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Why Wave Failed
Florian Wardell submitted a little discussion piece about Why Wave Failed. He blames marketing and the staged rollout. Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly. Had I been able to read my regular mail in the same UI, I might have been tempted to use it more.
Whatever the reason for Wave’s failure is, the fact remains: There are two types of people, the ones that love Wave, and the ones that don’t know what it is.
Well, I guess I don't exist then. I tried Wave, I understand that it's supposed to be a collaboration tool more than just a glorified IM Client. And I don't love it -- I don't hate it, either. If it cost money I would hate it. But since it's open source and free I kind of view it as a solution to a problem I don't have. My coworkers and I played around with it for a day, noticed some tiny problems with arrival times of messages and the like (things that would probably be ironed out) but after that small amount of time, I grew bored of it and didn't consider it a viable or necessary communication channel. Of course, I'm not trying to write code with someone on the other side of the world either.
Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly.
Well, to counter that, I personally found it to be too confusing and not intuitive enough. Adding in my e-mail would have just made it an indiscernible mess. GMail is already busy enough, I'm not going to be able to consume that inside Wave. Doing one thing really well is often more valuable to me than doing a lot of things really well and trying to cram them into one experience ... this UI bloat really wears on me.
Meanwhile, we’ll have to include Wave to Google’s increasing list flops: The Nexus One, Google Answers, Google Checkout, Google Viewer, the Knol, Orkut, Wave, and Buzz.
Fail early, fail often, right? I feel bad for Novel's Pulse and SAP's Cloudave which I think were built up to interact with Wave but at the same time I don't think it was forced on them nor do either of them have to stop working on that product if Google is dropping out of the game (open source is great!). Google's failures are far less painful to me than another company's failures so I'll gladly tolerate them ... maybe even appreciate them because they'll get something right one of these days (look at Android going nuts).
My work here is dung.
I thought Wave was some sort of surfing app or something physicists used for their QED experiments.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
So, what is "Wave"? Oh, I see...
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
.. he is probably right. I never heard of the thing before now (though I probably would not have been interested).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Funny, I feel the same way about websites whose style sheets involve great big floating things that don't go away when I scroll down. :)
(Serves me right for reading TFA...)
Wave Wave goodbye?
The poor performance of Wave when it first debuted quickly killed any hype it had going. Everybody was eager to try it out, then realized it ran like a dog in pretty much everything except Chrome (and even sometimes in Chrome, too.) That and the fact that it was a standalone app - I wanted to be able to work with my Google Docs, share items from my Reader, and work on emails from within Wave, spreading information between all three if I desired.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
There should be a movement to save it if for no other reason than it rhymes.
Hasn't it been out of an invite only state for less than 2 months? Certainly hasn't been around for much more than a year, if that. How the hell can someone claim it's already failed?
Google Wave was only useful to me if I could trust 100% of the participants in the Wave. Yes, yes, there is a roll-back to undo damage. Not good enough.
If I had a group of Internet participants, that absolutely wasn't the case. There was no in-between. Either you trusted someone and they could do almost anything, or you didn't. And damage was extremely easy to do. There wasn't anything else that I could find, like moderator pre-approval.
Public groups were too much trouble under Google wave. A group of students collaborating on a private assignment? Not so much.
When I first saw reports and demos of Wave, my reaction was basically "wtf is this crap?" When some of the younger people at my last job (web hosting company) started using it and I saw it "in action," that basically just solidified my initial impression. I couldn't figure out what it was really for (in a "solution to a problem" sense) or why I would want to use it.
It seems to be just an extreme conclusion of an ADHD society. It gives too much too quickly, all jumbled up and mixed together. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like my IM being separate from my email, and maybe its OK to use LDAP to pre-populate my contacts, but that's just about where I draw the line.
I suspect that I'm far from being the only person who also though Wave was pretty much just the worst idea ever and that using it would cause brain hemorrhages. No amount of marketing or alternate release schedules is going to make up for the fact that Wave was just insanely stupid and never should have seen the light of day in the first place.
Tag this story good riddance and be done with it.
I got Wave during the beta, as did many of my friends, and we all thought it was pretty nifty. After a few weeks, it had pretty much lost its allure and almost none of us were using it because the majority of the people we communicated with didn't use it.
The really problem with Wave was definitely marketing. If I asked a random, "normal" person if they used Google Wave, their answer would be "Huh? What's that?" No one knew about it.
Sent from my iPhone 5
If Google had integrated Wave into Gmail so that you could link to waves, like attachments or something, it would have been much more popular as people could try it out painlessly without trying out a whole new website. On the other side of things Buzz should not have been integrated into Gmail. If they had reversed their decisions on these two things it might have turned out different in both cases.
It just boggles me what a monumental screwup Buzz was. Just as Facebook was garnering large amounts of discontent among it's users, Google releases their competitor with a giant privacy fuckup. If someone at Google had had more of a clue they could have stolen a chunk of users looking for an alternative to Facebook.
Google needs to release the source code to their client. I think if it were available as a reference implementation to be tweaked and forked for free that it could be turned into something very useful, especially in corporate settings.
Why did email become so successful? It solved a problem that seemed real to most people: the ability to send text over long distances very quickly and without paying a lot.
What problem did Wave solve? None of the problems Wave solved were perceived as problems by most people, so nobody saw Wave as a "killer app."
Palm trees and 8
All I knew was that is was called Google Wave, was being hyped and I needed an invite to use it.
Why should it be a big surprise this thing never got wide spread adoption?
.. he is probably right. I never heard of the thing before now (though I probably would not have been interested).
CC.
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about we've covered it a few times.
My work here is dung.
I liked Wave, I'm still using it >..
The aspect of Google's wave rollout that I found baffling was their more or less complete inability to conceptually separate(at least in their marketing messages, which is bad, possibly in some of their internal thinking, which would be worse) the specific "Google wave" webapp they had created; frankly a rather rough and somewhat niche-y thing, from the wave protocol, which had considerably greater potential to power a variety of frontend activities in a standardized way that would allow for productive interaction between them.
The closest analogy that I can think of offfhand would be if XMPP had been introduced by releasing a Pidgin fork named "XMPP" and offering no particularly interesting benefits aside from instant messaging over XMPP rather than Oscar or IRC or whatever. The world would have greeted it with a collective "meh." As it is, though, XMPP is capable of running all sorts of more or less real time communication scenarios behind the scenes, basic chat being a small subset of that. Similarly, Wave the protocol is quite powerful and interesting, "Wave" the webapp is kind of blah.
Many things take time and a second or third effort to catch on. Microsoft has failed at many things initially, but they never give up. They do use many unfair advantages, but they also are persistent.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Personally I found Wave invaluable for any number of creative applications - gaming, writing, taking notes for projects, planning various activities. I blame its failure on all you jerks for not taking a second look.
The technology behind it was an impressive bit of coding. I think the problem was that a lot of people just didn't understand what they were supposed to do with it...either that, or they were just already too comfortable with the collaboration tools they currently use and didn't want to have to learn a new one.
Living With a Nerd
Had it augmented my email, I'd probably have looked closer. Instead, it tried to replace it. I have too much invested in my email addresses to supplant them simply. Most people do, too.
This is why Buzz has been so popular. Oh wait...
The main problem with this was that it solved problems that nobody was having. If I needed Wave, I would have used it, and found the time to learn it. But, no. I heard from new converts that this new software was great, would change my life, put hair on my bald spot, etc., but I've heard plenty of similar cries of pleasure from other early adopters (myspace, friendster, etc) and never trusted them, and it turned out I was right. Plus, it ties you too closely to Google.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I prefer to keep gmail a separate, standalone app. Fine if Google wants to integrate sepraately under other apps (as long as they aren't sharing my personal info a la facebook).
It was obvious Wave should have been integrated directly in Gmail just like Buzz was! I proposed it months ago as a feature to be added.
The one reason all my friends did not use it was that they had to open a new window for something they did not see the use for. If if had been integrated in Gmail, it would have been much more easier for non-geeks to take it up.
I usually don't care one way or another about google, but the way they mishandled the "Buzz" roll-out convinced me I'd never want anything with them to do, other than for handling my de-coookied, de-scripted and de-trackered searches, and a few mailing list subscriptions. I'm sure I'm not alone, and when you manage to spread that feeling among those who should be among your primary adopters, you're pretty much screwed.
Yes. I would have downloaded it the first week if it weren't for that "invitation" gimmick. I had a specific use case in mind and a specific group of people to use it with, but I realized I probably couldn't get my collaborators (non-IT people) to watch the 1-hour video (hell I could not sit through all of that), and to try to explain to them "you need an invitation to download this" would have resulted in blank looks at best. I figured I'd just wait till Google did something to make adoption easier.
I could have probably networked and asked someone for an invitation, but that is rather missing the point that I don't feel I should have to beg for an invitation to try out Google's new software. If they had wanted me to try it, they could have, you know, tried not preventing me.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Cry me a river, Google.
When Google couldn't figure out a functional use for Wave, and kind of threw it out for the public to find a use for it, the writing was on the wall.
Real time typing... Awesome you get to watch people hunt and peck, correct spelling, rethink what they are writing, etc etc. Does any of that help their communication? No.
Drag and drop files. Useful, but no auto-verisioning / checkin checkout makes it no more useful than emailing the file.
Open to develop widgets. Awesome, now I can add 25 different choose your own adventure bots to add into your wave. Still widget writers can't find a functional use.
People talking about it being great for communication that needs to be more formal than IM, yet more real-time than email, and more dynamic than a wiki. So there is a use. How much of people's daily communication would fall into this category? I don't think the percentage of most people's daily communication that could fall into this category made it worth their time to learn wave.
New Technology with no practical application may be cool but it's not technology.
Unintuitive editing. I tried it a few times, and kept ruining waves with new sections or comments that I couldn't delete, and I had trouble keeping things organized. If the product had been easier to learn without instruction manuals, I would be using it a lot, but as it stands I don't have the patience to learn it and get anyone I want to collaborate to learn it too. It was just too much effort.
Insightful is the fact that the comment gets moderated according to it's first word. Let's see if this works...
I never ever understood what the point of Wave was. What was it supposed to do? How was it supposed to be used, in a way that would amuse me, or make my life better?
Not only did I not know, but none of the people I normally deal with over gmail knew either.
The very name "Wave" indicates something transitory in nature. I used to be with a cable broadband ISP called Wave until they were bought out by Shaw@Home. Also, in the 80s there was a one hit wonder band called "Katrina and the Waves"
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Is a tough problem. Humans have only solved it in really one way....the meeting.
Sure we love to hate them, but more collaboration can happen in 15 minutes of face to face then in hours of email or some app like this.
Nothing gets done in a meeting, but I've always found that things get done after them. We all pray for the day when we can pop in and out of some app like this and come to conclusions, blah blah. Not going to happen.
I'd rather google make the best damn screen sharing app that every was. Meetings can be remote with a good speakerphone/mic+speakers and a good screen sharer. Any other tool is probably going to fall short. A shared desktop can do just about anything.
If you are all physically together with a desktop and a whiteboard even better.
What would be really cool is a real physical white board that could replicate over the wire. SmartBoards are getting there, but they typically use projectors and pressure sensors. I want to draw on a board with a real marker...and have the other side show it as pixels. Please someone put a bunch of big old LEDs side by side and make them drawable on...if they can magically erase the pen ink that would be great :) Where is all the damn nanotech.
Okay I've rambled enough.
After the initial swell of interest, it's usage fell into a trough and was never able to gain enough crest to break out into rolling acceptance.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... not because of any of that, but because as an email client it sucked, as an instant messaging client it sucked, and as a collaborative editing tool, well, wikis are much better.
My 2 cents.
I've tried very hard to like it, as I absolutely believe that email, instant messaging, collaborative editing, etc. need to evolve. And I can totally see them converge. But wave just didn't do it.
Wave failed for basic marketing reasons. Essentially, it was impossible to explain Google's vision of Wave in an elevator. If, instead, they had marketed as "21st century email", it would have had a better chance (it still has). Also, they built an impressive platform that allowed essentially anything... and forgot to put in the basics (for example, an integrated, easy to use version of a mailing list) Marketing essentially to Google geeks only didn't help either. Did you see any promotion of Wave in Google sites? (like the one for Chrome in the hompage when using IE) Also, account type proliferation is BAD. I already have enough trouble explaining to people that they don't need a _Gmail_ account to use Google services, just a _Google_ account. Now we had these addresses that _looked like_ emails, but weren't. And you still required a google account to get one. In a nutshell, Google should have done what it did with Gmail: do one thing and do it right. Solve a pain point. Only AFTER that has taken off, reveal the whole amazing plataform that powers it.
1) They couldn't explain what it was easily, and therefore couldn't sell it.
2) It solved problems that were already solved (Collaboration software! Gosh, how original!)
3) Interface was an afterthought, not the product's primary driver, as it MUST be for any consumer software product (Note. Repeat the word "Apple" three times before you flame).
Google is getting more Microsofty by the day, although Microsoft's MO is usually to solve problems you don't have in a way you can't use very easily (e.g. Azure) for big business so that the peons are forced to use it (and hate it) anyway.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The biggest problem was that it was more of a "message board" than an "instant messenger". The major failing was that it was indeed built into the web browser. It wasn't the type of IM that would give you a pop-up when someone said something. So for that, we used other IMs (Crappy Microsoft one, I think) - in my current company, we use Skype a lot.
No one had the discipline, temperate, or screen real estate to devote to wave - when what we really needed it for was occasional real-time conversations with a large dispersed group.
I know people had been using wave with success for playing RPGs. It's a hell of a lot faster than PBEM, and more accessible for most than IRC. Other than that, it was a solution looking for a problem.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I was probably one of the first people to get an invite. The problem? I didn't know anyone else that was using wave, so I didn't have anyone to collaborate with! If they had made it something that was available to gmail users I would have had other people to interact with.
The other problem was that they brought it out too early.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
I really tried it out, followed the development, and found it absolutely phantastic! - Except of for me. Serious. I hope and wish it will come back; but not as an 'outside' thingy like Wave was; yet-another-comm-application. When I saw the movies on Youtube, I was sure, that the death knell of email was close. When I started using it, everything had to be set up from scratch. I couldn't just drag and drop all my mails, any mail, around the globe to any of my contacts. I am running a number of mail servers, and this thing, Wave, wouldn't work with them.
In a nutshell, I guess Wave was just premature, like many inventions. Leonardo and the helicopter spring into mind. Though I have my contacts, my archives of close to 100.00 mails, my servers; and hell freezes over before I start another system, empty, from scratch.
Keep trying Google, it's the right thing. Now it only needs to fully integrate, work, migrate.
the idea behind wave was that kids would sit in front of a computer all day chatting. about the time it came out smart phones started to become popular and people use them more than PC's now.
then there were the usual Google mistakes
no trust. i'm not downloading and giving facebook passwords to some guy advertising a facebook plugin who's only a screen name
no links to outside social sites. just like buzz only pulled info from twitter made it worthless
hard to find people. i like google reader but it's a PITA to find people to follow. why can't google link it to facebook or twitter to scan for friends?
google makes some cool software but sometimes it seems like the combine apple's walled garden with the work of OCD kids. they code it to version .8 or barely 1.0. release it to the wild as open source and then forget about it and expect others to make it better. meanwhile the engineers who coded it have moved on to the next cool thing and don't want to work on it since it's old news. or lock it to only interact with google services where you can't find anyone else using it. and with google's management culture you will never get the engineers to revisit an old project unless it's a huge revenue opportunity.
I run a closed mailing list on a controversial topic (climate change) with a history of the opposing camp stealing and publishing private emails (that some of you may know about). Participants on the list are sophisticated about physical climatology and/or climate policy but have varying and sometimes low sophistication about computing. Almost certainly some of them spend some time getting email on compromised machines. We would like to be able to have private conversations among members of the list about projects and initiatives of various sorts. Some of these may be projects that people opposed to us who have demonstrated a lack of respect for privacy may be interested in spying on. The solution I came up with was to announce waves on the mailing list; google handles the security and shows who is subscribing to the message. It isn't perfect. If list member A is hacked they can subscribe to private conversation X. But we can see that A is participating, decide whether this is the sort of topic A would follow, and listen for comments of the sort A would make. If it's suspicious, direct contact to A would follow. And of course, we can up the security if we want to. But this level of security has suited us well. Forum technology can provide some amount of this but as far as I know doesn't show who's listening. I'm not sure if this sort of thing was a design criterion, but we could send an invite to the mailing list and members could see it. This was a major added convenience. This doesn't work that way on Google docs. I know of nothing comparable in any other communication platform. Does anyone? Nobody liked the Wave interface much, but we put up with it for its benefits in this direction. I'm sure that Wave would have been more successful in our group had there been more attention paid to design. This confirms what many people are already speculating. But still it offered us unique benefits that no other system provides. Some of the whiz-bang features have proven useful, but it was the security of knowing who was reading that provided the major advantage for us. I may need to code up such functionality myself if nobody can suggest an alternative.
mt
Nobody actually knew what it was.
The marketing maybe. The phone itself is an excellent piece of hardware, the only thing that even slightly tempts me away from my N1 right now is a Droid X and with Motorola seemingly in the anti custom-ROM camp I refuse to support them.
I still think Google gave up too soon there, if enough consumers realized that buying the phone yourself then getting a plan without the phone subsidy built in is ultimately cheaper more carriers would be forced to offer those types of plans. It saddens me that I may have to purchase my next Android phone through the carrier and locked.
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...
DancesWithBlowTorch, keep an eye on Mozilla's Bespin. I've used the very basic skeleton project they had and think they're on track but it's coming along and will hopefully firm up once HTML5 support and standards become common place. I don't know how fluid it will become with real time updates but imagine editing your code anytime from any browser that is HTML 5 compliant and your collaborators seeing that. Not sure how many languages they plan on incorporating but when it's done, your source will exist and be compiled in the cloud. Maybe not ideal for a business but for open source collaboration ... really neat!
My work here is dung.
Wave failed for me because I couldn't get an invite and then promptly forgot about it. There's nothing like hyping something and then making sure it's not available to kill off a product.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
The staged roll-out did hurt slightly, it was hard to get traction early on when so few of my contacts were in Wave at all. But the biggest reason it failed for me was that the interface was so atrociously lethargic. The second reason it failed for me was that Wave lived in its own little island tab.
Google Wave failed because the BOTs didn't work, no one really supported the client base, and 3rd party components would appear to work and then not work. There were promises of enhancements that never materialized and in the end no one could define what the product actually did. The collaboration scheme worked well but only for one-off projects, perhaps that functionality will appear in docs, mail or other products going forward.
and too configurable or flexible?
I haven't tried it but the videos introducing it showed a 747-cockpit kind of UI (very busy, important info
all over the place in unexpected or random locations.)
The value of simplicity (for adoption) cannot be overemphasized.
Simplicity of use (one text-entry field, two buttons), and non-clutteredness with mind-F***ing banner ads,
are arguably among the main reasons the google
search page was adopted over its competitors in the first place.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Maybe I'm just too old and grumpy, but I've been on the internet since the days when the most useful protocol was telnet, and I thought the same thing as you did when I saw wave. In fact, I tried asking a bunch of much younger people about it, and the best answer I got was that "it allows you to collaborate".
Q: "better than a shared whiteboard and phone call?" ."
A: "well, no . .
Q: "How do you keep everybody from trashing the design with their own agendas?"
A: "You can roll back"
That's the solution? To restore from a backup and waste everybody's time?
While Wave was definitely cool, and I don't fault Google for releasing it (I love playing with new stuff), it bugs the crap out of me that Every New Thing gets a fresh round of "buzz" and internet cheer-leading whether or not it's better than or even as good as what we already have.
A conversation I had with a friend yesterday explain it all succintly:
"Google finally pulled the plug on the Google Wave project."
"What's Google Wave?"
"Precisely."
I want the Etherpad developers to go back to that project again. It was better than Wave because it was much simpler and did just what I wanted. The only think I felt it was missing was spellcheck.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
I believe wave is a solution to many existing problems.
Think about a real estate contract. The brokers, attorneys, and clients all need to sign and approve any changes. So we end up faxing and mailing things all over the place saying "please change paragraph n to read: ____ " and everyone has to sign.
Imagine if all these parties could interact with a single document through a wave. An enormous effort would be saved!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Wave was confusing, and it demanded a big shift in thinking up front -- sort of like vim. You couldn't just add little changes into your workflow incrementally. On top of that, you had to have someone else to do it with. It was hard to be a geeky guy who was interested, and willing to climb the learning curve on your own.
So imagine you use a typical gui screen editor. And you want to learn vim. And the only way you can move forward is if you find someone else who's willing to use vim with you while you learn.
Most people just aren't going to do it.
Incremental gradual change is easier for people.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can't agree more. Integration with email until Wave could replace email was key to Wave not making waves.
Wave has existed for three months or so. That's roughly how long it's been fast, stable and available to everyone. Just what did Google expect to happen in such a short time?
Wave needed at least another _year_ or two to gain traction, not a few weeks. I somehow suspect the cost of running it was too high compared to any perceived way of monetizing it in the short term, and they pulled the plug.
I suppose the good thing about it is that nobody's had time to become too dependent on it just yet. We do use it where I work, but so far we've held off on making ourselves dependent on it; wise choice it would seem. We did have plans in that direction though, wrongly assuming that since Google added it to Apps it was here to stay.
I for one will miss it quite a lot, it made some activities so much easier than the alternatives, but I'll live.
what killed wave is what haunts almost all google apps ... just good enough is not good enough
besides i thought wave was that cheer down in stadiums around the US
I just started to use it seriously a month or so ago- when enough people i worked with were aware of it. I'm a 50-something engineer cum technical marketing guy - Most of the people i work with aren't IT whiz kids, they are a bit more representative of 'normal' people, they are spread all over the world so this kind of thing could be ideal. But these guys are not early adopters, these things take time to propagate out into the wider world. For example I 'd heard of Facebook YEARS before I started using it - now its universal. I was using E-mail at university in the 70's. It was nearly 20 years until 'everyone' had it. A few months means nothing.
From a commercial point of view this early abandonment should (in a sane world) knock BILLIONS off Google's market value, what they are essentially saying is don't invest any effort in any technology we bring out since we may not stick with it. Or looking at it another way, If its 'free' its not worth having. Almost makes me wish I'd paid for it so I could bitch at them.
Anyone who has tried to following a several month conversation with several version of the same document in Outlook would know why Wave could have been great. To have one place to read meeting notes from the team, or to read the decision making process for a project that you are going to maintain would have been very beneficial. Don't tell me that the company WIKI would have the documentation. Developers are notoriously awful at creating documentation, let alone maintaining it. Using Wave as project documentation tool would have kept it alive. that being said, add Wave to the list of really good ideas poorly implemented. I believe Wave failed for the following reasons: The server piece wasn't readily available .If I could have just walled it off for my organization only it would have seen better adoption
No intergation with Google Docs. A Collaboration tool with the documents to collaborate with is just stupid
It was buggy. I don't know how many times I added contacts that just disappeared...
I do firmly believe that someone will pick up this idea and run with it. I just hope they make it work better
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
Well, what did you expect to happen when you call it "Wave" after the tech in Firefly, and make all kinds of obscure references? You get the same fate, that's what.
Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave. Requiring a separate window guarantees that I wouldn't use it regularly.
Huh? Having its own inbox has yet to kill facebook, though I wish it would.
> He blames marketing and the staged rollout
> Personally I think that what killed it was that I should have transparently been able to see my gmail inside wave
Both wrong, the answer is much, much simplier - wave is just useless. For useful technologies, you don't need 'marketing' and forcing users to use it to make it popular. For completely idiotic ideas, even this won't help.
Lack of good mobile support killed wave: http://mispeled.net/2010/08/04/why-google-wave-broke/
slashdot promised me that wave had D&D games going on in google wave. I have no friends and so i cant play table top games :( I tried to sign up for wave but I didnt seen any d&D games :( Thats why it failed..... false advertisement.
I tried to use wave, but never figured out how to use their whiteboard. Now I don't remember what was the problem. They did have a whiteboard, but for some reason it was not usable.
Google is being entrepreneurial on a massive scale. If something doesn't work out that doesn't make them a failure. They're the only ones taking these kinds of risks. And a massive risk needs a good exit strategy.
Meanwhile, we'll have to include Wave to Google's increasing list flops: The Nexus One, Google Answers, Google Checkout, Google Viewer, the Knol, Orkut, Wave, and Buzz.
It's strange to see some of those on there. Sure, most did fail, but some I can't understand why. Google Checkout for example. I actually liked it as an alternative to Paypal. It's something I used whenever I saw it available, but I've noticed now that a lot of places just don't have it as an option anymore (evidenced by the fact that my last listed purchase was August 2009 - before that one it was in September 2007).
Google Answers seems odd too. Now, the whole "bounty" system that they used was quirky, but the idea in general seems like a very similar idea to Yahoo Answers, which I've used a lot and is immensely popular.
Oh well. I still use Gmail, Docs, Reader, Bookmarks, and Picasa pretty heavily. I'm waiting for them to come up with a good Dropbox clone. Paying for extra space would be more attractive if I knew I could spread it amongst that many services rather than buying more space for each type of thing I use.
t
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It wasn't revolutionary, it wasn't convenient, and it wasn't useful.
Fact of the matter is that it was unintuitive, difficult to use, and duplicated functionality - poorly - of apps we use that already do their jobs well.
Google Checkout is (was?) only available in three countries, not even close physically to one another.
Google Checkout allows buyers in over 140 countries to purchase goods and services using a credit or debit card through our fast, secure checkout process.
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I've actually been considering using Google Wave to conduct online focus groups. I think it has real potential in the area of low-cost collaborative research. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Lets face it, this is yet another example of upper management being short-sighted when they ended the program. It's just so typical, upper management get a hold of someone else's good thing, inflate it past what is reasonable and until it blows up and then they blame it on the customers or the employees or both; and for this they get six and seven figure salaries. Isn't big business beautiful.
I would agree, But there's a difference between "It didn't work out we will be dropping this product in a managed way" and "I'm bored: Screw you guys I'm going home..." This product has not had time to realise its potential, and the promotion to the wider community has been almost non-existent.
My point is that Integrating something like this into the way we work is a relatively long job, with this short an attention span, no organization will take the risk of trying to build a way of working around a google product again. And without organizational buy-in this kind of collaborative product will get nowhere.
Not enough people caught the Firefly reference.
Were we really supposed to start adopting Wave? Last I tried it, I was unable to meld my existing email with Wave- send messages to people who only have normal email from a Wave, and receive emails into a Wave. Without that, it is a failure. I'm not going to be forced to check my Email, Wave and Facebook to reply to various people. It's bad enough I can't just hit 'Reply' on those Facebook message notifications you get in your Email.
I also thought were were going to see Wave clients? I thought I would be able to use my own email address for this.
They should have made this into the next gen of Gmail, and then the whole Gmail userbase could just flip the switch in Gmail and suddenly everything would be waves.
It appears that Brazil and India use it the most.
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I actually thought Wave was still in beta. I heard great things but didn't realize I could use it yet. This is a sad story.
Brazil and India seem to be ~70% of the total orkut users.
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Just sayin'
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That was one of the reasons I stayed away from Wave. My typing is abominable sometimes -- not so much in typos or spelling, but in composition, to where I end up editing sentences like William S. Burroughs would edit a page. Rearranging words here, moving phrases around, and so on.
What I specifically don't want is the whole feeling of someone looking over my shoulder as I try to compose a thought.
Besides, I get it's an "innovation" in the sense of making something that exists new and fresh, but it's hardly _novel_, considering unix talk programs worked like that from day 1 (and I disliked them for the same reason)
I used wave for a brief period of time. A few classmates and I formed a wave and used it to talk about the class, assignments, and how awful the professor was that day. It initially worked ok for that purpose, but when it got to 100+ posts, it was as slow as molasses and we stopped using it. In retrospect, a forum would have worked better for what we were doing. I think wave was trying to aim for a niche in between IM and forums. The problem is that, that niche doesn't really exist.
Lack of control over your waves. Yes, it's supposed to be a collaborative environment. But you should still have control over who you collaborate with.
My team and I were using Wave to sketch out ideas for a project that we were working on. One of the team members invited someone else into the Wave - no big deal we thought, we tangentially knew the guy and he could contribute. But then he invited other people to the Wave (despite the warning we placed at the top of the Wave asking folks not to do that).
At that point, we tried to remove all these newcomers and found that we couldn't. We also discovered (well, knew already) that it was impossible to actually delete content from the Wave, because of its versioning capabilities.
So, our semi-private project had become public knowledge, and we had no way to get control back.
I understand that Google eventually did add the ability to manage Wave members ... but there was no way I was going back after what I experienced. A semi-private wiki with access controls is a much better option for my use-case.
Everytime I tried Wave I couldn't escape the feeling it was just like a busy wiki, with a superset of features.
Now here's what would be awesome: If I could share a window in my text editor / IDE with someone else on the planet, edit a piece of source together in real time, and still be able to save and compile directly from within the software. Oh, wait...
Emacs, of course, has supported this since a long time when running under X Windows. See e.g., "New Frame on Display..." menu item under File...
What killed Wave and dooms all of Google's cloud efforts is the lack of privacy.
I'll say it again: Wave failed because it was technologically brilliant, and implemented as a laggy piece of crap with a horrible user interface. You can't use it for non-trivial communications because all the interleaving makes it more difficult to follow it than a linear conversation, and the insistance on a web-based frontend means that beyond 50-100 messages it slows down to a crawl. I could literally type a message, then fetch something from the kitchen while it was typing out.
Put the concept into the hands of someone who can make things work for a user, not just a tech dude, and it can still succeed.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
dude, seriously, fuck off. you're worse than he is.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
I have to say that that's the single most astonishing thing I've ever read on Slashdot.
... namely Orkut. Sure, it never caught on in the US, but overseas, it's big.
No kidding. I'm never going to use all my Gmail space, so it would be nice to be able to use it for something else. Also: an Evernote clone would be another thing I'd like to see. Being able to tie all this stuff together in one place would be handy.
Wave did not take off because there were no Wave servers worth a damn that weren't Google.
Wave protocol is a Sharepoint killer. It's not a new cool social medium, it's a workgroup and corporate information sharing system.
And I want to kill Sharepoint, because the stupid thing only works with Windows.
Many organisations do not want, or cannot, share their information with Google. Google doesn't even use any translucent database techniques to help users keep their data private. Google being a Wave server is useful for some public publishing, but there must be your own private Wave server for Wave to be usable by most of the target market. The target market is the market of Sharepoint, larger organisations who are always more careful with their data.
So Google's error was not to make something noone wanted. It was to make something none of the interested people could use, because they did not release a free Wave server to use inside your organisation.
They will make the same mistake, of assuming people will share their data when they won't, again in future.
And I really don't care that people, usually from Google, say that Google can be trusted not to read users' data. That's not relevant; they can be compelled to reveal it to random other authorities without the users' knowledge or consent, and if anything like that does happen, they don't give any information out as a matter of policy.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
I would just do a M-x make-frame-on-display and give it a remote X11 Display string. An Emacs frame would appear on the remote display and my partner and I could edit the same code simultaneously, save it to my local host, compile, test, etc. If we typed at the same time then the keystrokes got intermixed, but all that took was some coordinating over a headset. This was all over a corporate LAN and security wasn't a concern of course, but it seems like it should be doable over the open internet with the appropriate ssh tunneling.
The reason I didn't use Google Wave was simply because few of my friends did, and they didn't because was is the same for them. Whatever the technical, invitation and marketing problems were they were irrelevant. To be useful all your friends had to have a pressing need for the Wave and to bother to install and learn it. Otherwise email, facebook and twitter were good enough, and all your networks functioning on them.
The Wave was just not a successful disruptive technology. Email was and succeeded because it was universal and the alternatives were telegrams, faxes and letters.
it was pointless without email
Planning trips, wave is invaluable. I'm an avid rock climber, and I used wave to constantly update people on trips, and used interactive maps to plan them (the map feature is arguably Wave's best gadget).
I also use wave to keep action item, backburner, and reference lists for myself and my business partner.
Lastly, I attempted to use wave instead of a forum on my website. It would've been great, but no one fucking knew what it was. In my opinion, wave's failure was a marketing one, not technical.
Lastly, it's more convenient for collaborative creative content generation than any other tool. The slashdot community, believe it or not, is the opposite of Wave's target market.
I hope Google has a replacement brewing for my purposes.