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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."
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!
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).
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
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.
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.
Please don't like Gmail or Google Calendar. I don't won't those to go away too! ;)
... 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?
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.)
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.
Maybe the problem was that the users of Wave also used phrases like "hyper rapid content development among small groups of dispersed people." Painful.
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.
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!
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
I guess the guys at Google couldn't figure out what it was for either.
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...)
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
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?
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