Google Wave Being Developed Into a Fully Functional Application

Google Wave may not have lasted long as an official web app, but the search giant announced today that it intends to use the existing code to design a fully functional application that can be hosted by anyone who wants it. The service will lose its integration with Gmail, but will still give active Wave participants a place to use and modify new and existing Wave’s after the service shuts down at the end of the year.

In many ways Wave might stand a better chance of reaching its full potential as a community open source project than as a neglected Google product. At the very least it takes the sting away from those who used the service extensively before they 

found out it was being given the axe.

Chrome Turns 2, New Version Launches To Celebrate

Think about what has happened over the past two years. It's probably hard to even comprehend. Technology has evolved in a huge way since 2008, but few areas have evolved as much as the Web browser space. The competition has heated up in a big, big way. Microsoft has found themselves lagged behind the other guys in terms of features and flexibility, Firefox's popularity has grown, Safari has picked up Extensions support, and Google's Chrome has entered the fold.

This week marks the two year anniversary (or birthday, if you'd prefer) of Chrome, and even that browser has changed a lot (for the better) since 2008. In order to celebrate 2 years, Google is releasing a new stable version (Chrome 6) that's even faster and more streamlined than prior versions. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance, and the UI has been stripped down a bit more to make browsing even simpler.

Google has also promised that they won't be taking too long a break to celebrate. The next edition of Chrome is already underway, promising to be even faster when it's released in the future. Are you a Chrome convert? Would you consider trying it out now that it's had two years to mature?