Google Kills Wave Development

We've mentioned several times over the past two years Wave, Google's ambitiously multi-channel, perhaps plain overwhelming entry in the social media wars. Now, reader mordejai writes "Google stated in its official blog that they will not continue developing Wave as a standalone product. It's sad, because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses."

Comments

SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[cencithomas]

...and nothing of value was lost.

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[HeckRuler]

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

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

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[bonch]

Google Wave just got Kinned!

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

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[jimmydigital]

Wait. Do you claim Sharepoint is dead like Wave?

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

Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh.

[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.

[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.

Not Open

[Skinkie]

The problem probably with wave is that there was no community behind it. Widget could be developed with some pain. But the entire frontend stack was not available to experiment with. It is also sad that the development of the eJabberd guys (Process One) never was launched as Wave server alternative. Personally I found the demo's more impressive than my own experiences with it. But the experiences I did have, were good.

UI was weird

[saikou]

And performance was a bit sketchy too. But most of all, it didn't have a clear 30-seconds or less explanation on what exactly it should be used to, and be better at it than email/IM.
So, wow factor was there, but users got bored, and went back to the regular bulletin boards. Where it's not that important to see that someone is typing right now, everything is more or less static and easy to understand.

I suppose online support could use it to communicate with customers, but then it'd need some heavy tweaking...

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.

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! ;)

What did it actually bring?

[mrbene]

Wave was somewhere between IM, email, forums, and The Wall. It never made much sense to me - it was kinda like asking me to cook dinner Swiss Army Knife - yeah, I can open wine, cut the meat, saw open the bread, and, well, do something with a screwdriver, but the specialized tools are much better suited for each task.

Maybe some folks did find value in it, but it seemed that the easiest thing to do on Wave was to talk about ways that Wave was theoretically good for doing stuff. And then I'd end up going and doing that stuff with the tools I'd been using to do that stuff up until now with, anyway. Either way, a product with as significant an identity crisis as Wave had from the get go isn't meant for greatness.

Re:What did it actually bring?

[geekoid]

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

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

Re:What did it actually bring?

[farnsworth]

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

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

Re:What did it actually bring?

[Unoti]

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

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

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

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

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

Re:What did it actually bring?

[Angst Badger]

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

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

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

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

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

So, the obvious next step

[Bruce Perens]

Although Google has said they plan to Open Source the Wave software, there has only been a partial release so far. Can we have the whole thing, please? Of course Open Source is a good way to make sure that some good comes of a discontinued product.

Re:So, the obvious next step

[Bruce Perens]

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

Let's be honest here...

[neonKow]

Google never promoted it well

It never took off because it was slow, buggy, and unintuitive. I got better frames per second on Team Fortress 2. Entire sites were made dedicated to how Google Wave made us feel like old people using computers. Initially, Wave didn't even work on Google's own Chrome browser.

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

On a related note, has anyone tried those collaborative diagramming tools that already exist? I expected (and would've been happy with) a multiplayer version of MS Visio over a real-time forum.

Completely Google's Fault

[Geurilla]

This is completely Google's fault. Google Wave is a great product as it currently is, but Google completely failed to communicate to people why. But more to the point, Google itself failed miserably to leverage its own idea in the ways the first demo at Google I/O promised. Why can't I integrate gmail with Google Wave? Why after all this time does it still not work on my phone? Why doesn't it work with Google Docs? Why doesn't it work with Google Buzz?

More importantly, why would someone waste so much time, money, and manpower on a product they have no intention of supporting through interoperability with their own product line and through advertising and public exposure? What did they think would happen?

This is yet another huge screwup for Google indicative of their inability to build social networking products. Maybe it's time to sell my Google shares.

Re:Completely Google's Fault

[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: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.

Expecting rapid adoption...

[blahplusplus]

... of something like google wave given the ineptitude of the masses is idiotic, something that would replace email/IM is going to take time to build (like on the order of decades). Why are companies trying to get an "instant win"? This lack of effort is disturbing. If it's not adopted immediately an din large numbers it's suddenly niche and a flop?

Buzz next?

[sugarmotor]

Is Google Buzz next to go ?

Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas

[Americano]

Would this be the same Etherpad whose wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad) reports that Google open-sourced the software (http://github.com/ether/pad) at the end of 2009?

Maybe the same Etherpad whose site lists a dozen or so public servers (http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html) which you can use to get access to the software?

Yeah, I can see why you'd be pissed that Google just killed the project and never open-sourced it. Now you can't save your company a bundle of money by installing the open-source version on your servers for free, and your only recourse is to bitch and moan about how awful Google is here on Slashdot. I seriously feel your pain, man. After going through so much effort to see if the software was still available, I can only imagine the crushing disappointment you feel now that you realize the software is gone forever, and you'll never be able to work with Etherpad ever again.

(And FFS, mods, the parent is not insightful, interesting, or even remotely relevant. It's simply bitching by a lazy person who can't be arsed to do a simple web search.)

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: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.

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.

Wave goodbye!

[jolyonr]

*waves*

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.

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?

[Ash Vince]

hyper rapid

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

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: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.

That's about right.

[Minwee]

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

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"?

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.