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Filed under: Social Software, iPhone

Waveboard: Google Wave client now available for iPhone

You may have already figured out that you can use Google Wave in Safari on the iPhone, but now there's a better alternative. Waveboard, one of the early attempts at a desktop Wave client, now has an iPhone app. The Waveboard app will run you 99 cents, but it's a much faster way to check your Waves than loading them up in the built-in browser.

Waveboard basically gives you the same thing you get on the mobile web version of Wave, but also adds some additional features. You can shake your device to logout and reload your Waves, and push notifications are apparently coming soon. It sounds like right now is the time to jump on Waveboard, in case future features come with a higher price.

If you have 40 seconds to kill, and you want to see Waveboard in action, check out the demo video after the jump.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Internet, Google, Open Source

Google come in peace... Wave Federation now activated

I'm not quite ready to reveal just how geeky I am, so I'll spare you the massive deluge of Star Trek jokes. My apologies in advance if one or two slip past your shields.

Anyway... Over on the Google Wave Developer Blog they've just announced that they're ready to start implementing the federation of Wave servers. This doesn't mean a whole lot to most of us, only that it means the Borg Collectiv-- er, The Google Wave Team, is plodding ever onwards, driven by its impulse engines towards some kind of epic singularity where all email servers will be wiped out and replaced with Wave servers.

And what a glorious day that will be. But yeah, if you're a developer -- or ISP? -- now's the time to get in there and integrate your experimental Wave server with Google's sandbox! With the open specification and open source nature of Wave it will be interesting to see what other developers are hiding up their sleeves

[On a side note, our great Google Wave invite giveaway was a great success. There should be more news about that later today -- and the lucky winners should start to receive their invites in the next few days!]

Filed under: Google, Social Software

The great Google Wave invite giveaway!

If you haven't heard of Google Wave yet -- a) wake up! and b) watch this tech demo. It's long, but if you're a nerd, or someone who uses the Internet a lot, you'll find it more exciting than the latest Harry Potter film. And at only 80 minutes, it's not a potentially-bladder-exploding endurance event, unlike the bespectacled wizard wannabe.

And with that said, the goodies: Download Squad are giving away Google Wave invites. We're going to start giving away invites whenever we have them to give away and today, to get the ball rolling, we've got 20 up for grabs! If things heat up, we'll scrounge under the couch cushions until we find more!

Wave is just starting to pick up steam, with more gadgets and gizmos and robots appearing every day. With reports of Google Wave server federation (the ability for anyone to run a Wave server) coming soon, and the sandbox walls being torn down, now's your chance to get in on the action.

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Filed under: Google, Social Software, web 2.0

Waver, a cross-platform Google Wave application for your desktop

There's Tweetdeck for your Tweets, Seesmic for your Facebook stalking -- and now Waver for your Waves!

Waver is simply an Adobe AIR application that hooks into your Google Wave account. From there, you can create new waves, or update existing ones.

Adobe's Javascript implementation seems to do surprisingly well, rendering Waves as quickly or quicker than Google's own V8 -- though this could be due to the fact that Waver uses the cut-down iPhone UI output from Google Wave. Also, a lot of the UI seems to actually be, er, missing. And a lot of the shortcuts don't seem to work yet.
Try as I might, I could not get Waver to look like their sample picture -- perhaps it's because I'm running Windows 7 instead of OS X?

But let's not forget the most important thing here: in this case, Waver is merely rendering Google Wave using WebKit -- the same engine powering Chrome, Safari, and several other web browsers.

Is it really worth installing AIR and running a separate application to access your Wave account? Why not just open another tab in Chrome?

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Filed under: Web services, Google, Social Software

Google Wave gets a notifier add-on for Firefox

That was fast! Google Wave's barely been available for a week, and there's already a Google Wave Notifier extension for Firefox. The notifier sits in your status bar and shows the number of waves with unread messages in your inbox (not the total number of unread messages, mind you). It's small, unobtrusive, and checks for messages at an adjustable interval.

Of course, you can also manually refresh the notifier. Double-clicking it will take you to Wave, so you can deal with those unread messages. It's a pretty basic extension, but it's the first one out of the gate, and Google hasn't released anything official with similar functionality.

Filed under: Web services, Google, Social Software, iPhone, web 2.0, Mobile, Android

Surprise! Google Wave (unofficially) works on iPhone and Android!

After playing with Google Wave for about a week, I found myself wishing I could check my waves on the go. How is this thing going to replace email in the future if I have to be at my computer to use it? Well, it turns out that Wave does work on at least two mobile platforms: the iPhone and Google Android. Although the mobile versions of these browsers aren't technically supported - so you'll have to click through a warning to use it - the fact that they're built on WebKit means it's more or less Wave-ready.

There's even a mobile-optimized site for Wave, similar in design to mobile Gmail. Although there's no official Wave iPhone app, you can add Wave to your home screen on the iPhone for convenient access. Obviously, some of Wave's features won't work in the mobile version - dragging and dropping images, for example - but for basic reading and adding to conversations, it's fine. Preparing a decent mobile web version of Wave is certainly one alternative to going through Apple's app store approval process, especially after the infamous Google Voice rejection.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: E-mail, Web services, Google, Commercial, Social Software, Web

ZenBe releases Shareflow, seems similar to Google Wave

ZenBe Shareflow

We all went ga-ga over Google Wave when it was announced back at Google's I/O conference in May, but except for a very fortunate few, we really don't know what it will be like to use. Today online productivity suite developer ZenBe released a new product called Shareflow, which has a number of similarities to Google Wave.

Shareflow is a collaboration tool that ZenBe says is not email, IM, social networking, or instant messaging, but has elements of all of them. Sound familiar? The idea is that you can organize conversations around topics by creating "flows" and inviting people to collaborate on them. This maps directly to Google's concept of creating "waves" and inviting people to them.

Obviously Shareflow and Wave are not identical, and as with anything their respective implementations will have many differences. Beyond implementation differences, there are three fundamental differences between Shareflow and Wave that are worth noting:

  1. Wave will be a free and predominantly open-source product, while Shareflow is a closed-source commercial product (albeit with a free account as one of the various plan levels)
  2. Wave has the strength of Google behind it
  3. You can't use Wave today, but you can use Shareflow

You can sign up for a free account, or use the promo code FREE30 to get 30 days free of either their Basic, Plus, or Premium plan.

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