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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."
...and nothing of value was lost.
...'tis easier to blame than to improve.
To Wave Goodbye.
Get it?
The problem probably with wave is that there was no community behind it. Widget could be developed with some pain. But the entire frontend stack was not available to experiment with. It is also sad that the development of the eJabberd guys (Process One) never was launched as Wave server alternative. Personally I found the demo's more impressive than my own experiences with it. But the experiences I did have, were good.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
And performance was a bit sketchy too. But most of all, it didn't have a clear 30-seconds or less explanation on what exactly it should be used to, and be better at it than email/IM.
So, wow factor was there, but users got bored, and went back to the regular bulletin boards. Where it's not that important to see that someone is typing right now, everything is more or less static and easy to understand.
I suppose online support could use it to communicate with customers, but then it'd need some heavy tweaking...
Hyperom.com
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Clearly I am in the minority but it was really useful and good for collaboration, imo. Then again I enjoyed Google Notebook too. It will be a shame to see it go.
Wave was somewhere between IM, email, forums, and The Wall. It never made much sense to me - it was kinda like asking me to cook dinner Swiss Army Knife - yeah, I can open wine, cut the meat, saw open the bread, and, well, do something with a screwdriver, but the specialized tools are much better suited for each task.
Maybe some folks did find value in it, but it seemed that the easiest thing to do on Wave was to talk about ways that Wave was theoretically good for doing stuff. And then I'd end up going and doing that stuff with the tools I'd been using to do that stuff up until now with, anyway. Either way, a product with as significant an identity crisis as Wave had from the get go isn't meant for greatness.
Although Google has said they plan to Open Source the Wave software, there has only been a partial release so far. Can we have the whole thing, please? Of course Open Source is a good way to make sure that some good comes of a discontinued product.
Bruce Perens.
We used it to run games but it got so overwhelmed we'd have to create new Waves every 50 or so posts. So I'd have a In Character 1, In Character 2, Table Talk 1, GM to Player 1, GM to Player 2, etc... At one point we had 30 or so different Waves.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I really enjoyed watching Chrome swell up to 3GB resident memory, and then detonate, while wading through all that dynamic "content." The core files were... remarkable.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what Google wave is. You have to see an indie youtube video for yourself.
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.
Even if Wave was a bad idea, perhaps Google should have continued to support it.
Why throw resources into a bottomless pit? Because time and time again it's not the best technology that wins, it's the one that everyone thinks everyone else is using. (Examples (debatable of course): qwerty keyboards, VHS, SQL, windows, C++, XML, javascript)
In the future, Google will unveil other major initiatives and will try to reach critical mass with them. Now that people know Google is willing to abandon a large project so easily, they will be less likely to commit to future Google projects.
I'll predict that we'll instead see most of Wave's functionality/technology incorporated into gmail, either as a separate panel like Buzz or integrated pop-ups like Google Talk is. It really didn't make sense to have it be a dedicated site, since it made it harder to integrate with one's other activities. I imagine that within a few months Gmail will probably introduce functionality to convert an existing email and/or chat thread into a wave.
Google never promoted it well
It never took off because it was slow, buggy, and unintuitive. I got better frames per second on Team Fortress 2. Entire sites were made dedicated to how Google Wave made us feel like old people using computers. Initially, Wave didn't even work on Google's own Chrome browser.
Google Wave got plenty of coverage. It didn't take off because it was bad.
On a related note, has anyone tried those collaborative diagramming tools that already exist? I expected (and would've been happy with) a multiplayer version of MS Visio over a real-time forum.
This is completely Google's fault. Google Wave is a great product as it currently is, but Google completely failed to communicate to people why. But more to the point, Google itself failed miserably to leverage its own idea in the ways the first demo at Google I/O promised. Why can't I integrate gmail with Google Wave? Why after all this time does it still not work on my phone? Why doesn't it work with Google Docs? Why doesn't it work with Google Buzz?
More importantly, why would someone waste so much time, money, and manpower on a product they have no intention of supporting through interoperability with their own product line and through advertising and public exposure? What did they think would happen?
This is yet another huge screwup for Google indicative of their inability to build social networking products. Maybe it's time to sell my Google shares.
I 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??
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
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.
Wave had a lot of cool ideas.
The problem was that it was a steaming pile of junk.
Since it was a browser-bound experience which didn't even have good functionality except in Gecko and Webkit it really didn't have all that much going for it.
Inefficient interface, really steep system requirements and not enough actually useful stuff to counter the disadvantages.
Also, even without allt the problems it had, it was just another form of communication without any hook to actually use it daily.
Remember, even if a service is technically superior to what it is supposed to be replacing, that alone is definitely not enough, you need something else (if I knew what apart from symptoms I'd be rich beyond imagination).
Also, if a service is inferior in speed it means it's a pain to use, and, with the market slowly realizing that you need to accept that there are slow computers on it wave really didn't fit, not only should every form of communication work on a netbook, but these days it even needs to work on a bloody cell phone.
So, yeah, bloatware with few real places where it could be used to good effect doesn't gain critical mass?
No big surprise.
... of something like google wave given the ineptitude of the masses is idiotic, something that would replace email/IM is going to take time to build (like on the order of decades). Why are companies trying to get an "instant win"? This lack of effort is disturbing. If it's not adopted immediately an din large numbers it's suddenly niche and a flop?
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Is Google Buzz next to go ?
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Would this be the same Etherpad whose wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad) reports that Google open-sourced the software (http://github.com/ether/pad) at the end of 2009?
Maybe the same Etherpad whose site lists a dozen or so public servers (http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html) which you can use to get access to the software?
Yeah, I can see why you'd be pissed that Google just killed the project and never open-sourced it. Now you can't save your company a bundle of money by installing the open-source version on your servers for free, and your only recourse is to bitch and moan about how awful Google is here on Slashdot. I seriously feel your pain, man. After going through so much effort to see if the software was still available, I can only imagine the crushing disappointment you feel now that you realize the software is gone forever, and you'll never be able to work with Etherpad ever again.
(And FFS, mods, the parent is not insightful, interesting, or even remotely relevant. It's simply bitching by a lazy person who can't be arsed to do a simple web search.)
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.
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.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
If you read TFA, is says things like "we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives" and "we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science."
Earth to Google: a computer scientific achievement does not a user experience make.
Really. It's not that hard. Just becase you can putting together bunch of crazy-ass techno doesn't means people will flock to your door any more than I should be president of the United States if I can solve a Rubuik's cube in under 10 seconds.
Pizza-munching geeks. It's crap like Wave that reassures me in my job as a user experience designer.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
*waves*
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
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.
A latent existence
http://etherpad.com/
They provide alternatives.
...goodbye.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Maybe the problem was that the users of Wave also used phrases like "hyper rapid content development among small groups of dispersed people." Painful.
Painful.
It's buzzword friendly! It allows you to leverage your synergies or something.
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.
hyper rapid
lol, try saying "very fast" and then maybe normal people will take you seriously :)
I dont read
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.
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.
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.
An important change for education.
Aye Wave was always "This would be really great if they put a bit more effort into it."
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.
Life. Is. Good.
Actually, you you might be the uninformed arse here. Last time I tried (and *I* actually tried, not just googled it and then ran my mouth on /.) to install Etherpad it was not a straightforward install, the source was full of hard-coded crap, it lacked many of the features the website had, the docs were bad, and when it finally got up and running it was flakey.
Yes some people have had success, but Google put almost no effort or man power into it, and it was in many ways a better tool than wave.
I was disappointed with Wave. About a year ago I spent a week trying to understand their source code because I wanted to use their data structures as a database and eventually build it into ObjectCloud. Their code was about 20,000 lines that essentially ran a text-based chat with no way to persist the data. I asked twice on their mailing list which interfaces I should plug into to persist the data, but I got no responses.
Basically, they tried to solve too many problems at once. If they just open-sourced a nice way to have concurrent data structures, it might have taken off; but the system for concurrent data structures was too difficult to understand or work with.
Google promoted Wave well, I remember sitting behind some Wave developers at Google shortly before they were going to show it off and they kept saying things like, "when everyone's using Wave..." Well, it takes a long time to build that kind of critical mass!
No, I will not work for your startup
I guess the guys at Google couldn't figure out what it was for either.
There were also performance issues once waves got large.
Had a look at it, played with it a bit, but really couldn't see the point. Don't think i've even logged into my wave account in about 6-9 months.
I'm sure maybe SOME people found a use for it, but by and large, most people struggled to find a purpose for it, other than sharing porn, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You mean, things like "redefine turn-key web-readiness," "iterate cross-media platforms," or "unleash proactive schemas"?
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
A friend and I tried using it, mostly as a joke, and one of the first things I discovered was that there was no obvious way to make a table. I know the web is based around format-independent data, but I wish more sites would provide a simple way to do aligned columns. It makes so many things so much easier to read.
Visit the
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.
Standardisation is never "hyper-rapid".
I am going to hunt down and kill the next person who uses "hyper-rapid" in this thread :)
I dont read
It's true that I didn't use my Wave account much, but not because I didn't want to...more because nobody else I wanted to talk to had it, or was willing to use it.
Not being developed isn't the same as deleted, at least. It's still functional for the time being.
To much anime is bad for the brain...desu.
Sorry. Couldn't help it.
Ok, WE did. But the people I tried to get using it for meetings and the like just didn't want to know. They're happy with their voice conferences plus one person presenting a powerpoint over a screen sharing app.
Hey now that google considers it useless, maybe they should open source it...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Google has publicly stated. "That the future is mobile platforms."
How does Wave fit into this future of mobile platforms? It doesn't. It's gone.
Buzz is arguably a bigger dud. But it is still hanging on. ( How much longer is debatable. ) Why? Buzz can work on a mobile platform.
Just a theory.
What did Wave teach us?