To paraphrase Mark Twain, it appears that rumors of Google Wave’s death may be greatly exaggerated. Google announced that it was ending development on the project back in August. But some of Google Wave’s developers have submitted the code for what’s now known as Wave in a Box (WIAB) to the Apache Software Foundation.

The project will now be a candidate to become a Podling in the Apache Incubator, the first step in becoming one of Apache’s open-source projects.

Google Wave was introduced in 2009 as a distributed, real-time communication and communication platform. But, citing low user adoption, Google ended the project earlier this year. Google has made moves towards packaging Wave in a Box so that developers can have standalone functionality of Waves and can run them on their own servers.

Many of Wave’s components are open source, so others can and do continue to work on the project. According to the Apache Incubator proposal, “We anticipate early future committers coming from places like Novell, SAP, companies related to the US Navy’s usage of wave, startups in the wave ecosystem, and many independent individuals.”

The initial goals of the WIAB project include migrating the codebase from code.google.com to the ASF infrastructure and then continuing the project’s development and growth of its developer community. ComputerWorld cites Dan Peterson, one of the developers on the project, as indicating that a vote from the Apache Software Foundation on whether Wave in a Box will become an Apache Incubator Project may come as early as next week.

View full post on Web Technology Blog, Development and Social Media

There have been a lot of discussions lately about how the Internet is changing traditional media. Viewpoints from either side tend to await the chance to discredit the other and we end up with story after story about how the Internet is going to be the death of pen and paper news.

It seems though that one group of people has been sorely missed: those who understand that the Internet is a tool for helping them to provide more interactive, better-written traditional media. It is with this in mind that we want to extend congratulations to Cory Haik and The Seattle Times for recent Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, including the use of Google Wave.

You see, The Seattle Times is one of those organizations that understands how social media and traditional news go hand in hand. When the story broke about four Seattle-area police officers being shot, the Times decided to not only follow the story on their site, but to also get their audience involved by opening a Google Wave for the story.

The Wave allowed for real-time updates, not only from the Times staff, but also from readers. As users of the Wave dug through information across the Internet, evidence sightings, witness reports and school closings were given out immediately.

Cory writes, during a guest post on the Google Wave blog: Despite the fact that we reached fewer than 500 people and encountered a couple of technical glitches, Id like to think that using Google Wave was successful. And if the No. 1 rule of social media or at least my No. 1 rule of social media is that using it as its useful to you is the rule, then I am quite confident it was.

This is the second time, in recent weeks, that weve seen a Pulitzer being awarded for Internet-based news. That being the case, we suppose that kudos are in order for the Pulitzer Organization as well. It takes some bravery to break out of the molds of traditional media and reporting, and even more bravery to recognize when that reporting has set new standards by using available technologies such as Wave.

Related posts:

1. Real-time with Google Wave Google wave is a recent real time communication application from…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

View full post on Web Technology Blog, Development and Social Media