About a year ago, I mentioned Google’s decision to stop active development on Google Wave, and the Apache Foundation’s subsequent move to take ownership. More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience. Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than...

On Galleycat, Jason Boog links to today’s edition (MP3) of his ten-minute podcast, the Morning Media Menu, in which he talks with the founder of a new social collaborative writing site called Neovella. Michael Siedlecki founded Neovella after noticing in college that his generation doing much of its reading on-line, and for the most part not actually reading books but instead reading social network stories about their friends. Siedlecki wanted to bring together the social aspects of social networking and collaborative aspects of writing together, so created Neovella in the hope of getting people writing stories together. The site...

Google Wave, one of Google’s more infamous red-headed stepchildren, has found a home in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program. Originally touted as a fantastic new way of revolutionizing the collaborative process, the cross between e-mail, instant messaging, and an outlining tool faltered after its initial start when only a minority of the people who tried it could actually figure out any useful purpose of it. Along the way, Wave imperiled a collaboration tool that I and a number of others found considerably more useful, as Google bought up the company that created the EtherPad collaborative web text editor...

Google appears to be abandoning development on Google Wave. The collaboration project many derided as a solution in search of a problem apparently never found the userbase Google had hoped for, perhaps because its user interface never managed to approach the user-friendliness of other Google projects such as Gmail or Google Reader. Writes Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, on the Google Blog: Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at...

This Friday, the collaborative web editor EtherPad finally shuts down. I first wrote about this editor in 2008. It was bought by Google last year (to add its developers to the Google Wave team) and temporarily taken offline, but after an outcry brought back pending the open release of its source code (which happened a couple of weeks later). Since then, a number of EtherPad clones have sprung up—some using the source code with no changes, others extending it to add new features. Some are free and noncommercial, while others cost money to use. CNet has a good...

Last week, the Society of Professonal Journalists released the first volume of its “Digital Media Handbook”—a collection of essays from its members on the uses of various Internet and digital tools including PDFs, videos, social networking, Google Wave, and so forth. While it probably could stand to be a little better-organized in some cases (why did the essay on using hashtags in Twitter come several sections before the “beginner’s guide to Twitter”?), it has a lot of information that could be useful to journalists only just getting their feet wet in the digital arena. Find it on Scribd...

[Note: This comment from “Adan” seemed to merit a reprint as a “Does Anybody Know” column. I’ve sent him a Google Wave invitation myself.] I was using Yahoo Groups (they bought and crippled Dutch “Clubs” software, while Google Groups is even poorer; all quite outdated) and a little Drupal and Mediawiki site setup for some information freedom activist news. Most issues could be done in Drupal and/or Mediawiki. But now there is Wave… Then my girlfriend and I both have some stories to write books about. She about (extreme) personal experiences and I about some political murder research....

I conducted an interview with Pablo Defendini, Producer and blogger for Tor.com, via Google Wave. Our conversation ranged from the Tor.com blog itself, to the free e-book giveaway that kicked off the site, to the much-anticipated but still-absent Tor.com e-book store. Defendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions). However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about...