With two months to go before Google opens up Wave access to a larger audience, there is a lot of work still to be done, going by a demonstration last Tuesday at the search company's headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Half an hour into the demo of the technology, which Google hopes will reinvent internet communications, software engineering manager Lars Rasmussen acknowledged that he had uncovered another bug.
Rasmussen had patiently worked around other minor bugs during the demo, but when images dragged into a wave would not load properly he asked his brother Jens, seated at the conference-room table, to get an engineer working on the issue right away.
Google Wave was unveiled in May at the Google I/O Developer conference, and it dazzled attendees with its goal: to combine real-time communication with social networking and search capabilities built into a familiar interface.
Wave is more than just an inbox on steroids, however. It is also a communications platform that developers can use to build their own applications — something many coders were excited about in the early hours of Wave's life on the public stage.
Behind the scenes, the reality is sobering for the Rasmussens and the 6,000 or so people actively using Wave. The priority for the Rasmussen brothers — who are managing the Google Wave project — is making sure Wave is stable enough to accommodate the 100,000 new users who will start using Wave after 30 September, when Google opens up the limited preview to a wider audience.
At the moment, around 25 percent of all Wave sessions end in a crash, Lars said. That is obviously not acceptable and, somewhat ironically, the highest priority bug on Google Wave at the moment involves search.
"I would imagine in six months this will be fast, slick, stable and usable," Lars said. "Right now, you have to be a super-early adopter [to use Wave]. By 30 September, an early adopter."
Wave has been in the works for about two-and-a-half years. The original prototype — constructed in nine months, to pitch the concept to chief executive Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page — was discarded in favour of a system that provided better scale, Lars said.
Much of that time has been spent simply designing the workflow of Wave: how to add people to a wave, reply to a wave, add pictures and create rules. Wave shares some basic infrastructure with Gmail, but is essentially a completely separate undertaking and has been a bit of an "organisational experiment" for Google, in terms of giving an important project a great deal of autonomy, Lars said.
So why go public now, with so much yet to be accomplished, and with some critics describing the project as 'vapourware'?
The brothers Rasmussen chose the opposite launch strategy for the product that kicked off their careers at the search giant: Google Maps was not unveiled until it was complete.
The difference with Wave is that Google believes developer feedback is crucial to its evolution as a product. "We wanted to get people thinking about how we're going to use it and what people are going to use it for," Lars said.
For now, however, Wave is carefully labelled a 'developer preview', a status that does not even rise to the level of one of Google's ubiquitous beta projects. Google still has no formal process for determining which projects are previews, as opposed to betas, as opposed to full-blown products. The goal for Wave is to reduce the number of crashes to less than one percent of all session starts, at which point the 'beta' tag can be more confidently applied.
When introducing Wave in May, Google said it hoped to open the service up to the general public some time in 2009. However, launching a product that has been hyped as much as Wave with anything even close to the number of bugs currently present seems an unlikely step for Google.
