SAN FRANCISCO - Google executives offered a mea culpa of sorts for Google Wave on Wednesday, noting that the company did a poor job of explaining Wave's purpose. Going forward, the evolution of Wave will probably look a lot like Gmail, they said.

Google a year ago at the Google I/O show here, promising it that would revolutionize real-time communication. At the time, Wave was presented as a preview, although Google did let its Gmail e-mail product languish as a beta for several years.

At Google I/O 2010, Google released Wave to the Web at large, after restricting it to developers for the past six months, and then to a limited number of beta testers thereafter. Google also made Wave part of Google Apps and made other improvements, such as allowing robots that originally lived only on Wave to live elsewhere on the Web, and open-sourcing the beginnings of a client-server protocol.

"When we put it out there, we did so in sort of a raw form ... what are the set of use cases, how can we make them more useful and more productive, can do it all in Wave," Lars Rasmussen, the head of Google Wave, said in a press conference here Wednesday. "No longer do we need to have the discussion here and have instant messages over here. Can we do it all in one tool?"

The lesson that Google learned was that it needed to do a much better job of explaining Wave, Rasmussen said. A year ago, Google offered an hour-long demo preview of what the technology could do, "but we failed to answer the question of what can I actually use Wave for, right now, right here," he said.

The initial experience of Wave was "a little daunting," Rasmussen said.

"How do you get your mind around that we're combining communication and collaboration in one spot?" Rasmussen asked. But he said that there's been a "big difference" in the feedback received from Wave six months ago to present day.

The problem was that users didn't get it. To solve that, Google added to the number of tutorials and other aids to ease users into Wave. Google is also beginning to realize that the consumers don't want to add an extra tab to their browser. As a result, Google Wave may end up as a part of Gmail, Rasmussen said.

"I think what we'll work with in a very short time is integration betwen Gmail and Wave ... over time, and I'm not promising anything, the two ends will end up more like one," Rasmussen said.

Some wins for Wave, however, include the "live typing" feature, where users can see what the other is typing as they're inputting the text. Rasmussen said that the live feature helped people engaged in a dialogue to anticipate what the other user was going to say, which increased the speed of the conversation. People also saw others in a Wave as individuals, rather than anonymous e-mail addresses, he said.

So what is Wave good for? Working as a group, Rasmussen said. "We found the sweet spot is all about groups collaborating on things," he said.

The Seattle Times embedded a Wave as part of its breaking news coverage, and Deloitte & Touche have also used them. Executives from Salesforce.com and SAP were also on hand to talk about how their companies had integrated waves for collaborative purposes.