Slashdot Mirror
Google Kills Wave Development
We've mentioned several times over the past two years Wave, Google's ambitiously multi-channel, perhaps plain overwhelming entry in the social media wars. Now, reader mordejai writes "Google stated in its official blog that they will not continue developing Wave as a standalone product. It's sad, because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses."
I wonder...
First wave (oh no, they killed it)
...and nothing of value was lost.
...'tis easier to blame than to improve.
My new Google Wave client! http://micro-wave.appspot.com
It kind of goes to show how full of shit most tech blogs are. Almost all of them were talking about how Wave was the future, absolutely, after watching one indie youtube video about it explained in cute crayon drawings.
To Wave Goodbye.
Get it?
The problem probably with wave is that there was no community behind it. Widget could be developed with some pain. But the entire frontend stack was not available to experiment with. It is also sad that the development of the eJabberd guys (Process One) never was launched as Wave server alternative. Personally I found the demo's more impressive than my own experiences with it. But the experiences I did have, were good.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
And performance was a bit sketchy too. But most of all, it didn't have a clear 30-seconds or less explanation on what exactly it should be used to, and be better at it than email/IM.
So, wow factor was there, but users got bored, and went back to the regular bulletin boards. Where it's not that important to see that someone is typing right now, everything is more or less static and easy to understand.
I suppose online support could use it to communicate with customers, but then it'd need some heavy tweaking...
Hyperom.com
...amateur tech journalist types assume it was a big deal.
The developers and the company are obviously going to be fine. No need to shed tears.
Clearly I am in the minority but it was really useful and good for collaboration, imo. Then again I enjoyed Google Notebook too. It will be a shame to see it go.
Wave was somewhere between IM, email, forums, and The Wall. It never made much sense to me - it was kinda like asking me to cook dinner Swiss Army Knife - yeah, I can open wine, cut the meat, saw open the bread, and, well, do something with a screwdriver, but the specialized tools are much better suited for each task.
Maybe some folks did find value in it, but it seemed that the easiest thing to do on Wave was to talk about ways that Wave was theoretically good for doing stuff. And then I'd end up going and doing that stuff with the tools I'd been using to do that stuff up until now with, anyway. Either way, a product with as significant an identity crisis as Wave had from the get go isn't meant for greatness.
Although Google has said they plan to Open Source the Wave software, there has only been a partial release so far. Can we have the whole thing, please? Of course Open Source is a good way to make sure that some good comes of a discontinued product.
Bruce Perens.
If the wave concept was designed to integrate into gmail then I think it may have gone somewhere. Why would I want to go to a separate interface to communicate with a few select people who are using wave when most of my contacts are in gmail? If this gap was bridged I think it would be a lot more accessible for people.
Ever tried it out? On some real world project? Just to see the 'lot of potential' kill your bleeding edge laptop performance brutally, crash your firefox or whatever else, plainly annoy and slow down the entire project? Unstoppably flood your mailbox with junk reports? Let you scratch your head for hours wondering how to do even plain simple operations like changing one setting?
I'm glad they opened their eyes on that, at Google. It was just not the time, yet. Goodbye Wave, foor good.
We used it to run games but it got so overwhelmed we'd have to create new Waves every 50 or so posts. So I'd have a In Character 1, In Character 2, Table Talk 1, GM to Player 1, GM to Player 2, etc... At one point we had 30 or so different Waves.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I really enjoyed watching Chrome swell up to 3GB resident memory, and then detonate, while wading through all that dynamic "content." The core files were... remarkable.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Once you got usde to it, it as awesome; however it's hard to explain to people why and get them through the learning curve. I suspect there will be something like this used as corporate communication in the future. Man, so freaking awesome.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, it was a cool concept. I can see different parts of the framework they've created being useful for specific implementations.
Maybe they'll just open source wave entirely. That would be neat...
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Even if Wave was a bad idea, perhaps Google should have continued to support it.
Why throw resources into a bottomless pit? Because time and time again it's not the best technology that wins, it's the one that everyone thinks everyone else is using. (Examples (debatable of course): qwerty keyboards, VHS, SQL, windows, C++, XML, javascript)
In the future, Google will unveil other major initiatives and will try to reach critical mass with them. Now that people know Google is willing to abandon a large project so easily, they will be less likely to commit to future Google projects.
I'll predict that we'll instead see most of Wave's functionality/technology incorporated into gmail, either as a separate panel like Buzz or integrated pop-ups like Google Talk is. It really didn't make sense to have it be a dedicated site, since it made it harder to integrate with one's other activities. I imagine that within a few months Gmail will probably introduce functionality to convert an existing email and/or chat thread into a wave.
Google never promoted it well
It never took off because it was slow, buggy, and unintuitive. I got better frames per second on Team Fortress 2. Entire sites were made dedicated to how Google Wave made us feel like old people using computers. Initially, Wave didn't even work on Google's own Chrome browser.
Google Wave got plenty of coverage. It didn't take off because it was bad.
On a related note, has anyone tried those collaborative diagramming tools that already exist? I expected (and would've been happy with) a multiplayer version of MS Visio over a real-time forum.
I guess i'll give a shot and try to get people to use my soon-to-be-totally-dead web based wave client.
Email and electronic billing largely replaced sending letters because they are the same things, except faster and cheaper.
SMS replaced telegrams because it is the same thing except faster and cheaper and more private.
HTML emails, MMS:es and various forms of online photo services are replacing postcards because they do the same thing as postcards, except faster and cheaper.
Google Wave cannot replace any of these things because it doesn't really do these things. Google Wave, if it had been developed further, might possibly have become something useful, but it is not a replacement for some old technology.
Google bought Etherpad and Jotspotlive, two very advanced implementations of real time collaborative editing (albeit without some of the extra features of wave). Can we please have them back Google? I was about to buy a decently priced server version of etherpad just before the buyout, and I thought, OK maybe with Google's open framework they can do it better and give us a nice server/client package. I have lost trust in Google, I think the Wave was too innovative for them, it allowed data to stay on separate servers, perhaps Google wanted more control over our data than that model allowed. If Google has any decency about this, they should at least opensource the full web client implementation so that we can continue development. There are many enlightened sysadmins that saw the potential of Wave but could not use it because it was non functional without a locally installed client for intranets. So Google has killed two good projects to bring us..... almost nothing Oh well... back to Moonedit for now, prove me wrong Google...
This was a few months ago so perhaps things changed - 1) It was slow and buggy and crashed a lot. It didn't work on internet explorer. 2) You couldn't use it for your ordinary email. It tried to replace it rather then extend it. 3) It was horribly confusing. It tried to do too many things but it wasn't obvious how to do any of them! But the idea was great. Hopefully something will spring up from it's ashes.
This is completely Google's fault. Google Wave is a great product as it currently is, but Google completely failed to communicate to people why. But more to the point, Google itself failed miserably to leverage its own idea in the ways the first demo at Google I/O promised. Why can't I integrate gmail with Google Wave? Why after all this time does it still not work on my phone? Why doesn't it work with Google Docs? Why doesn't it work with Google Buzz?
More importantly, why would someone waste so much time, money, and manpower on a product they have no intention of supporting through interoperability with their own product line and through advertising and public exposure? What did they think would happen?
This is yet another huge screwup for Google indicative of their inability to build social networking products. Maybe it's time to sell my Google shares.
I really like the concept, so much in fact that I've started to write a simplified version of it for an in-game messaging service.
The problem was with the UI. The interface was crap, and beyond a certain number of postings, waves started to slow down so much it was unbearable.
It needed more way to clean out old crap and make a wave readable and useable even after having been used for a while. Hopefully, someone else will take the concept and the protocol and make it work.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Thanks Google for aquiring and killing!
I entirely agree with your sentiment. We've watched over the years Microsoft turn into what they hate (IBM), and now we get to watch Google turn into what they hate (Microsoft). That said, if you want Etherpad on your own server, Etherpad's full open source code is available.
No one gives a shit about they are gone.
Wave had a lot of cool ideas.
The problem was that it was a steaming pile of junk.
Since it was a browser-bound experience which didn't even have good functionality except in Gecko and Webkit it really didn't have all that much going for it.
Inefficient interface, really steep system requirements and not enough actually useful stuff to counter the disadvantages.
Also, even without allt the problems it had, it was just another form of communication without any hook to actually use it daily.
Remember, even if a service is technically superior to what it is supposed to be replacing, that alone is definitely not enough, you need something else (if I knew what apart from symptoms I'd be rich beyond imagination).
Also, if a service is inferior in speed it means it's a pain to use, and, with the market slowly realizing that you need to accept that there are slow computers on it wave really didn't fit, not only should every form of communication work on a netbook, but these days it even needs to work on a bloody cell phone.
So, yeah, bloatware with few real places where it could be used to good effect doesn't gain critical mass?
No big surprise.
... of something like google wave given the ineptitude of the masses is idiotic, something that would replace email/IM is going to take time to build (like on the order of decades). Why are companies trying to get an "instant win"? This lack of effort is disturbing. If it's not adopted immediately an din large numbers it's suddenly niche and a flop?
"We've watched over the years Microsoft turn into what they hate (IBM), and now we get to watch Google turn into what they hate (Microsoft)."
No wonder Slashdot has been left in the dust by the other major social media sites with the same stupid karma whores jerking each other off day after day.
Is Google Buzz next to go ?
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Would this be the same Etherpad whose wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad) reports that Google open-sourced the software (http://github.com/ether/pad) at the end of 2009?
Maybe the same Etherpad whose site lists a dozen or so public servers (http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html) which you can use to get access to the software?
Yeah, I can see why you'd be pissed that Google just killed the project and never open-sourced it. Now you can't save your company a bundle of money by installing the open-source version on your servers for free, and your only recourse is to bitch and moan about how awful Google is here on Slashdot. I seriously feel your pain, man. After going through so much effort to see if the software was still available, I can only imagine the crushing disappointment you feel now that you realize the software is gone forever, and you'll never be able to work with Etherpad ever again.
(And FFS, mods, the parent is not insightful, interesting, or even remotely relevant. It's simply bitching by a lazy person who can't be arsed to do a simple web search.)
Fucking stupid, fucking useless and nobody will use it. Said just after I tried my first wave out.
Why was I right?
Because it was a terrible bit of software, in both concept (nobody wants collaboration at that level - if they did every content creation desktop app would do it), and in implementation.
Just awful.
Totally agree. We used Etherpad a lot, until we were forced into Wave. Wave was good, but Etherpad had two features we really wanted/liked that Wave lacked: line numbers, and different-text-color-per-user so you could see who typed what.
If they really did believe their "first, do no evil" mantra (which they've been ignoring of late), they would spen Etherpad back off, let it resume operations, so that the need that it filled can be, well, filled again.
Not sure what we're going to do for collaborative editing/planning now.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Except Sharepoint actually makes money. And not just a few bucks, but $1B in yearly revenue (I know, it's not profit, but it's profitable).
http://www.ameinfo.com/152875.html
And that's not counting the sales of SQL and Windows Server CALs that you will need to run it properly. If you study this market carefully (I did) you will see that Sharepoint is the only semi-decent product, and, e.g. Alfresco (which positions itself as the strongest competitor to Sharepoint) is a half-baked, broken piece of crap, with or without the yearly support contract.
Wanna know how I knew Wave wasn't the future? It's because no one -- I mean fucking no one -- could describe it. After all this time, I still don't know what Wave is/was.
It probably sounds like I'm proud of my ignorance, or that I'm implying that I'm oh-so-clever and above it all. No, no, no, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that if Wave had substance, someone, I mean anyone with even a moderate-to-bad gift for words, would have been able to fucking explain what Wave is!! If the only answer you can ever get is, "You've just got to try it," then there's just nothing there.
Nothing else in life is like that. The web wasn't like that. Google wasn't like that. Beer isn't like that, sex isn't like that, ann rock'n'roll isn't like that. Sometimes "you've just got to try it" may very well be the best answer, but it's never the only answer, unless the subject is just totally underwhelming and empty.
If you read TFA, is says things like "we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives" and "we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science."
Earth to Google: a computer scientific achievement does not a user experience make.
Really. It's not that hard. Just becase you can putting together bunch of crazy-ass techno doesn't means people will flock to your door any more than I should be president of the United States if I can solve a Rubuik's cube in under 10 seconds.
Pizza-munching geeks. It's crap like Wave that reassures me in my job as a user experience designer.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
I'm not sure Microsoft hated IBM. Some people who used Microsoft products might have hated IBM and projected that emotion onto Microsoft, but I think Microsoft actually wanted to be IBM. Certainly they didn't hesitate to use all of IBMs tactics and enhance them to be even worse.
Qxe4
The thing that really bothers me about Jotspot is Google using it as the Google Sites online editing tool. For this purpose it is crappy and Google is not putting enough work in to make it better for the purpose. There are just too many problems from trying to squeeze it into the wrong box.
Why have a huge announcement and generate the buzz and then not let anyone use it? I signed up the first day after they announced it because I thought it might make a cool tool for my dev team, which tends to be remote most of the time. I didn't hear anything back for a while and then just kind of forgot about it. Part of their user adoption problem might just be the fact they didn't let anyone try it.
Weren't those acquisitions largely for the purposes of (and the technology applied for) improving the realtime collaboration features in Google Documents and Spreadsheets?
The Google Wave protocol is hardly the only server-to-server protocol created by Google and leveraged in Google products that allows data to stay on servers outside of Google, so I doubt very much that that is the problem.
I think the problem is that an insufficient number of people were using the Wave product to continue to actively maintain it as such, not that the product offered people too much freedom to use non-Google servers.
They should have at least give integration with gmail and google chat a try be shutting it down. I kept waiting and waiting to use Google Wave with e-mail but that never happened.
Google writes in the blog post that Wave has "pushed the boundaries of computer science." And how exactly?!
*waves*
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
What a load of BS. Have you even used the latest version of Google Documents and looked at the real-time collaboration? Basically everything that was available in Etherpad is available there.
See it in action. Go to 0:45.
...goodbye.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We had a local talk by folks who attended Google I/O this year. Several of us wondered where the heck Google is headed .. there seems to be little coherence in their offerings. Things don't seem to fit together. Wave was the first one discussed, it just didn't make sense. Apparently the attendees agreed, they grilled Google staff about this and got the answer that all google projects are small independent groups with little required synergy with the rest of the company.
This certainly lead me away from GAE, for example. I just don't trust them beyond gmail, search, calendar, maps and a few others. Not apps. Not GAE. Not Go.
Not to say google's "ecology" is lousy, but I certainly wouldn't risk a customer's project on it.
She said, "Goo goo. Wave bye-bye."
Anybody want a peanut?
When it become available, I created an account, looked at it for 2 minutes, and after not seeing any clear message "what to do next",
I simply logged out. Perhaps google failed to explain somewhere in simple terms what is it and how to use it?
I'm among those who thought Google Wave was the greatest thing ever. However:
-It only worked in HTML5 browsers (and for a while it was iffy even in Firefox, and of course it required a plugin in IE)
-Its a communication program without a native desktop client. Gmail has POP3, IMAP, etc, as well as the Chrome-as-an-app installer to make them look like native-ish apps. Wave had nothing.
-It was in BETA! You can only keep things in beta for 5 years so many times before people start stepping back.
Google hired Microsoft's project managers or something?
Wave only became generally available three months ago. And the APIs only reached a usable a few months back, too. So, most users and developers didn't seriously consider using Wave for anything until three months ago. In those three months, I have seen a lot of uptake in my company and among my friends. In that short time, Google Wave has been a really useful tool, and it's shown a lot of potential. And that's only the beginning, as several people I know have started developing new and interesting robots and gadgets for it.
I think Google is seriously hurting themselves with this decision; even if Wave wasn't going to catch on in the long run, if they discontinue a service that has received so much buzz after so little time, they are going to have an even harder time attracting developers and users next time they try to create some new and innovative service.
In response to embrace, extend, extinguish, Google acquire, alter, and abort.
...they kill it when i start to get it..
You can't invent a technology to replace email/IM and not offer integration to those "legacy" technologies. There has to be a transition period and Google failed to provide the necessary means for people to transition smoothly. Add to that the slowness, instability, unintuitiveness, lack of development community, and the privacy issues, and it's only surprising Google didn't can it earlier.
Google may allow you to convert an existing E-mail and/or chat into something that looks like a Wave, but it won't be a Wave. Google Wave wasn't just about the threaded chat, it was a server and communications infrastructure that let people build robots and gadgets. Even if Google tries to recreate equivalent functionality, gadgets and bots will basically start from scratch. Furthermore, do you really think that people or businesses who invested a lot of time and effort into figuring out how to do that for Google Wave are going to do that again for an entirely new Google platform?
Integrating Google Wave and GMail was an obvious and necessary step, but Google should have done it by keeping the Wave server and application infrastructure and merging the services at the UI level. Dropping the Wave server and implementing something new that looks like Google Wave within GMail, while useful, is simply nowhere near the same.
And despite wanting to jump on the bandwagon, I just found myself going, "meh. I don't see the point."
*shrug*
Google Wave was on track: an odd-ball separate product with a small user community that had the potential to take off in the future. The next logical steps would have been integration with GMail and Google Talk and Google Docs, cleaning up and speeding up the UI, creating a mobile client, extensiblity in App Script etc. In a few years, Google could have had a kick-ass mainstream platform or it could have fizzled. It would still have been a good try.
However, nothing like Wave will ever catch on three months after its first open, public release. It's just not going to happen. And by killing it so quickly, Google has not just killed a nice platform with good potential, they've also seriously damaged trust developers have in them.
So... Google killed Etherpad.......... for this?
SAP's Streamwork is a much better collaboration tool. Google has had some great innovations, but wave never progressed at the same rate as many of their other offerings.
I'm really gutted to hear this, as I think Wave has a huge amount of potential.
It was released as a combined email, IM and document collaboration platform, but with the potential for so much more. If you look at what extensions like Unawave, ConceptDraw and Fighty+ allowed you to do, developers only really touched the tip of the iceberg.
I'd really like to see a good, solid version of the federated protocol server available for use so that those who care to can continue to use this product.
I saw a lot of potential in the product.
Unfortunately, every single person I know who tried to actually use it found it confusing, not intuitive, and the vast majority of the more powerful features were never discovered.
Wave could do so many things, but seemed to rarely do them better than dedicated solutions, so that no person could point to it and say "I am definitely going to use Wave to replace my use of X". For instance, a Wave could be an entire project collaboration space, or a way to play a chess game with a friend online, or just email. But was any one of those three uses easier or more intuitive than existing dedicated products?
I could go on about the UI also... so much potential though. It really was a neat attempt at consolidating many of the tools we use today.
Since it was not an open platform they killed it when it took 3 months for my first friend to start using it to this day I only have 2 friends listed when I sign on. I wanted to use it at my office but since it's not on google apps it wasn't useful.
1. Go to docs.google.com ...
2. Create new document
3. Share
4. Collaboratively, and with more formatting options than etherpad, draft a plan of world domination
5. Profit!
PS: While you are at it, share a drawing of the plan, a presentation of the plan and calculate the expenses of the plan on a spreadsheet, all in real-time collaboration. Or you can just "buy a decently priced", pardon me, get a decently FREE "server version of etherpad" that google open sourced and start a new draft on sarcasm ;)
Getting canceled - imagine that.
Seriously though, I really hope that Wave will prove to have been ahead of its time. Technical challanges aside, in terms of raw data, e-mail, IM, IRC, forums, comment sections, etc. are all essentially the same beast and it would have been great to finally have one protocol that covers all those bits of text we share on the Web every day. If anything, the folks at Google failed to believe in their own vision, by neither intergrating Wave into their numerous services at all, nor allowing it to mature until broad integration would have been feasible.
That was totally subtle. I had to do a double-take.
Good work
Another notch in Google's failure belt. What is it about Google that makes them come out with innovative, cool-ass things that could be awesome if they just spent more time developing and fine-tuning? Instead they're like some 10 year old kid on a sugar rush and as soon as they're bored with one shiny toy they just drop it and move on to the next thing. How does a company like that become as big as Google is now? It's like a company full of goddamn slackers.
Actually, you you might be the uninformed arse here. Last time I tried (and *I* actually tried, not just googled it and then ran my mouth on /.) to install Etherpad it was not a straightforward install, the source was full of hard-coded crap, it lacked many of the features the website had, the docs were bad, and when it finally got up and running it was flakey.
Yes some people have had success, but Google put almost no effort or man power into it, and it was in many ways a better tool than wave.
I was disappointed with Wave. About a year ago I spent a week trying to understand their source code because I wanted to use their data structures as a database and eventually build it into ObjectCloud. Their code was about 20,000 lines that essentially ran a text-based chat with no way to persist the data. I asked twice on their mailing list which interfaces I should plug into to persist the data, but I got no responses.
Basically, they tried to solve too many problems at once. If they just open-sourced a nice way to have concurrent data structures, it might have taken off; but the system for concurrent data structures was too difficult to understand or work with.
Google promoted Wave well, I remember sitting behind some Wave developers at Google shortly before they were going to show it off and they kept saying things like, "when everyone's using Wave..." Well, it takes a long time to build that kind of critical mass!
No, I will not work for your startup
I loved them both and thought they had great potential. The only analysis I can personally offer from my experience as to why I think they failed is that it is the difference between the telephone and walkie-talkies. Both Groove and Wave assume a full near-real time connection. If you look at email, twitter, sms, facebook, etc. they are all asynchronous portals. People think they want real time communications but in reality, the control of passing on answering a call or thinking about a idea for a minute before typing or speaking is a fundamental. These systems just don't quite accommodate that human need.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I guess the guys at Google couldn't figure out what it was for either.
If they released the source, in what way did they kill the thing?
Wrong. It failed for a couple other reasons. Wave has a disgustingly obfuscated interface. It's truly horrible. It makes it difficult to get to the core functionality. Adding all sorts of nice features is fine, as long as they are added AROUND the core purpose of the service. Wave was an example of the core being buried in ugly interface implementation.
Wave also doesn't support syntax highlighting. Personally, I didn't find that to be enough to keep me from using Wave. The interface being so horribly obfuscated with "features" and yet lacking such a helpful feature like syntax highlighting was a huge mistake.
Etherpad was wonderful. Piratepad is very nice. Wave is a bloody mess.
There were also performance issues once waves got large.
Had a look at it, played with it a bit, but really couldn't see the point. Don't think i've even logged into my wave account in about 6-9 months.
I'm sure maybe SOME people found a use for it, but by and large, most people struggled to find a purpose for it, other than sharing porn, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
My only encounter with Wave was people SPAMming me with wave requests. It'll pretty much be permanently associated with SPAM in my mind.
I feel Wave's potential is ENORMOUS and these suggestions would begin to tap said potential. 1) Be able to handle both email and Waves - if I could get on Wave and check my Gmail stuff, why would I ever use Gmail? 2) Have Video chat enabled natively. Wave itself is inspired by the "Waves" from the Firefly series, so you'd think would be a no-brainer. 3) Clean up the way you can edit posts in a Wave. The "real-time see them typing" thing is unwieldy. A real-time box should pop up that has a colored message "New post coming.." à la the "so-and-so is typing" thing in IM's.
That's the trouble with relying on unprofitable services from a profit-making company. Google pulls the plug on many such projects. They've dumped the SOAP-based search interface, Google Gears, and now Wave.
All Google services other than search advertising lose money. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someday they announce that GMail is becoming a paid service.
I'm uninformed because you couldn't get the open source project running?
1) There are public servers with etherpad already running on it.
2) The source code is available for free, online, as an open-source project.
3) If you do not have the skill to download and run it yourself, take the money you would have paid Etherpad or Google to purchase a copy, and hire someone to set it up for you.
The person I responded to was proclaiming his dissatisfaction that Etherpad was dead - it is most clearly NOT dead, and has been open-sourced, which he explicitly stated it never was. None of what he stated was accurate, and yet I'm the uninformed arse for pointing out the inaccuracies and providing links to the stuff he claims doesn't exist?
I expected a thank you from him, frankly.
A friend and I tried using it, mostly as a joke, and one of the first things I discovered was that there was no obvious way to make a table. I know the web is based around format-independent data, but I wish more sites would provide a simple way to do aligned columns. It makes so many things so much easier to read.
Visit the
you can get etherpad right now ( and withouth paying) because it was open sourced before the site was close
could get it here http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/
with this, i have an etherpad only for the people who knows my IP and i want them to use etherpad, it's like my private cloud
sorry for my english
Wave is what the internet was headed for all along. Chat, email, cloud collaboration all in one package.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
To be fair, there were some decent widgets created early on such as the RickRolley bot.
One of the most useful bots was Talk Like a Pirate which was very helpful in converting waves into an understandable language.
It's true that I didn't use my Wave account much, but not because I didn't want to...more because nobody else I wanted to talk to had it, or was willing to use it.
Not being developed isn't the same as deleted, at least. It's still functional for the time being.
To much anime is bad for the brain...desu.
Sorry. Couldn't help it.
Ok, WE did. But the people I tried to get using it for meetings and the like just didn't want to know. They're happy with their voice conferences plus one person presenting a powerpoint over a screen sharing app.
It was launched too soon. The hype now is facebook and twitter, even if something 1000 times better come out, they didn't even care because they're too busy with those ones. just MHO... maybe in 2 or 5 years, everybody will want something like wave :| I do... now.
Hey now that google considers it useless, maybe they should open source it...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Google has publicly stated. "That the future is mobile platforms."
How does Wave fit into this future of mobile platforms? It doesn't. It's gone.
Buzz is arguably a bigger dud. But it is still hanging on. ( How much longer is debatable. ) Why? Buzz can work on a mobile platform.
Just a theory.
First it was invite-only for an age and when it finally did open up to the public the first thing I did was try to search for topics, groups and people to join in with. Which was impossible. The only thing you could do, after much searching was type "with:public" into the top box, which just gave you a list of all the public discussions about every topic on the planet ever with no obvious way to filter it.
If I couldnt figure it out, and I'm a physics graduate who works on the internet, then sure as shit could nobody else
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
It was not a KISS! It really is that simple.
What did Wave teach us?
With all the Hype they announced it with and the - at least technical - potential to be the next big thing in collaboration and communication...
I really thought they had long term plans with it.
AM I missing something here ?
I mean... 2 years for a paradigm shift ? Seems a bit optimistic for me.
I wished they had given wave more time to evolve and develop.
Reminds me of an innovation forum some time ago where I gave a short presentation of wave to some customers.
One of them kept saying about every wave feature: "but I can do this with tool y and that with tool x" and so on.
Finally he realized that he was going with 4 tools that he had to integrate - where wave could have solved the same problems on its own.
Anyway - I have to go... have some data migration on my schedule today ... ;-)
To me, the main thing that made Wave... well, useless.... is that I didn't have anything near a useful mass of fellow users to Wave with, and I wasn't going to open up an additional, slow website just to talk to my brother. Most of the collaborative stuff would have been more useful to me at work... but no way was my company (or any company with a reasonable concern about confidentiality) going to turn over our internal communications to Google. Maybe if there were a way to self-host Wave it would have flown.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Wave more than justified its existence, and dropping it is not a net loss: GWT is a gazillion times faster and more featureful today because Wave caused it to crack at the seams, repeatedly, in every way imaginable. See the Google I/O talks from 2009 for more info. Also I suspect that killing off wave had something to do with acquiring the Etherpad team. Etherpad is Wave done right. (Except for the hand-crafted Javascript part...)
We have been using google wave in a collaboration between about 20 scientists across the world working on a large genetics project. We have found it very useful to organise and share data. Its made our lives easier and there is nothing like it that we can use instead. Maybe google doesn't realise how useful wave is to some people. Maybe we are a niche or maybe we are early adopters.
I never figured out what to use you for anyway.
Does it matter that "server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated" when there is only one server?
Google Wave was never opened for federation. It was not used as a tool to communicate. Only as a demo for a tool for collaboration between people working on the same system.
People connected to the same computer where able to communicate using the computer. Then in 1971 Ray Tomlinson extended it a bit to allow people with accounts on different hosts to communicate. Email was invented and the rest is history. Wave has never reached this stage. It was a closed garden used only by people using Google Wave accounts. There was no one else running a Wave server and there was no point in doing so when there's no other server open for federation (other than the "sandbox" servers that did not serve any real "users", a.k.a. "people"). Email in 1971 was not close to what it is today. but it was working and allowed people to use it to communicate. "Gadgets" (RFC822, MIME) came years later. In Wave it seems they tried to do it the other way round. Did they expect it to work?
I'm a casual Wave user, don't do any business on it but played with it by having discussions and sharing things with friends. It was alright. But now that Google is dropping support, I suddenly feel like it's the coolest thing ever! Who's with me?
Doesnt this failure tell us that "cloud apps" are completely fucking bullshit? Say what you want, the real problem was that the wave client was a webpage in a browser. No browser has ever had good memory management for online content--disk cache? wtf is that. If they wanted Wave to succeed they should have written it in C and provided a proper way to interface with it through vim/emacs. Also, aside from the aforementioned niches, trying to read a wave was about as fun as puking out your eyeballs except that it didnt produce that post puking relief high.
You missed it
...already available as open source, for homosexuals...
So yeah, a troll. Not even a funny one.