Box will be a functional application, the future of Wave will be defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve," he said.