Google's Wave wasn't a success and the site was closed down but now some of its technology  has a second chance in Google's new Shared Space lab project.

Google's Wave experiment into new ways of using the web may have closed, but the technology lives on. First there is Google's Wave in a Box, which is essentially the server components of Wave that you could run on your own servers. This was adopted by Apache as an incubator project complete with the source code that Google donated.

Now Google has taken some of the technology in Wave and used it as part of a Google Labs project that helps you collaborate with other people by adding information to a Wave gadget.

There are gadgets that you can use to add placemarks, create diagrams, lists and so on. There is even a Wave Sudoku gadget for when you get bored.

The new project is called Google Shared Spaces and it's a lot easier to understand what to do with it than the full Wave app was. To share your work you simply send its URL to anyone you want to and invite them to sign up.

You can build your own JavaScript gadgets and join in with the development of Shared Spaces. The big question is why would you want to and why is Google still playing with Wave technology? The simple answer is that the Wave gadgets are quite attractive and who knows - this time the whole thing could work.

Or of course it could just be the death throes of a technology that isn't really needed by very many people.

More Information

Google Shared Spaces

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