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."

Comments

SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[cencithomas]

...and nothing of value was lost.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[HeckRuler]

That's because it's chat with a couple of features.
Now, the feature where you can chat in between previous lines of chat is nice and all, but what killed the wave is that starry-eyed marketers got a hold of it and sold it as the new revolution.

Like sharepoint. It's a web framework with some extra features. Or, it's a collection of prebuilt web pages with an SQL backend. But they don't sell it as that. They load it with 200% of Marketese and Weaselish and it can bring you a sandwich. (Just not out of the box).

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[bonch]

Google Wave just got Kinned!

Every drooling tech blog proclaimed Wave to be a historic achievement of mankind, reciting the history of email at the beginning of every article to drive home the point that Wave is as historic as the introduction of email itself. I questioned its viability back then and was modded down on Slashdot. Yet here we are witnessing its cancellation despite enormous levels of hype from Google-friendly outlets. With Wave's cancellation and the bundled crapware from carriers on Android phones, Google continues its metamorphosis into the Microsoft of the internet age.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[jimmydigital]

Wait. Do you claim Sharepoint is dead like Wave?

Sharepoint is undead... in that.. it's dead.. but no one realizes it and they keep deploying it. It's like.. the greatest tech the 90s has to offer!

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[DerekLyons]

Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt

Because most of your 'above' is either irrelevant or very selective comparing of features to existing systems.
 

Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern).

Other than being slow as hell, clunky as hell, counterintuitive as hell, having a crap UI, and not behaving in any way resembling the systems it was meant to replace - no, it didn't have any disadvantages.
 

But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good"

Well, the cool thing is is exactly the attitude Slashdot took - and when they got a chance to test it, they found that not only did it not live up to it's hype, it wasn't any good (at least not in the "dessert wax and a floor topping" sense Google kept insisting on). It simply didn't work beyond being a cool collaborative editing tool - and wiki's do that far better.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[nigham]

All server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated. All wave origins are verified using digital signatures, so, to quote from wikipedia,

Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.

Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue

DomainKeys does similar things for e-mail.

Waves can be embedded. Blog comment sections can be replaced by waves; forum threads by waves. All comments would appear in your inbox. Email cannot even hope to replicate this other than with the clunky-and-annoying "notify me when someone responds" forum setting.

First, I might not want all this integrated into my e-mail inbox. Second, Facebook (and probably OpenSocial, Google's other thing) does this - integrating forums, discussions, comments, likes into posts, which are arguably wave-like.

You can easily add people to the discussion. The only way to do so with email is to re-forward the whole chain of emails to them and ask them to reply-all; or to include them in the next reply-all and hope that noone else responds first. This is a pretty glaring flaw of email that Wave fixes.

I'll argue it's much easier to scan through an e-mail thread than do a playback on a wave. Real-time playback is cute but I don't have time for it. And reading the wave linearly doesn't help since people can modify things in between.

There are of course a ton of other reasons why Wave was more than just "chat with a couple of features", but these were big. Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments.

Google couldn't even integrate GMail with wave. One of the main reasons I gave up Wave was having to keep track of two Google inboxes.

Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern).

I don't think people dismissed it out of hand. When it first came out, people lined up for accounts. It just didn't offer anything much in addition to what we had.

Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt that was completely opened to the public (source for the servers was released!)? Is everyone really that in love with MS Exchange?

Maybe nothing of value was lost precisely because everything has been opened up anyway? Anyone who wants another shot at convincing people that this is a Good Thing(tm), can quite easily do so. I agree that there was phenomenal engineering involved and that may well be used in many scenarios.

Tech blogs are funny.

[Blice]

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.

Re:Tech blogs are funny.

[PolygamousRanchKid]

It kind of goes to show how full of shit most tech blogs are.

Tech reporting has always been full of shit. In the 70's, when I read "Popular Mechanics/Science," they always had something that was "just few years away." Mostly, the stuff never appeared. In the 80's, we were going to have a "paperless office," real soon. The pervasiveness of computers just enables more folks to print out stuff that they probably will never read anyway. Also in the late 80's Token Ring would eventually replace Ethernet, because it is technically superior. When that didn't occur, desktop ATM would enable multimedia applications for everyone. What about the hype about Grid Computing? Oh, that's Cloud Computing now.

The more hype there is about some new tech, the less chance that it will ever see the light of day.

Tech blogs just enable more folks to rave about something that they don't understand.

Not Open

[Skinkie]

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.

UI was weird

[saikou]

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...

What did it actually bring?

[mrbene]

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.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[geekoid]

Once my team and I 'bought in' to using it, it became a marvelous tool. Very helpful, very speedy.

But ahead of it's time. Like handing someone from 1980 a smart phone.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[farnsworth]

I always thought that their webapp was just a demo of how the protocol works and what it could do. I for one was looking forward to forums such as slashdot changing their backend to Wave. There are so many great communities that have terrible software that could benefit from a robust backend that has all the cool features that Wave has.

It's not clear if the backend aspect of Wave is dead or not, but it kinda seems that way. And that's too bad. I guess the protocol is technically OSS, but it seems unlikely that an installable instance of it will ever come to be.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[Unoti]

Perhaps you don't remember 1980 as well as you think. Seriously, you wouldn't have been impressed in 1980 if I were to tell you that pretty much everybody would have their own personal phone number, and be able to use it anywhere? That the same device would act as a personal music collection with enough cassette tapes and records stuffed in there to fill several refrigerators, with fantastic audio quality? And that you could touch a couple of buttons and get just about any music in the world in a few seconds? And that record stores as we know them, would essentially cease to exist as a result of this game changing technology?

And games. Seriously the lowliest game on a phone today pretty much blows Atari 2600 out of the water. Oh plus they're multi player now over the net.

In 1980, if I wanted to send an email, I used CompuServe for $5/hr to connect on a 300 baud modem, and my system wasn't advanced enough to compose it online. And I was pretty advanced-- nearly nobody else around at the time had even heard of email.

Also you used to have to read a manual to be able to use pretty much any piece of software. The whole idea of an intuitive GUI that you could figure out how to use by just looking at it didn't really exist yet.

If you wouldn't be impressed in 1980 with the state of computers today, perhaps you don't remember 1980 very well. Maybe this list of the top songs of 1980 will help you remember 1980 better.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[Angst Badger]

Once my team and I 'bought in' to using it, it became a marvelous tool.

Almost everything works well if everyone involved "buys in". Technical history (and politics, religion, hobbies, etc.) is littered with cult followings that coalesced around one thing or another that failed to catch on with the general public.

Success depends on either everyone buying in, which almost never happens, OR cases where the product/service works well for its users without everyone else having to use it. Email and the web are rare examples of the former; the enormous variety of mail clients and web browsers are examples of latter.

But ahead of it's time. Like handing someone from 1980 a smart phone.

The overwhelming majority of the public doesn't have smart phones and isn't terribly interested in them. But they are wildly successful in their niche precisely because you can have an iPhone and still call your grandmother's rotary dial land line phone.

So, the obvious next step

[Bruce Perens]

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.

Re:So, the obvious next step

[Bruce Perens]

They have fretted for over a year on how to release Wave without releasing their proprietary javascript RPC technology.

I am having trouble understanding how JavaScript RPC is a business-differentiating technology for Google.

integrate with gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This will hurt google in the future

[Z8]

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.

Let's be honest here...

[neonKow]

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.

Completely Google's Fault

[Geurilla]

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.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[gmuslera]

They are killing the standalone version, but that dont implies that they wont use/embed/whatever it in other of their existing or future products. Would be great an isolated version of it in google apps for your domain, in buzz or, who knows, something that integrate tools instead of seeing them as separate entities with a common authentication. Also (some of?) the code is open, another company could deploy/evolve it.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[sarhjinian]

Google products end up in two distinct buckets: applications that are designed for the way people work, and applications designed for the way one or two propellerheads at Google work.

Gmail, Search, Maps, Chrome and possibly Android and Picasa fall into the former. Youtube and Postini do as well, even though they're not-invented-here

Apps (as a collaboration system), Wave, Bookmarks, Reader and Bookmarks fall into the latter. ChromeOS might do the same.

Wave's problem is that no one could really explain how to use it in a fashion people could understand: it solved an itch of someone's at Google, but no one was able to effective explain how to use it. I've found out more from reading Slashdot comments about how it could be used than by reviewing any of the material Google provided. That it was kind of glitchy is just icing on the cake. With some effort it could have gained acceptance, but it would have required the propellerheads to try and exhibit some empathy. Wave forced me to say "Ok, now what?" way, way too often.

In Apps it's perversely hard to share documents. You set up a shared workspace; you should be able to upload documents and have everyone see them, except that you can't. You have to explicitly share it with everyone, including users you provision later and it doesn't even show up search results. You can't even tag documents in Apps, despite the sucess of tagging in Gmail and elsewhere. Again, I ended up saying "Ok, now what?" and wondering if Apps developers ever deal with real users. That the thread in Groups about this failing is months old and pages long says everything, really.

Ditto Bookmarks. You should be able to search, tag and sync with Chrome. Except you can't. Reader I've never been able to figure out. I'm pretty sure Video would be in this boat had Google not bought Youtube, because it's still very strange. Buzz might go this route as well; it's a bit early to say.

Compare this to Search, Gmail or Maps, which just work and are used, effortlessly, by millions. Even when features are added, they're usually added in a sane, helpful way. This is where Google falls short, and where Apple usually does not: Apple doesn't, leave the end user hanging and wondering what the hell to try next. It's also a very similar feeling I get from Nokia's offerings: that someone is in love with the technology, but far too arrogant and self-centered to admit to it's failings and/or that the software is developed to scratch one person's itch and left to rot.

No big surprise

[Andtalath]

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.

Expecting rapid adoption...

[blahplusplus]

... 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?

Buzz next?

[sugarmotor]

Is Google Buzz next to go ?

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[Americano]

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.)

The clue is in "computer science"

[gilgongo]

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.

Google's fault is lack of patience

[yyxx]

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.

google wave...

[smash]

... was a solution looking for a problem. In addition, i think there is a bit of stigma with using a free, beta, un-proven technology for business purposes.

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[RoFLKOPTr]

Second that.

I really love Google Wave but it was simply too unstable to use very often.

I love Google Wave, too, and I've spent countless hours trying to come up with something that I can actually USE Wave for... unfortunately, I come up blank most of the time. It's really fun to play around with, but there's nothing that Wave is really great for except in very specific cases... and in those specific cases, Wave is probably the most useful thing in the world.

open source it!

[StripedCow]

Hey now that google considers it useless, maybe they should open source it...