Last week, just in time for the holidays, we released a Google Labs project called Google Shared Spaces. "We" is actually just a few people working in our 20% time: Douwe Osinga - former Wave API tech lead, Jon Tirsen - former Wave contacts tech lead, Vadim Gerasimov - former Gadgets API engineer, and myself - former Wave API developer advocate. As you can see, we all came from the Wave team, where we saw firsthand the ways that users used Wave and the ways that developers used the Wave APIs. Wave was a lot of things to many people, and there are a lot of directions that you could take the ideas in it. After Wave was cancelled by Google, a small team has been working on open-sourcing it for the past 5 months, so developers can start building off the Wave technology stack, as a whole or as bits & pieces, to take it in the direction of their vision.
The four of us were personally interested in seeing what we could make with just the gadgets part of the stack. The Wave Gadgets API is a simple but powerful API -- it combines the open-source gadgets API with a basic JavaScript API for modifying a shared state (hash map) & retrieving participants information. With just a shared hash map, developers were able to make an astonishing array of gadgets - multi-player games, collaborative diagramming apps, date-picking utilities, even a Flash-like animation tool. In fact, developers made gadgets that were basically full-featured webapps, and they would take up the entirety of the Wave interface when you were using them. Developers weren't using Wave for its conversational abilities at that point -- they were just using it for the collaborative space that it enabled. Some of the developers even added a chat feature to their gadget, as users didn't want to have to scroll down past the gadget to converse with the other participants.
The Diagram Editor gadget:
When we saw this happening while Wave was still an ongoing project, we thought of various ways we could improve the Wave UI for these app experiences: full-screen modes, split scrollbars, chat mode. But with Wave cancelled, we thought about how we could start from scratch to create an experience that centered around these collaborative gadgets. At the same time, we wanted to experiment with other aspects of the Wave experience, like the sharing & permissions model. And thus, Shared Spaces was born.
Shared Spaces is entirely centered on the gadgets. The landing page is a list of featured gadgets, and each of them offers a button to "Create a space". Once you click that, you're prompted to login with either your Google, Yahoo!, or Twitter account. (We didn't see any reason to limit authentication to just Google, particularly since people might want to use Shared Spaces to collaborative with communities outside their Google sphere). You're then taken to a "space" with a list of participants (just you, to start), the selected gadget, a chat area, and a bunch of share buttons. Once you share the URL with other folks, whether via email, IM, or microblogging, you'll see the other participants show up in the list, and all of you can collaborate on the gadget together - whether that's a game of Sudoku, an RSVP gadget, or a drawing board. Much of the experience is similar to the Etherpad experience, where you can create a collaborative pad with one click, chat on the side, and share that pad by URL; I sometimes think of it as "Etherpad for gadgets."
The Yes/No/Maybe gadget:
We've launched Shared Spaces with what we deemed the minimal features necessary because this is very much an experiment; we want to see how users use this, what they want out of it, and what direction it may go in. Perhaps it will become a full product, or perhaps it will be integrated into existing Google products. And hey, maybe it will inspire non-Google companies to use similar technology in their products. The web is increasingly about collaboration, and I think it is always a good thing to experiment in how all of us can make collaboration easier. :)
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