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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.
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!"
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.
Insightful is the fact that the comment gets moderated according to it's first word. Let's see if this works...
"Solution in search of a problem"?
Here's the problem. This week, I dragged a work related email out of my archive, hit reply-all, added a couple of extra recipients, top-posted a "why has nothing been done about this yet" comment at the top, and hit send.
There were a few replies, some of which added new people to the conversation. So there were multiple threads going on with different subsets of the relevant people seeing them. Then another colleague chimed in independently, so I forwarded him one of the mails, which contained some, but not all, of the conversation so far.
If all this had happened in a Wave, everyone would have been party to the whole conversation, and latecomers would have been able to catch up.
That it could seamlessly turn into a chat, is great. That we could collaboratively edit a wavelet is useful too.
I'd have used Wave a lot more if we'd had one inside our intranet firewall.