Update 2: Google has now officially announced Shared Spaces, saying: 

A bunch of us who had been working on the Wave APIs were brainstorming about what it would take to just run a Wave gadget. Developers had been doing wonderful stuff –building real-time mini applications–and rather than let that effort go to waste, we wanted to create a new way for people to continue to use these tools and games. Google Shared Spaces is exactly that. A shared space turns a (Wave) gadget into a standalone collaborative application. Just click on the gadget you’re interested in to start a new shared space, and then simply send the URL around to share it with your friends and colleagues. You don’t need to sign up for a new service – if you have a Google, Twitter or Yahoo account, you’re good to go.

Each shared space comes with a chat area (which is just another Wave gadget) for extra interaction. So take Shared Spaces for a spin: Use the Waffle gadget to pick the date for a night out with your friends, annotate a shared map with your favorite places and vote on where to go usingany of the polling gadgets. Or if you’d rather stay in, hit the games section and challenge somebody for a good old game of chess. To learn more, check out the quick presentation on our about page.

Update: The site is now up and running. If you go there, you will see a list of gadgets, and you can sign in using your Google account, Twitter, or Yahoo account. Each one has a chat feature. 

Original Article: A new experiment has appeared in Google Labs. It’s called Google Shared Spaces. 

It’s hard to provide too much info about it at this point, because when you try to access it (after signing in with your Google account, which it requests) it only gives you a 404. Several people commenting on the site indicate that they are experiencing the same problem. 

Shared Spaces appears to take advantage of some of the technology behind Google Wave. Here’s the description Google provides:

Google Shared Spaces allows you to easily create a space with a collaborative gadget and a chat box in it. The gadgets are based on the Wave gadgets technology, so there are already more than 50 gadgets across different categories, like games, productivity, and event planning. Anybody can create a new space by going to the gallery and clicking on one of the featured gadgets. Spaces can easily be shared by just pasting the URL into a chat window, an email or a content sharing platform like Google Buzz or Twitter. And if you know a little Javascript, it is easy to get started building your own real-time, collaborative gadgets and create new spaces based on those.

At this point in time, that’s about all we have to go on, but more information will no doubt be revealed soon enough.

It sounds pretty social, so it could end up being tied to Google’s larger social media strategy, which may include a toolbar that appears across various Google services. 

Either way, it’s in Google Labs, so it may or may not ever become a full fledged service. Some of these go on to become popular Google products though.