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

First wave

[jlar]

First wave (oh no, they killed it)

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.

[Wagoo]

That's because it's chat with a couple of features.

The principle of which is deleting what someone previously wrote and replacing their text with "I'M GAY!!!!"

Incidently the wave I used for one afternoon with some friends now takes hundreds of megs to load in a browser..

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[Eirenarch]

Wait. Do you claim Sharepoint is dead like Wave?

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

And it works like a charm. Everyone one-off, non-IT, IT department is clamouring to get their hands on "Sharepoint". Most of the "IT Directors" are promoted from other parts of the business and have absolutely no idea what they're doing. So when Microsoft tells them something is a "Best Practice" and that it's "Best of Breed" and "Web 2.0" and "SaaS" and on and fucking on, these douche bags swallow it hook, line, sinker and pole.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[wisnoskij]

Sure it is chat with a couple of features, but it is done in such a way as to make it very unique.
Having used Wave in all its current greatness and even more amazing potential I would still state that wave is the future, or at least a program/service that has very similar features is the future.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[grumbel]

The thing I don't get: Why wasn't there an easy way to create a public wave? Wasn't that thing meant to be integrated in your own webpages and stuff like that? How would have any of that worked without public waves? The thing felt like a Wiki that is invite-only, good for a few things, but to be truly usable you want the ability to open it up to the rest of the world.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[rsborg]

Like sharepoint. It's a web framework with some extra features.

Sharepoint is Microsoft's implementation of an enterprise content management (ECM) system. You can do much of the same these days with a large number of open-source projects (Alfresco 3.x is great out of the box), most of which work well with each other due to open standards. I bet you're glad you never had to deal with a sucky SP 1.0 implementation in a windows only shop. It may not suck that bad anymore, but it was great to get away from that hell.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[Thinboy00]

It was intended to be used more for communications, and close collaboration (hence the simultaneous editing; can you imagine Wikipedia with simultaneous editing?)

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.

[Mongoose Disciple]

Eh... I'll give you that SP 1.0 was a steaming pile, but I can't think of 1.0 of anything Microsoft that was good, honestly. It did get better.

In a lot of ways Alfresco is playing perpetually-behind catch-up in the same way Open Office chases Office and the Gimp chases Photoshop. Sharepoint, at this point, has a lot more tied/folded into it than simple ECM.

That being said, almost all of the bigger Microsoft shops I've worked in were using Sharepoint, and at least half of them weren't using it for anything that Alfresco wouldn't easily do straight out of the box.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[kaiidth]

can you imagine Wikipedia with simultaneous editing?

I'm imagining it. Like an ASCII version of Drawball Two.

Wasn't it Lovecraft who wrote about The Horror that Crawls From The Chaos, The Blind Idiot God? What a prophet that guy was.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[afabbro]

Sharepoint actually had potential. "We want to do a site like a wiki, only instead of markups, we'd use the Office tools". Unfortunately, they made it godawful clunky and web-based. They should have ditched the "web" part of it altogether and made it a proprietary system. Not that I would have touched it with a ten foot pole, but it would have been more interesting than the junk that is Sharepoint now.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[afabbro]

Eh... I'll give you that SP 1.0 was a steaming pile, but I can't think of 1.0 of anything Microsoft that was good, honestly.

Some of their mice and keyboards. Microsoft makes excellent mice that almost have a cult following (e.g., the Trackball Explorer) and fantastic keyboards (e.g., the Natural 4000). Microsoft is an excellent hardware company. Too bad they never figured out software.

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.

[LordLimecat]

That's because it's chat with a couple of features

Only in the sense that a car is a horse with a couple of features, otherwise, youre just wrong. Among its "couple of features" (unashamedly pulled from an earlier post, as it seems this, like so many myths, persist...)

1. 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

2. 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.
3. 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.

4. 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. All of this was, and is in its current implentation, able to be taken care of from a wave inbox. Spam would have taken a hit, as would phishing, because you wouldnt be able to forge "accountservices@capitolone.com". Email chains would have ceased to be a gigantic disaster of people forwarding, reforwarding, editing, reforwarding, and generally mucking up inboxes with garbage. Most importantly, a portable interface could have been crafted around all this, practically for free-- dont need a custom client for each feature, just a client for wave.
   
   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 understand why, sort of, since it really wasnt explained at all, and it took me several hours of screwing with to figure out just what it was, and could do. But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good" rather than "that looks complicated, im going to stick with what I know because this scares me".
   
   I mean, if its taking this long to get IPv6 rolled out, and this just failed to take off, what hope have we of ever being rid of rickety old SMTP? Do we just need to keep extending the thing to death until its major flaws are fixed (if thats even possible)? Are we to be stuck fiddling around with seperate interfaces for every form of communication we use (IM, IRC, email, messageboards, comments) for the forseeable future?
   
   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?

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[Hadlock]

I can confirm. I've spoken with a few of the larger non-profits in my area, and they're all planning on rolling out Sharepoint in the next 12-18 months.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[rtb61]

Google does best on open networks. Google wins on the internet with search. Google is starting to win on mobile phones by opening them up with android. For google to win on social media, the choice is obvious, pick one of the upcoming more popular open social media networks and push it.

So Google has the best chance to get it's piece by promoting and supporting open social networking. It doesn't need to beat facebook and myspace, it just needs to cripple them. Hey, both are fads eventually doomed to fail, both are abused by corporate greed, so no great loss and, to be honest open social networking is better for everyone, well at least 99.99999 percent odd not of course facebook and myspace investors ;D.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[ColdWetDog]

Google continues its metamorphosis into the Microsoft of the internet age.

Cranky fellow. Missed the early stock options, did we?

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.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[slim]

That's because it's chat with a couple of features.

Odd, because to me the chat aspect was minor. It's an email thread in which latecomers can see the whole conversation history. And there was the aspect where people could treat an entry as an editable wiki. If more than one participant happened to be using it at the same time, then it became more like a chat, but that was secondary to the whole thing to me.

I've had successful Waves in which no two people were ever editing it at once.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[McDutchie]

1. 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

This reflects a common and unfortunate misunderstanding about spam. The vast majority of spam does not forge the sender and has no need to. Most spammers want responses, after all. Besides, email has already solved this problem (SPF, DomainKeys) and it did nothing to deter the spammers. Phishers now simply register domains that look similar to the real ones. Spammers register domains in bulk so they don't care if they get blocked or shut down. Wave would do nothing to solve any of this. Spam is a social problem, not a technical one, so it can only have a social solution.

2. 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.

That is not a problem with email, but a problem with blogs. Besides, what is the difference between "notify me when someone responds" and "all comments would appear in your inbox"? Nothing is stopping blogs from sending all comments to your inbox now. There is a reason why they don't usually do that, and that reason would apply equally to Wave.

3. 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.

Mailing lists fixed this in the 1970s. Even simple mailing lists are more efficient for discussions than Wave and blogs combined. All you need is a decent email program with threading and filtering. The recipient is in total control, and it's simpler to learn than Wave.

4. 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,

You bought the hype. But even if this were true, it would have put Google in total control of all our communications. No thanks.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[Gunzour]

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 understand why, sort of, since it really wasnt explained at all, and it took me several hours of screwing with to figure out just what it was, and could do. But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good" rather than "that looks complicated, im going to stick with what I know because this scares me".

Accusing people of being scared of it seems a little insulting, IMHO. There are a lot of things asking for our attention these days. Wave asked for it in big ways, and frankly, most of us just didn't have the time to bother to figure out what the hell we're supposed to do with it.

Wave was a victim of it's own complexity. People couldn't figure out (quickly) what to do with it, so they didn't bother.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[xtracto]

Mhmm, lets see:
1. Users do not really care... and if someone care they use either PGP or https: in an email

2. Kind of like when someone wants to link one forum conversation (or any other media from the web) into another, they use this magical "a href" thing.

3. Oooor you can use a standard forum and give the linky (see point 2) of the thread to your pal.
(from your linked post)
4. "extend with poll widgets": Current forum software can do it.
5. "letter by letter real time communication", can you tell me 1 (ONE) scenario where this is not only a gimmic... anyway, webchat (ala facebook chat), irc and any other instant messenger protocol can do it.
6. "Retract comments": I can do it on email, it is called "apologizing" for sending the wrong email (or an email without attachement)... also in forums, it is called "edit post" or just reply to your own post.
7. "waves can be global an public", guess what! Forums can be made global and public!
8. "Waves can be moderated;" this is getting boring...

In reality it is true that nothing of value was lost.

Look, I use a lot of google services (e.g. gmail, docs, calendar) on a daily basis, including the "failed" google Notebook which is quite good.

But when I tried to use wave I just could not see any feature that would make me want to change from Skype+Forum+DimDim+Doodle+Docs to do what I want.

The *only* thing that Wave *could* have done is concentrate all those services in one place, the problem is that the interface then became very complex.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[mcvos]

Because Microsoft pushes it aggressively. Who cares what the superior technology is? What matters is what people use and what companies push. And that's not Wave.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[Radtoo]

All server-to-server communication is TLS encrypted and authenticated. All wave origins are verified using digital signatures, so, to quote from wikipedia, [...] Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue

It only means that you can reliably whitelist.

But as soon as you need to communicate with what are essentially strangers (almost any professional work has to, but also when you, say, talk to some buying or selling stranger about some online auction or many other things, or simply sometimes make new acquaintances whose certificate you don't exchange on-the-spot), you'll still get spam'd. Spammers can easily create as many certificates as they want, much as they can create as many email accounts or forum logins or domains, as they can right now.
Also, your acquaintance's computers will still get compromised, including certificates...

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.

Yes, it could have been a revolution, and I myself was hoping for the overall mode of communication to become more like Wave described it. Maybe it still will happen.

But if Wave had been picked up in its current state, it would have been a disaster. Neither the server(s) nor the client(s) were ready with regards to ease-of-use, stability, security, administration & customization, documentation, scalability in order to succeed in taking over even niche areas of communication with low requirements...

Also, there are many other factors that are a problem in practice, such like that it is not all an open or easy-to-implement or even a somewhat technology-stack-compatible standard (see here for a brief, nice and simple explanation / illustration of Wave's structure). That would have gotten very much in the way of retrofitting/extending existing programs with Wave or healthy competition between servers and clients.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[HeckRuler]

I claim sharepoint SHOULD be dead.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[shutdown -p now]

That's why marketing is important.

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.

[nacturation]

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.

Perhaps there should be a rule for them. Just as with companies using the products they make is called eating their own dog food, blogs who promote someone else's failed product should have to eat their own dog shit.

Re:Tech blogs are funny.

[sakdoctor]

Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what Google wave is. You have to see an indie youtube video for yourself.

Re:Tech blogs are funny.

[Stan Vassilev]

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.

You may be hitting the wrong blogs. What I read, coincided with my own opinion: interesting technology, but little advantage over competition, and high complexity, means you won't see mainstream adoption over basics like email.

Of course, maybe I unintentionally looked for blogs to match my own opinion. So.. what were you looking for ;) ?

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.

Re:Tech blogs are funny.

[bonch]

Tech sites like Slashdot continue to believe the lie that Google is a friendly open source company. In reality, its search and advertising platforms are as closed and proprietary as Windows, and they just offer free products like Gmail and Chrome to get you onto their closed platforms for indexing purposes. On top of that, they don't give two shits about privacy, and their CEO flat-out said anyone concerned about it has something to hide.

But, because Google used cheap Linux PCs when it was starting out and offered a free email service, Slashdot will always be blindly in love with it. I'm always curious when the tide is going to start turning. I thought scanning and arching people's WiFi data "accidentally" would be the last straw, but I underestimated fanboyism.

I'll be the first

[Monkeedude1212]

To Wave Goodbye.

Get it?

Re:I'll be the first

[Chibi Merrow]

I'd kill for a -50 DIAF mod right now.

I kid, nothing but love...

but go DIAF...

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.

Re:Not Open

[Swampash]

No, the problem with Wave is that it is a technical solution to a problem THAT NOBODY HAS.

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...

Re:UI was weird

[SpryGuy]

They should have marketed it as a niche product for scrum/agile development teams with remote members to do collaboration and sprint planning and such. Our team found it very useful for that (as we found Etherpad before it). Problem is, with those two products now gone, what do we use for real-time collaboration and planning? Email cannot cut it, and neither chan "chat". This is seriously going to suck unless we can find a decent (free) tool to replace it.

Re:UI was weird

[Antity-H]

They did not realize that today everyone has a favorite mean of communication, wether it's email, im, twitter, whatever. Wave was not integrated with anything.

Until fairly recently there was no mail notification, no twitter update, nothing that would allow you to know that something happened in wave. I got invited to waves and found out weeks or months later as I connected by chance to have a look at something else that someone had tried to talk to me.

The activity level was never high enough that I would log in every day, add little to no notifications and it quickly fell off my radar ie I got bored.

Re:UI was weird

[mdmkolbe]

But most of all, it didn't have a clear 30-seconds or less explanation on what exactly it should be used to

They should have just said:

It is a wysiwyg, distributed, real-time, personal, sharable wiki, with a few extra features that any good wiki could use including tracking conversation threads, subscribing to updates for a page, notifying friends of pages you think they'd be interested in, and easy user access control. In detail:

• First and foremost it is a wiki: it is easy to edit a page, it is easy to collaboratively edit, pages are persistent, you can view the history of a page.
• It is (in theory) distributed: you can control and host your own content and it still inter-operates with the rest of the "wave-scape".
• It is real-time: you can use it as a chat for quick back and forth.
• It is personal: you can put whatever you want on it. No limits on topics and no fighting over page namespace.
• It is sharable: you can write pages that only you can see, share them with a few friends, or even the whole world. It is up to you.
• It does threaded conversation: most wiki's have a "talk" or "discuss" page, but don't really support threaded conversation. User's have developed conventions to get around this (like text nesting levels), but how they don't have to work around it. It is built in.

Ok, maybe that was more than 30 seconds, but you get the idea. When I thought of it as "chat" or "e-mail" it didn't make sense, because I already have perfectly good chat and e-mail. What I don't have is a wiki where I can put my private notes or share my designs with colleges to let them update/fix/annotate them.

It is a shame Google is giving up on it. Fortunately if you drop the distributed aspect (which I think got Wave bogged down in technical details), it shouldn't be too hard to clone the ideas there. For that matter, with just a few tweaks it could even be a Facebook killer. After all, being "wysiwyg, real-time, personal, sharable" isn't too far from being "social". (I mean "social" in the sense of Facebook, not just "social" in the sense of collaborative content creation.) Google came this close to inventing the "social wiki". Now I guess it is up to us.

Re:UI was weird

[Hadlock]

I think the bullet that killed Wave was, like you mentioned, the lack of email notification. It's really hard to kill email, if the replacement can't interact with it's predecessor.

Re:UI was weird

[ukyoCE]

Agreed. It did too many things at once, and was too buggy and slow to be used regularly at this stage of development. I loved the idea but every time I made a serious attempt to use it, I got stonewalled by performance, bugs, or both.

If they had used the same backend technology but made you pick a "type" of wave, eg. version-controlled document or threaded chat, people may have been able to grasp the concept and eventually move on to making generic "waves" that used all of the features at once. Even if it never ended up making sense to have version control, real time chatting, and threading in a single conversation, the subsets of these features would still be an improvement over many of the tools we use today.

I really liked it

[thetoadwarrior]

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.

Re:I really liked it

[TooMuchToDo]

Please don't like Gmail or Google Calendar. I don't won't those to go away too! ;)

Re:I really liked it

[John Hasler]

> Please don't like Gmail or Google Calendar.

But please do like FaceBook and Twitter.

Better yet, like spam.

Re:I really liked it

[fermion]

All Google products are useful. What worries me about Google is since most of the services are at least incidentally supported by ads. Therefore the services can be cut when they cost more than they are worth.

Some services like mail are here to stay. It costs relatively little and builds brand loyalty. Other services are more costly and may be cut off. There are people who really depended on Wave, who were trained on wave, and have to move to other platforms. The goodwill to Google has been lost.

I am going to be running Googledocs, building loyalty to a large group of people in the process. Training them in Google not in MS Office. Of course if Google plays games, that will ne lost as well.

Re:I really liked it

[Omestes]

There are people who really depended on Wave, who were trained on wave, and have to move to other platforms. The goodwill to Google has been lost.

Huh? It was a very young beta, not an old chunk of finished software. You should NEVER depend on beta software, and whoever is training people to use beta software shouldn't.

How, also, can you lose goodwill against Google for canceling an underperforming beta?

Re:I really liked it

[flanktwo]

Please don't like Gmail or Google Calendar. I don't won't those to go away too! ;)

Or Google Search!

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?

[Monkeedude1212]

Well you actually made a good analogy - it being more like a Swiss Army Knife and that specialized tools being better.

But if that were always the case - there'd be no market for Swiss Army Knives and they probably wouldn't exist.

So I guess its just a little more surprising that a product like this didn't work, being that jack of all trades that some of the market might have liked.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[thetoadwarrior]

Agreed, I don't use it much for my personal life but I used it loads at work for communication amongst team mates. It was very easy to communicate and get a clear break down of conversations and I do believe something similar will pop up in the future.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[morgan_greywolf]

And yet it didn't do any one of those things as well the specialized tools did. Which was the problem with it from what I saw. I played with it for about 2 days and discovered that it was too slow (even with Google Chrome) to replace IM or IRC, there was too much information displayed all at once for it to replace email and forums, and there weren't enough 3rd party tools and clients.

I dunno. I like the Swiss Army Knife analogy.

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?

[SpryGuy]

What do you suggest as a "specialized tool" to replace it?

We used to use Etherpad for collaborative planning and communication for our (geographically dispersed) scrum/agile team. I liked it better because it had two things that Wave didn't: Line numbers (made it easier to refer to things) and each person contributing had their own text color, so you could see who typed what. But Google bought Etherpad and killed it. So now instead of two possible options, we have zero.

Are there other free collaborative editors out there, that give us the ability to have multiple people collaborate on text in real-time, and see what each other are typing?

Google Wave filled a necessary function for our team (and Etherpad before it). I'd like to find something to replace these two that is at least as good as either.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[nEoN nOoDlE]

I thought Wave was great. Yes, it was just a combination of a bunch of other tools that people were using, but there is something to be said for unification of those tools into one cohesive whole. I, for instance, am glad that my phone is also a camera and a calendar. The big problem with Wave was that it was slow and buggy. It would crash constantly and if you had over 50 posts on a wave, it would become unusable. Also, it was hard to get people to know when an update on the Wave was posted. By the time they implemented e-mail notifications, people already moved back to what they were used to and didn't want to deal with the bugginess. I wish they stuck around with it and gave it a chance to catch on.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[Saint Stephen]

Well come to carry that analogy to the extreme, I always carry a small Swiss Army knife on my keychain. It's the most useful tool I carry. But I only use the big blade. But I use that blade forlots of different things. And it's important to have a Swiss Army brand knife because the blade is strong enough to do everything without bending. Maybe in that analogy, you can find something useful to compare for this.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[PrecambrianRabbit]

I apologize for my lack of imagination, but why would Slashdot discussions benefit from being Waves? It seems like D2 is a pretty decent comment/messageboard system (despite occasionally flaking out on me), and I don't see how all the added features of Wave would add anything desirable.

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?

[farnsworth]

Slashdot could benefit by using Wave in these ways:

1) In-place ajaxy updates to comments (not necessarily char-by-char, that would be a UI choice for the site owners...)
2) Better notifications (admittedly not a strong part of Wave, but it's gotten better and there is no fundamental reason why it should suck.)
3) Unicode support so people could easily add, eg, the Euro symbol to their comments.
4) A sane and transparent markup/formatting idiom.
5) Federation/aggregation with other forums.
6) Probably better spam/bot detection, although I'm not sure about this.

All this comes "for free" if a public forum backed it's discussions with Waves. Rely on the messaging experts (google) to provide the messaging software, and rely on site owners (slashdot) to provide the content.

You don't need to change the UI or the look-and-feel of the site, it would all be wired up in the backend.

And since the protocol is OSS, all the data is still stored and owned by the appropriate party.

At least, that's the way I saw it before today...

Re:What did it actually bring?

[LordLimecat]

Some tools may be better than some of the features, but I totally disagree that email was better than wave at pretty much anything. Email sucks at collaboration, badly. Its pretty much only good at announcing things; for any sort of multi-person back and forth, it works, but not well.

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.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[sootman]

What did it actually bring? For me, too much. There is no single perfect way to handle everything. The idea of "keep all the info forever so anyone who joins can look it over and see how it evolved" is great, unless you've been in the project all along--then you've got to wade through all the same crap over and over looking for the 2 bits of new stuff on a page with dozens of entries. When I tried it, there was no way to say "I've looked at this, addressed it, it's done, now I don't ever want to see it again."

Rather than one tool that does everything, for me it was a great example of when you really *do* want to have separate places for separate things. If me and 10 other people all have 50 emails, maybe five emails are important to each of us, but it'll be a different 5 for each person. Using Wave is like having one inbox shared with the whole team.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[21mhz]

enough cassette tapes and records stuffed in there to fill several refrigerators

I was 5 years old in 1980, and my memories are hazy, but I'm sure people didn't keep their records in refrigerators.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[rapiddescent]

interestingly, I never was able to use it at work - but our local mountain bike group use it all the time and it is popular. The core benefit was that the real time chat-like interface made it easier to setup rides at very short notice, sharing media and googlemaps integration made it pretty useful as well. Although the majority of the waves included "everyone" it is really useful for niche groups to plan trailbuilding activity etc that the rest aren't interested in.

However, as other posters have mentioned - the slowdowns and javascript errors meant that it can be quite painful when a wave has too many replies on it.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[tenZygzak]

Most important - threaded conversation is not very useful [1] if you don't have a simply way to know which post you already read and which new posts don't. Wave have it Out-of-the-Box, working pretty flawless. [1] Yeah, I know that no one really care about making Slashdot conversations useful.

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

[microbee]

You said it as if there were shortage of discontinued open source products.

Re:So, the obvious next step

[Bruce Perens]

Code dying on the vine is part of the Darwinistic process that maintains the quality of Open Source. If nobody cares about it, nobody will develop it. What I suspect in this case is that there might be a community willing to carry on this project. It's an interesting 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.

Re:So, the obvious next step

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really fast. It requires a mix of high and low level I/O code, see Jetty's manual about continuations. There is another technical component to this technology that I could mention but for selfish reasons (we have our own implementation of it) I won't.

These ideas are out there, some with Google's consent, but for whatever reason they declined to package it all up as an implementation. This is part of Google's 'speed is a feature' mantra.

Re:So, the obvious next step

[Deekoo]

If they release a Javascript RPC implementation, their competitors will be able to use it to make their apps as slow, clunky, and unreliable as Wave seemed to be?

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.

Gaming

[Bigbutt]

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]

Re:Gaming

[_Sprocket_]

Ever use something like OpenRPG? If so, how'd it compare?

64 bit web site

[TopSpin]

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.

It was wierd.

[geekoid]

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.

Re:It was wierd.

[VGPowerlord]

<ramble>That reminds me of a "conversation" I had about the Java dev tool Maven on StackOverflow recently.

One person said "If you don't understand Maven, you never will."

I replied "So, the only people who understand Maven are the people who wrote it?"

I don't think he ever did understand why I said that.</ramble>

Re:It was wierd.

[Paranatural]

I could never figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with it. I played with it for hours, got a few people to join, but it was basically just a weird hybrid IM/Forum thing with some document handling. Thing is I didn't need any of that crap, so we all just stopped using it.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[thoughtfulbloke]

I used it. Specifically, I used it for hyper rapid content development among small groups of dispersed people. The advantages of simultaneous editing of single documents (along with the edit history) were huge for this particular niche.
The thing is, there aren't many small dispersed groups needing hyper rapid content development. If you weren't as dispersed, or had the time for consecutive (rather than concurrent) editing, other traditional tools were better. The interface, and its tendency to bog down once the wave sizes grew large, didn't help either.
But as I fell into the small niche it was really useful for, rather than just as a novelty, I will miss it.

Interesting...

[i_ate_god]

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...

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.

Re:This will hurt google in the future

[John Hasler]

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.

So now the projects will actually have to have some merit? Sounds good to me.

Re:This will hurt google in the future

[Maarx]

This is exactly what I was planning on saying as I read the comments, but you said it better.

Re:This will hurt google in the future

[Z8]

So now the projects will actually have to have some merit? Sounds good to me.

Ideally you're right, but often which projects have merit in the long term is a self-fulfilling prophesy. A decision to switch to a platform is a long-term commitment, and necessarily is about what will have "merit" 5 years from now.

Google is up against Apple and its Reality Distortion Field and Microsoft with its 90 thousand employees and its Windows/Office cash cow monopoly. Google must convince people that its platforms will have critical mass five years from now—if they don't their projects won't have (long term) merit, no matter how good they are.

Re:This will hurt google in the future

[jellomizer]

That and developers will be less likely to adopt a new google technology. As they will just kill it later. I am bummed that my google page is gone.

Re:This will hurt google in the future

[yyxx]

So now the projects will actually have to have some merit? Sounds good to me.

Google Wave had tons of merit. But three months out of closed beta just isn't enough time for any new software product to prove itself. None of the big, successful tools you use today would be here if they had been dropped that quickly.

Re:This will hurt google in the future

[sardaukar_siet]

Check out this article (http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/03/error-message-google-research-director-peter-norvig-on-being-wrong.aspx) on Google's timing and method for new projects, it sheds some light on what goes on in there.

Re:This will hurt google in the future

[yyxx]

Quantifying performance and cutting projects that don't work is a good principle. However, it only works if you pick the right performance measures and targets. For Wave, the performance measure seems to have been "widespread adoption after three months of public release". That's just a dumb measure.

In addition, another measure that is important to Google is not just "how many people are using this right now", but also "what attitudes do developers have towards our company". I can tell you: the latter measure has taken a big turn for the worse.

Also, how you cut poorly performing projects matters as well. They could have cut Wave during limited beta with little damage. But what they did is first release it to the public at large, and then elevate it into the select circle of apps that are available on Google Apps. And after all that, they drop it.

Sorry, but citing good engineering principles is not an excuse for stupid decisions and bad management, and what Google did with Wave was both, and it's going to hurt them for years to come.

Prediction: Gmail integration

[FleaPlus]

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.

Re:Prediction: Gmail integration

[systematical]

Or why not at least give it the ability to send an email. I mean WTF!?!

Re:Prediction: Gmail integration

[jopsen]

I agree people will start moving to wave if it's integrated with legacy services...

In fact when they started showing demos of Wave, saying how extensions for almost anything could be made for Wave... I was wondering why they didn't have proper integration of e-mail and IM... At least XMPP/GTalk, GMail, IRC and other open standards, but no...

Also an installable client, so that waves would be accessible when offline, would have been a killer features... Apps in browsers are just never going to really cut it... They'll always have small annoying obscurities...

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.

Re:Let's be honest here...

[JohnFluxx]

Regarding the unintuitive bit..

Has there ever been a successful UI with 3 columns of information? That layout never seems to work very well.

Re:Let's be honest here...

[celesteh]

I think their invitation model was also a huge mistake. It was a great way to build hype for Gmail, but you can use Gmail to interact with anybody who has email. A gmail invite was thus really cool because it was immediately useful. You could email all your contacts, but with a very hip/hyped interface. Slowly trickling invites into Wave did build some hype, but when I got on it, I only had 2 or 3 contacts on it, which did not make it useful. It was also slow as hell. Google launched it before it was ready to actually deal with public usage and tried to cover for that by letting people on it very slowly, thus making it pretty useless to early adopters. I haven't even looked at it for months and probably neither have any of my contacts. Their slow rollout effectively prevented it from reaching critical mass.

Re:Let's be honest here...

[farnsworth]

Google Wave got plenty of coverage. It didn't take off because it was bad.

I think you are confusing Wave-the-technology with Wave-the-site, a la wave.google.com, pretty much the only existing implementation of Wave. The site has it's problems, but they are not fundamental to Wave. Wave is a protocol. It's like complaining that smtp sucks because sendmail configuration is a PITA.

micro-wave.appspot.com

[antimatter15]

I guess i'll give a shot and try to get people to use my soon-to-be-totally-dead web based wave client.

Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcasm)

[zeigerpuppy]

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...

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[DarkIye]

Very useful for small to medium-sized project collaboration, software and probably otherwise. That's how they should have billed it from the start. It lends itself to people putting up clumps of text, and allowing other people to modify it (the meat of it is basically a more dynamic version of a wiki).

It's too unstable to be particularly good for anything bigger than that, and offers nothing which makes it more suitable than the existing stuff for instant messaging.

Three things killed it

[jbb999]

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.

Re:Three things killed it

[takowl]

• 1) It did get quite a bit more stable and responsive. IMHO they opened it up too early, and the early flaws put many people off.
• 2) I've never understood this point. It was nothing like e-mail! Yes, you could have a conversation, but the power was really in using it more like an easy, private wiki, e.g. for planning a day out with a group of friends. I think the developer talk ("what would e-mail be like if it was invented today?") was misleading.
• 3) I sort of agree that it was confusing. Specifically, they released it without any guidance on what to do with it. They did later try to remedy that with a few templates (e.g. "Brainstorm", "Task tracking"), but it was too late

Armchair pundit assessment: it was a good idea, but they made a hash of releasing it. They should have left it longer, released more polished code with more servers behind it (so that it didn't need invites), and given people an idea of how to use it. Oh, and they should have turned federation on (they still haven't). Hopefully we'll see it again in some form, especially the idea of federation.

Re:Three things killed it

[dzfoo]

I read this a lot, in Slashdot and in other sites. It seems that, in spite of all the press and praise Wave received initially, when pressed most people admit that, well it was buggy, it crashed a lot, and it was sort of confusing--then turn around completely and say something to the effect that it was still great.

Why? I don't get it. Kind of like the Matrix sequels, you know, they were awesome and brilliant--except for the fact that they sucked and bored me to tears.

      -dZ.

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

[Shin-LaC]

Ok, then maybe you can do better. Tell me, what is Wave, and why should I care? (Or should have cared.)

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

[amirulbahr]

I disagree with your assertion that the effort has been a waste of time. A lot of the ideas and methods that were developed for Wave are already being used in some of their other products. Have you had a look at the real-time collaboration features in Google Documents lately? From TFA:

We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

I have a feeling we will start seeing more and more Wave-like features making there way into other Google products. Also, a lot of the code is already open source.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[grumbel]

It is basically a Wiki with a build-in discussion system that doesn't suck. Or the other way around, a discussion system with a build in Wiki. Basically a tool in which you can get stuff done, instead of just do the talking.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[Lord Bitman]

Completely google's fault, I agree. Google completely failed to communicate what wave was and how to use it, gotcha. Google didn't use Wave enough itself, very true.

But "great product as it currently is"? Fuck no. "Useful collaboration tool which fits nicely into the gap between IM and e-mail", definitely. But certainly not "great", especially not "as it currently is". Wave has never added enough basic features to make it truly great.

Right now it fits between IM, email, and wikis, filling a space which has long wanted a stronger tool.
But to be great, it would need to be able to completely replace at least one of them.

Perhaps all that's needed for that is "don't be web-only", which of course would involve Google making good on what their tech-demos showed.

Of course, it's also true that I can set up an e-mail server (poorly, but still functional) from zero knowledge to running in ten minutes. I've yet to figure out what's needed for a working Wave server, or even if they really exist (as opposed to just being a toy for developers).

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[Lord Bitman]

Wave is google's replacement for e-mail.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[Thinboy00]

I think there were two problems with Wave:

1. 
   It was very over hyped as a general product when it's more of a niche thing
2. 
   Google didn't fix anything that was broken (the interface was kind of wonky)

Other than that I think it was a fine product

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[exomondo]

Wave is google's replacement for e-mail.

"x is a replacement for y" isn't a valid way to explain what x is or why anyone should care.

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.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[bonch]

Because Google is turning into Microsoft, where one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[stephanruby]

It arrived in google apps premier, I'm not sure when it arrived, but I added it to my google apps domain yesterday. I can't say I have the best timing for these things. :(

I can't say they didn't warn me thought, it came with all kinds of ominous disclaimers about it not being included in my existing SLA and me not being able to contact them if they ever lose the content from my domain waves. Someone told me today that they were going to keep it turned on until at least the end of the year. I assume this should give enough time for people to archive their existing waves in a wiki, and experiment with alternatives for the real-time parts of it.

In any case, I find it curious that I can now get wave on my google apps domain, but I still can't get Buzz on it. Does this mean that as soon as I get access to Buzz on google apps premier that it's going to die shortly thereafter too?

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[Aceticon]

Well, Google (used to?) hire their people based in scholastic achievement and the ability to solve strange non-real-life problems and which are self-proclaimed idea-masters

(Exactly the kind of people that don't want to "lower themselves to the level of the 'normals'")

Then they promote an internal culture of elitism and "circle jerk" in which "We work at Google because we're so good and we're so good because we work at Google" on what are essentially high-intelect-low-soft-skills people (easy to manipulate, sink easilly into groupthink).

It's thus not surprising that most of Google's applications turn out to be not so great on the usuability front and never really polished to perfection (since their creators do not have the patience for the essential slow plodding effort of making them smooth working and bug free).

I am in fact highy surprised that they have any applications at all which are successfull in a context where technical (so OSes don't count): maybe they mistakenly hired somebody really experienced instead of a bright-eyed-just-graduated-masters-holder?

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[Lord Bitman]

X is a replacement for Y. This is because Y sucks, everyone who has any interest in the matter or who has ever used Y knows about the many flaws of Y, and while X has various limitations inherent in a newcomer which is attempting to replace a system as ubiquitous as Y, it does not actually have any of the problems you could come up with that Y has. X serves the same purpose as Y. If you don't like Y, try X.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[Lord Bitman]

Google did fix a lot of the broken things. Wave today is not Wave of a year ago.

But they didn't fix everything, and the problems which have been with it from the beginning, to those who have used it from the beginning and continue to use it today, are still a pain every day.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[tbird81]

So if Y is email, can Google Wave be used easily by anyone?

No. So it's not really a replacement for email.

And does email suck? It's not perfect, but it's been around a long time, basically unchanged. I'd say it's pretty successful.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[Lord Bitman]

X has various limitations inherent in a newcomer which is attempting to replace a system as ubiquitous as Y.

Google Wave can be used easily by anyone, though it is clearly not as ubiquitous- there aren't as many servers, and there aren't as many clients.

I will admit that writing a google wave implementation is more difficult than writing an e-mail implementation, given that it would require slightly more than "netcat" and "nothing else"

And yes, Email sucks.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[exomondo]

X is a replacement for Y. This is because Y sucks, everyone who has any interest in the matter or who has ever used Y knows about the many flaws of Y

So email sucks and everyone who has ever used email knows it? No, that's incorrect.

Moreover it still doesn't explain what X is, and in this case, why anyone should care. Clearly most people didn't care since most people have no idea what wave is.

nice concept, crappy implementation

[Tom]

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.

Re:nice concept, crappy implementation

[dzfoo]

Another one of these?

"It was great, except that it sucked when I used it. But still great."

I really don't get it.

        -dZ.

Re:nice concept, crappy implementation

[Tom]

What you don't get is the difference between concept and implementation.

"Action Movie" is a cool concept (well, for many people, it may not be your thing, bear with me for example's sake).
"Postal" by Uwe Boll is a crappy implemention of that concept.

There are other, better implementations. For Wave, I'm pretty sure there will be.

Re:nice concept, crappy implementation

[dzfoo]

If by "concept" you mean something that already existed in other applications, but just cobbled together as a browser application.

Lets be clear here, most of those "computer science" innovations introduced in Google Wave were things that have existed in many different forms before, but usually as dedicated protocols and applications; Wave attempted to do it in JavaScript, tunneled through the stateless HTTP.

That in itself is questionable.

        -dZ.

Re:nice concept, crappy implementation

[Tom]

Agree completely, putting that up as a web app wasted most of its potential.

The innovation was merging various protocols together. It's not a massive innovation, but it helps. Have you never had some IM client, some IRC client and an e-mail program open all at the same time? Have you never used SMS, IM/chat and e-mail to send messages to the same person, all interleaved? Wouldn't it be cool to have one stream of communication? That's the problem Wave tried to solve.

And then the geeks found it and added all kinds of bullshit crap into it. Three different types of replies, gadgets, robots all the nonsense. Design lesson: Build a simple, but complete thing first, then add the bells and whistles.

Re:perfect time to spam about

[antimatter15]

Hi, antimatter15!

Hello! I forgot to login for that post -_-

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[SpryGuy]

I used it all the time. Our development team does scrum/agile, and we have some remote team members. We used to use Etherpad for doing collaborative sprint planning, but when Google bought and killed it, folding those developers into Wave development, we were forced onto Wave. It's been useful (though I liked Etherpad better), and now we're in a position of wondering what tool we can use to fill this need.

Anyone have any suggestions??

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[Stan Vassilev]

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 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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[mevets]

Funny, we just started using it for conference calls. With our group distributed, it is really handy to have a private way to communicate during meetings. Has the side effect of keeping all the meeting notes in one spot. I hope it continues to be offered.

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?

Re:Expecting rapid adoption...

[trouser]

I have friends who now communicate through Facebook and Twitter in preference to email and IM. If Wave had supported Farmville it could have been huge.

Re:Expecting rapid adoption...

[LordLimecat]

None of the technically minded folks I knew (including, it seems, most of slashdot) seemed determined to either ignore or disparage wave. How was it to succeed without technical people supporting it, who would do so if they wouldnt?

Buzz next?

[sugarmotor]

Is Google Buzz next to go ?

Re:Buzz next?

[mutherhacker]

probably.

Re:Buzz next?

[upuv]

I forgot Buzz still existed.

That was a turkey the moment it went live.

Re:Buzz next?

[xannik]

I'm probably in the minority, but as a Gmail user and Android user Buzz works nicely for me. I prefer it over twitter as it does not have the 140 character limit that twitter does. I keep my posts small (normally), but if I happen to go over a 140 characters I don't like to try and find ways to shorten my post. I also like the content fetching that Buzz will do when you post a link. It makes sharing news/content quite easy.

Re:Buzz next?

[slyborg]

It's still here?

Re:Buzz next?

[Minwee]

Is Google Buzz next to go ?

Yes. It will be followed by Google Rex, Bo, Hamm and Slink. Somehow, Google Sid will always be with us.

Re:Buzz next?

[Xarius]

That'll probably get turned into Google Me when it comes out..

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.)

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[SpryGuy]

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.

Except Sharepoint actually makes money

[melted]

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.

Re:Except Sharepoint actually makes money

[CodeBuster]

The only place where Sharepoint really stands out is in the Microsoft Office intergration. The CMS features are both available and done better in other closed and open source ASP.NET based CMS products. If you want to build web apps on the windows platform you could just go straight to the source and use straight ASP.NET (Sharepoint was built on top of ASP.NET after all) which is both more flexible and more powerful because Sharepoint is necessarily a more limited view of ASP.NET and the .NET Framework (i.e. "doing things the Sharepoint way"). Taking a competent ASP.NET developer with a built up technology stack and forcing him to use Sharepoint is like putting him in a straight jacket and is actually a major downgrade for the developer. Things which could be done easily with a vastly extensible framework takes weeks of hacking or are just not possible when things must be done "the Sharepoint way". Even if one just wanted a basic CMS there are better choices on the Windows platform: dotnetnuke and N2 come to mind. The only good reasons to use Sharepoint, as far as I can tell, are (1) the Microsoft Office collaboration tools are really important to your company and (2) you plan to use the "out of box" Sharepoint installation, with little or no customization work. Finally, the notion of non-developers creating apps for Sharepoint is really oversold in my opinion. I'm sure that it does happen in larger companies, but most of the Sharepoint installs that I have seen feature little or no app development or customization because the users tend to be non-technical types. Perhaps my experience is not representative and someone who knows more about Sharepoint can comment, but I think that I cannot be too far off the mark with my assessment of Sharepoint.

Re:Except Sharepoint actually makes money

[melted]

Guess what, people just need something to conveniently share documents first and foremost. And all your other "ASP.NET based CMS products" suck at that.

>> you plan to use the "out of box" Sharepoint
>> installation, with little or no customization work

Which his how it is deployed in 95% of the cases.

Re:Except Sharepoint actually makes money

[CodeBuster]

Which his how it is deployed in 95% of the cases.

Which is fine as long as people understand what they are buying into and use it appropriately. HOWEVER, the problem begins when the marketing drones at Microsoft and their certified partner companies, in a misguided attempt to increase SharePoint sales, start pitching SharePoint and third-party add-ons as the ultimate website development framework and toolset. Most people in IT see through this smoke screen, but there is always somebody in middle management who doesn't get it and starts believing the bullshit being shoveled by these marketers. These middle managers can cause a lot of damage to IT and internal software projects by becoming a SharePoint cheerleader and pushing for more and more SharePoint, even for projects where it is clearly not an appropriate choice. This makes developers angry and ultimately users too (who blame the devs of course) when they see how badly things have turned out by converting everything over to SharePoint. The marketers and their fellow travelers do nothing but stir up trouble in IT and development. We are quite capable of finding and using the "best" tools on our own and we don't need to be told our business by a bunch of PR consultants and hyped up marketing types. So yes, I see your point that SharePoint works well for what it was designed to do . The problem is that lots of people with a financial or non-technical career stake in the outcome are pushing SharePoint into places where it doesn't really belong and Microsoft does little or nothing to discourage or correct these misconceptions . It seems that as far as Microsoft is concerned, SharePoint is right for anyone with a corporate credit card, whether that is actually true or not. This type of strategy doesn't earn much respect or trust among real developers.

Re:Except Sharepoint actually makes money

[melted]

Microsoft is just like any other company. They want to sell product, and if customer is stupid enough to buy something that doesn't fit their needs, that's fine by Microsoft. Heck, a lot of other software products are sold exactly the same way and for a lot more money. Why should Microsoft or its partners leave the money on the table. :-)

Re:Except Sharepoint actually makes money

[CodeBuster]

Why should Microsoft or its partners leave the money on the table

There is more than one way to market and sell a product. Making hard sells and recommending products which ultimately turn out to be wrong or bad fits damages Microsoft's credibility in the marketplace. It doesn't make much sense, at least in my opinion, for a major corporation with a billion dollar brand to take the "low road" by increasing short term sales, even if it burns some of their customers. You don't sell SharePoint and other major software packages the same way that you would the "incredible knife" which cuts anything and never gets dull for only $19.95. All I'm saying is that Microsoft should monitor their marketers and those of their partners a bit more carefully so that false and misleading claims don't get passed around. If they fail to do this then they risk the reputation of the entire brand just for a few more hard sells of SharePoint; not the best product sales strategy if you ask me.

I knew it was bullshit, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I knew it was bullshit, really.

[lga]

No one can tell you what wave is.

You can only experience it for yourself.

I'm sure I have heard that before somewhere...

Re:I knew it was bullshit, really.

[sparrowhead]

In a nutshell, Google Wave is^H^Hwas the love child of Internet Forums and Instant Messengers. IMO it's a great tool for Collaboration; not so much for traditional ways of communication. It gives you a great level of control over the discussion and who takes part in it and presents it in a way, you could easilly follow it over a great of time.

Re:I knew it was bullshit, really.

[PrecambrianRabbit]

I totally agree with you.

The basic idea, near as I can tell from 30 seconds of playing with it, is to create documents that can be edited simultaneously, in real time, by many people.

That's basically it. Sure, it adds some extra features, like being able to add and reply to comments within the document, that could give it more of a message-board feel, and you can quickly add multimedia and other features to your documents (like quick polls and the like). But fundamentally it's multiple people working on the same document simultaneously.

The thing is, that's actually kind of cool. But apparently some people didn't think that was cool enough, so they started going on about how it replaces email with socially networked instant messaging collaborative wiki forum web 2.0 open protocol servers, and all of a sudden no one has any clue what the hell it is or does.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[no1home]

I was invited into it, so I signed up. Looked around and couldn't find a way to make it useful to me and never went back. So I for one won't miss it. However, I can see where others will miss it.

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.

Re:The clue is in "computer science"

[grumbel]

I think Waves failure has a lot more to do with Google axing it then anything else. I mean seriously, the thing has been public for how long? Not even three month? How the hell did they expect "big huge success" in that time? I don't quite get how they can announce it, hype it and then kill before it had even a chance to gain some traction.

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:I was right.

[sugarmotor]

You want to try out embargolink next time ?

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[wisnoskij]

I also used it for similar purposes.
It is hands above the competition in its niche.

Closed beta killed it

[badboy_tw2002]

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.

Re:Closed beta killed it

[cowscows]

Closed beta, plus when you finally found someone with an invite to give you, then you'd still have to wait for a few days for some reason. What did they need those three days for? Were they doing background checks on me? Did they have one stressed out intern entering all the invitees' email addresses into a database? I was excited when one of my buddies offered me the invite, but by the time I actually got to sign up, much of that excitement had already passed.

Re:Closed beta killed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they have one stressed out intern entering all the invitees' email addresses into a database?

I seem to recall a contact at Google telling me that, initially, they WERE sending out invites manually.

Re:Closed beta killed it

[badboy_tw2002]

Yeah, there was like some survey stuff. I figured that was for metrics but maybe they were evaluating if people were "worthy" for entry into the club? Who knows? It should have just been an add on to google docs or gmail in the first place. Just throw it on there and see if anyone uses it.

Re:Closed beta killed it

[cowscows]

Yeah,, I can see how a relatively small and resource strapped company like google couldn't manage to throw together something to process applications for it. It's not like they already had a dozen or so other web apps that people could set up accounts for. Besides, even if someone did write it, where would they find a server to host that on?

Re:Closed beta killed it

[21mhz]

I actually got my Wave invite in good time. Never used the chance to try it, as I didn't see a need.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[grumbel]

I wanted, then I found at that it is currently not possible (or at least awkward via some email hack) to create a public wave, then I went away thinking "I'll try that again when its ready"... Guess that will now never happen, to bad, since it actually looked quite good for development discussions, brainstorming and all that other stuff that isn't quite a mailing list discussion and not quite a wiki either.

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[DragonWriter]

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?

Weren't those acquisitions largely for the purposes of (and the technology applied for) improving the realtime collaboration features in Google Documents and Spreadsheets?

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.

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a development model that isn't just a bunch of bullshit buzzwords for a middle-out model? Perhaps use amazing modern technology like the telephone or email, and actually put someone in charge of your project instead of relying on flaky feelgood collaboration? Maybe use a repository like the rest of the software world? Or simply join a rugby club where your agile scrum and collaborative sprint abilities will be rewarded?

Glad to help.

boundaries of computer science

[omidaladini]

Google writes in the blog post that Wave has "pushed the boundaries of computer science." And how exactly?!

Re:boundaries of computer science

[dzfoo]

Because computer scientists have always been baffled by the purely theoretical challenge of implementing "real time typing", that staple of old AIM clients from the 1990s, in JavaScript.

      -dZ.

Wave goodbye!

[jolyonr]

*waves*

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[lga]

Absolutely.

I use it to coordinate a web development team. I have a team of four people, all in different towns, collaborating through wave.
The graphic designer can drag her work in and have everyone comment.
The CSS coder can tell the PHP coder what he needs done, and vice versa.
The accesibility adviser can tell us what to change.
I can check on progress.

I will seriously miss wave.

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[amirulbahr]

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[modmans2ndcoming]

http://etherpad.com/

They provide alternatives.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[lee1]

Anyone have any suggestions?

Keep using it? After all, the server is open source; several people and organizations have installed it themselves. You can continue to use it independently of Google, and if you want to, develop the server and clients into something that suits you even better.

Wave...

[denzacar]

...goodbye.

Google Lack of Focus

[backspaces]

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.

Re:Google Lack of Focus

[lehphyro]

They are trying to do everything by themselves. This attitude causes big failures like wave and small ones like badly designed APIs (some parts of Android are simply horrible) and bad integration among Google's own products like bookmarks and the rest.

Re:Google Lack of Focus

[Zelgadiss]

Actually that is Google's research strategy.

Throw random stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
I think they refer to it as "generating luck".

Re:Google Lack of Focus

[Zelgadiss]

I don't think it's has anything to do with Not Invented Here syndrome.

It's just the way Google's research works.
They basically try everything and anything, some will fail.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[PCM2]

The advantages of simultaneous editing of single documents (along with the edit history) were huge for this particular niche.

Doesn't Google Docs offer the same?

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Thinboy00]

I believe Google was working on (and may have finished?) federation with Jabber/XMPP/Google Talk/what-do-you-call-it.

My Infant Daughter Predicted This...

[FrankDrebin]

She said, "Goo goo. Wave bye-bye."

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Nazlfrag]

I would, but then I would be promoting processes and tools over individuals and we can't have that now can we ;)

What did they expect?

[Shados]

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?

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[welcher]

Maybe the problem was that the users of Wave also used phrases like "hyper rapid content development among small groups of dispersed people." Painful.

What is Google thinking?

[yyxx]

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[tophermeyer]

Painful.

It's buzzword friendly! It allows you to leverage your synergies or something.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[WoLpH]

Second that.

I really love Google Wave but it was simply too unstable to use very often. Slowdowns and sometimes even crashes were often, either by wave or the browser having problems with it. It's brilliant technology that has a lot of potential in the future, but I don't think it's ready for most production usage yet.

Acquire, Alter, A...

[moria]

In response to embrace, extend, extinguish, Google acquire, alter, and abort.

Dammit...

[maijc]

...they kill it when i start to get it..

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Ash Vince]

hyper rapid

lol, try saying "very fast" and then maybe normal people will take you seriously :)

Too many problems

[slasho81]

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.

that's missing the point

[yyxx]

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.

I heard plenty about it...

[drunkennewfiemidget]

And despite wanting to jump on the bandwagon, I just found myself going, "meh. I don't see the point."

*shrug*

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[digitig]

I'm using it (not my choice) for collaboration on a technical standard . I don't think it works well, because every change needs extensive discussion anyway. Standardisation is never "hyper-rapid".

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.

Re:Google's fault is lack of patience

[nanomanc]

I had an idea for a wave project that I was going to build. I requested and received a dev and test account and played about with the UI. I managed to get the openfire extension installed on my server, the google appspot account setup, a particular non-repo version of eclipse and the GWT extension (on one version of Ubuntu). I built a crude robot (the logic) and a gadget (the UI), uploaded it and saw it working. If I bought a SSL cert I could have federated so that the robot code ran on my server (as my app would have needed to do).

I liked that it was an extension to XMPP. I liked a lot about the direction google took the project. Yes, the UI was flakey at the time (last year) and I had my doubts about how federation would scale. The thing I was waiting for was some server-side code for the web part of a federated server to be made available.

I put in quite a bit of effort to get that far and had faith in google's faith in the platform. I'm surprised wave has been pulled and I'm sure developers that put in more work than I will feel let down. It is not often that google cancels a product, especially such a large one that has had so much work thrown at it. I believe the idea was a good one, that it flowed from naturally XMPP and hope it flourishes in a FLOSS way in the future.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[thoughtfulbloke]

Doesn't Google Docs offer the same?

Not quite- In wave, when rapidly evolving a text based document, you could tell exactly where other people were working. This meant people could dive into any part of the document that needed work without any additional organization of who was doing what. While google docs synchronizing every few seconds and showing who is editing approaches this, that last step actually makes quite a big difference.
I'd like to see docs color code the paragraph by the active editor, then it would have the same functionality to me.

RIP Etherpad

[ToastBusters]

So... Google killed Etherpad.......... for this?

Confused product

[jwhitener]

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[edumacator]

The new Google Docs set up actually shows you exactly where someone is and has almost the same rapid updates as Google Wave. I would guess they are using something similar in Google Docs as they did in Wave.

Dead from start

[kurtis25]

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Gerzel]

Aye Wave was always "This would be really great if they put a bit more effort into it."

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[pjfontillas]

Don't rely on a single product to guide your team. That's why you have a team leader. They are in charge of making sure you have the most effective tools at your disposal so your team can work efficiently. Multiple products that they know work well enough together that your team can benefit from using them in conjunction with one another. Sometimes one component of the system won't work well with others. The team leader replaces it; and life goes on.

Use Google Docs or something similar to easily share documents and resources.

Use Git or SVN to have a repository for your project if multiple members write code that's updated regularly.

Use the phone to call someone when it's urgent or text them if you can wait for a response. Still feel free to email people as an alternative method of communication. Use Skype, or just about any other instant messenger. Don't rely on just one thing.

Rely on your team leader, that's why you have one. Can't reach someone or somebody isn't putting in their fair share of work? The team leader ultimately takes care of that, whether by removing the offending member or reprimanding them.

Specifically, our team uses Git to access a repo hosted on ProjectLocker. PivotalTracker helps keep our features, deadlines, and bugs prioritized; and we're looking into using Trac for bugs and issues. We use Google Docs to share resources. We email each other constantly; have each other's phone #s; and sync up via Skype at least once a day. There are a few hiccups here and there, but you learn to roll with it and keep on going.

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[Bob The Cowboy]

(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.)

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.

Dissapointed

[GWBasic]

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!

Wave and Groove were both great but flawed

[Bodhammer]

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.

That's about right.

[Minwee]

I guess the guys at Google couldn't figure out what it was for either.

Re:Wave's final Firefly reference...

[zeroG_prc]

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.

absolutement. anybody who's lived with technology and the internets the past 10-20 years and developed in this space should get this. that was exactly what i saw in wave.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[edthebedhead]

So much for my PhD project. oops?

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[LordLimecat]

If they released the source, in what way did they kill the thing?

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?

[WaroDaBeast]

You mean, things like "redefine turn-key web-readiness," "iterate cross-media platforms," or "unleash proactive schemas"?

SPAM

[Stiletto]

My only encounter with Wave was people SPAMming me with wave requests. It'll pretty much be permanently associated with SPAM in my mind.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Mike Buddha]

Isn't that true of all of Google's "beta" projects (ie everything they do)?

Google giveth, and Google taketh away

[Animats]

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.

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[Americano]

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.

No tables

[AdamHaun]

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.

Re:No tables

[owigger]

Agreed! I missed that, too. Sadly, nobody is going to implement tables in wave now. Maybe the omission was deliberate, in order to stop "visual artists". Remember what damage table abusers did to HTML web design?

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Archeron]

Like others here, I was invited. I started watching their intro video with two of the least compelling and homely promotional staff ever droning on and on and ZZzzzz...
By the time I woke up some time later, I had forgotten what I was doing and never went back. Perhaps they should have hired Godaddy's or Budwieser's publicists.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Swampash]

join a rugby club where your agile scrum and collaborative sprint abilities will be rewarded

Post of the day. +1

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[amRadioHed]

What Flash? Clearly you don't know what you're talking about.

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.

Sadness

[AP31R0N]

Wave is what the internet was headed for all along. Chat, email, cloud collaboration all in one package.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Ash Vince]

Standardisation is never "hyper-rapid".

I am going to hunt down and kill the next person who uses "hyper-rapid" in this thread :)

That's a shame.

[Kireas]

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[teh kurisu]

Don't you get the feeling that Wave was just a public testing ground for features that Google would eventually integrate into its other products?

The UI was certainly innovative, and as mentioned above it did offer new features, but there was no compelling reason for it to be a separate product from Google's existing line-up.

Failed because people didnt grok it

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:Failed because people didnt grok it

[Terrasque]

I fully agree. We used wave for developing an open source project (sharing ideas, defining features, discussing said features and ideas, sharing data (like crash output) and discussing that) with people from different time zones, and it was an absolute dream. We could have 4-5 people active at the same time (two typing various features, one making a comment to a feature, one answering another comment, and so on) and it felt like being i an actual meeting with them, without the annoyances of people talking at the same time (even tho they typed at the same time).

Saying google wave is a solution looking for a problem is like saying a smartphone is a solution looking for a problem. You can already buy phone, camera, notepad, gameboy, radio, watch, calculator, maps, gps device, music player, portable movie player... plus you already have the post office for sending letters and messages.

Google wave collected more or less all current ways of digital communication in one system, and then some. I'm sad that they stop it, and it's annoying to see people dismissing it just because they're happy with existing email (and all it's flaws). Wave was a very good solution for a lot of a lot of problems which, granted, we already have some pretty crappy (and many) separate solutions for.

too soon

[YaBa_Portugal]

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.

open source it!

[StripedCow]

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

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[68kmac]

I was invited into it, so I signed up. Looked around and couldn't find a way to make it useful to me

For me, the "now what?" moment was more of "now where are all the people I know and want to work with?" I think Wave is a rare case where the "by invitation only" technique worked against it. To make use of Wave, all the people you want to work with need to be able to sign up. The invitation was an additional hurdle to its adoption.

A theory. Wave doesn't fit long term strategy.

[upuv]

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.

No

[cyclomedia]

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

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[maxwell demon]

What Flash? Clearly you don't know what you're talking about.

Maybe the Wave data is stored on SSD.

IMO, Failed because.....

[rainhill]

It was not a KISS! It really is that simple.

"Wave has taught us a lot" Urs Hölzle, SVP Go

[nslonim]

What did Wave teach us?

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[stiller]

You do realize the irony in referring to an alternative which was also acquired by Google and then killed? Admittedly, this time at least they properly open sourced the codebase. As opposed to the whizz-bang tech of Wave, this humble product actually seems to have a thriving community around it, now. Excellent work, Google! Please keep buying out then open sourcing promising technologies.

what really surprises me...

[alobar72]

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 ... ;-)

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Theoboley]

You'll have to do that with a hyper rapid speed. *ducks*

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[mcvos]

Exactly. I didn't have enough invited to invite everybody I knew, and that killed it as a potential email killer.

Also, I want a good native client, rather than being tied to a browser.

If Google wanted Wave to be a success, they should have put a standard Wave client on Android and give each Android user Wave.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Elektroschock]

Etherpad is just fine thanks to the Etherpad Foundation.

Must... love... Google... brother...

[markhb]

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.

Wave's raison d'être: GWT

[thisisauniqueid]

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...)

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[the agent man]

WAS fine! It was acquired by Google for the Wave and the Etherpad service closed.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[Elektroschock]

Etherpad.com closed, but Etherpad is well and alive.

See also:
http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html

Goodbye Google Wave...

[awshidahak]

I never figured out what to use you for anyway.

Wave was never opened to the public

[hadaso]

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?

Did I miss something?

[hyperion2010]

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.

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[the_olo]

Where's that edit history you're referring to?

I were looking for it in a number of places (and their own help has 0 articles for that keyword) all around the Wave UI, I just wanted to revert some deletions I've made to a document.

I couldn't find it and it was the major reason I've stopped playing with it - too easy to lose content.

The other reasons being lack of integration with Google Docs and GMail...

Re:Did anyone ever actively use it?

[no1home]

I agree. Perhaps a wave account should have been automatically given either to all GMail users, or at least to the very active ones. But really, the system should have been open for sign-up from the beginning.