Google Wave Update

9/29/2009 08:46:00 AM

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select business and university customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we...

Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!

Microsoft's Free Security Essentials Antivirus Goes Final

The free Security Essentials app from Microsoft just escaped beta, meaning they fixed all the showstopper bugs that would cause users to be irreparably pissed.

Lifehacker says there aren't a lot of new features since their first look at the software, but it is a free antivirus app, albeit one that might not be great enough to get you to switch from your current app. After all, AVG is still free for individuals, but for small businesses that need to install one on every machine, this might free up a good deal more budget for a fancy Xmas party. [Microsoft via Lifehacker]

Early Info Release on Pink Phone (Microsoft)

These phones are going to be made by Sharp, who'll get to share branding with Microsoft. Sharp produced the Sidekick hardware for Danger, who was bought by Microsoft almost two years ago. Pink will be primarily aimed at the same market as the Sidekick, and the branding and identity for it is highly developed, pointing toward a later stage in the development cycle.

The prior relationship between Danger and Sharp is the only reason we can think of why Microsoft stuck with Sharp for the new phones, and perhaps why they look so much like remixed Sidekicks. (Kind of yucky, that is.) The youth bent is somewhat surprising, if Pink is going to be their big consumer phone play, building off the expertise of Danger and members of the Zune team.

The hardware design has a definite younger feeling: Turtle looks like a chunky child's version of a Palm Pre, while Pure seems like a standard slider, and both are clearly plastic, with an overall sense of roundedness, thanks to lots of soft angles and circular keys.

It's been reported elsewhere that Pink phones will include Zune services, and have its own app store, making it as close to the Zune phone as we may get. We'll see if it's close enough in the coming months, though these are the only facts our source will let us safely publish for now.

Back to the Future with Phones

Imagine sharing one phone with up to 11 other students on your dorm floor. Penn State students who lived in the residence halls through 1977 don’t need to imagine it; they lived it. Now, with current students’ near-universal use of cell phones, Penn State’s residence halls will once again feature shared hallway phones. That’s just the latest change in campus phone service since the first telephone was installed in the 1880s.

The decision to pull “landlines” (the undoubtedly Gen X-coined term that refers to what those over age 30 tend to call “telephones”) from Penn State’s residence halls turned out to be a no-brainer. As Penn State Housing Director Conal Carr explained to The Daily Collegian in July, some quick research revealed nearly all students carry cell phones, and during the 2007-08 school year, almost three-quarters of them used their room landlines less than 20 times. That hardly justifies the $800,000 Housing was paying to keep the lines active in nearly 50 residence halls.

Replacing the individual room landlines will be courtesy phones in the hallways that will work for local calls and for calling 911 in case of an emergency. “In a way, it’s going back to the way our students’ parents had it,” Carr told The Collegian. The story of phones on campus and in the residence halls has many twists since the first telephone was installed in 1883.

“An Indispensable Nuisance”
A local newspaper, The Bellefonte Democrat Watchman, reported on June 23, 1883, “The State College (as Penn State was then know) now is connected by telephone to the outside world.” President George Atherton was responsible for Penn State’s first telephone, which was located in his office. But Atherton’s daughter, Helen Govier, recalled later that he considered the new form of communication “an indispensable nuisance.” It wasn’t long before the business office, Engineering Building, Agriculture Building, and registrar’s office also had telephones.

Those early telephones were connected to Bellefonte, then the population center of the county. Within five years, Penn State was also connected to Lemont. At the same time, eight of the houses in what would become the town of State College had telephones “from which one may have instant communication with any one of 166 other telephones of the Bellefonte exchange and with 1,800 others through the Central Pennsylvania Telephone Company.” A century before faxes and e-mails, ringing the operator, giving her a name or number, and waiting while she connected your call through her switchboard was considered “instant communication.”

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