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Google Wave To Live On As 'Wave In a Box'
snydeq writes "Google Wave will morph into an application bundle for real-time collaboration, according to a blog post by Google Wave engineer Alex North. 'We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and Web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box,"' North said, adding that the future of the recently flat-lined Google service will be 'defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve,' he said."
Claims it got the idea from that Schrödinger fellow.
To all the fellas out there with ladies to impress, it's easy to do just follow these steps:
1. Cut a hole in a box
2. Put your wave in that box
3. Make her open the box
An interesting workaround of the claims that it failed - now at least it's both alive and dead until we look. And how knows what that constant peeking might turn out in the long run...
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's dead, Jim.
...lots of water, and then shake it.
I guess google stopped it because they could not figure out how to allocate the amount of server infractructure needed and still earn money while keeping the service free. I actually would think that wave would reduce googles advertisement income because it would grow on the cost of other services while it has much harder demands on the computation power assigned to it than e.g. google mail. Its ok if an email takes a minute, but in the wave concept an minute would be long. With mail its even if it takes 20 Minutes a a busy time of the year.
And here's why I say so:
First, they (Google), failed or refused to integrate Gmail capabilities with Google Wave! In other words, I could not send an email from within the Google Wave interface! What reasoning was behind that?
Second, I just do not understand the logic behind their modus operandi of having usage by invite only or even suspending [new] registrations as was the case with Grand Central.
This way of doing things is just a non starter in my opinion.
Small OSS projects. It replaces irc, todo lists, websites, messenger systems....... If you've ever taken part in a small oss project you'll know the spread out mess I'm talking about.
Wave COULD fix that and have everything combined. Integrate a bunch of features that are needed... like something to do difs and small file/code uploads. I'm sure depending on the project you could think of more things. It could do the job very well without much effort on the coder's part.
First off, I truly thought the concept was great.
However, not being able to delete and modify prior threads is a HUGE (there is no super-duper-de-duper-wholy-shit symbol, so I'll just use the '4' to express my WTF-idness!) privacy issue-- 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4!!!!!
Why would you not even consider the fact that people post stupid stuff, then want to delete it?? 44444444444444444???????
Yeah.... I thought so Google, you are up China's respective bunghole. Does NSA know about this? You should send them a memo....
I am open source, and Linux baby!
The Google, you are too out there for me. I use The Gmail and The Analytics (can't get strikethrough to behave), The Blogspot, The Translate and that's about it. One day I hope to learn about The Wave, but I have to The Work and pay The Bills in a different geek field than The Googler.
Home of The Suki Series
The roll-out was just terrible (like, in a different way, to Buzz). They should have just added a sweet little "wave live!" button to g-chat and gmail one night. Those wanting to turn it on could have just pressed the button and been like "whoa, this is neat." But instead, Google got way too caught up in their own hype machine and the endless feature implementations.
.... why?
That was my reaction to the breathless introduction one of my coworkers gave to Wave. As he listed the "neatures", as I call them, I couldn't see how any of them would improve work flow without first totally disrupting it, and, even then, the improvements were more in explaining what we were doing than in actually accomplishing work.
Collaborate in real time, when the problem was that we were each working on multiple projects simultaneously? Find a solution that eliminates the distractions and allows you to spend 20 minutes concentrating on ONE THING, so you can recognize the consequences of each step, rather than making it easier to break your train of thought!
Wave had many interesting features.
But there was no way to let you see waves from
you email client like a feed or a plugin.
Also known as a coffin.
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One thing that most people didn't get about Wave is that its mayor strength is providing an environment where humans and computers can easily communicate and work together.
Don't think about Wave as a super-email or super-chat or super-wiki, although it's a bit of all this, think of an interface that can be populated with custom robots that give to you and your coworkers easy real-time collaborative access to backends specific for your the work you're doing.
Like a form in a web site, that's highly interactive and can be accessed collaboratively by many people at once.
It had huge potential, but unfortunately very few people "got it".
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
It is real time wiki on steroids, and there is place for such tool, especially in software development. But I can see it to be used in other areas like event planning, rescue operations, etc.
It is reasonable that Google obsoleted their service, as it is really more for people to install and use locally. As it is XMPP based, I expect to see federation of Google Wave servers in, for example, open source world or big software development house.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Google should have targeted Wave more as a collaboration and document sharing system like microsoft sharepoint in the first place. Heck if it also had its own SVN/CVS management service like source forge it would probably make a killer open/closed source collaboration tool for development. Maybe the original wave already did that and I was too ignorant to notice. Still that's how Google should have made Wave to be. Besides, we already have too many standard social networking sites as it is like facebook and myspace.
Hey girl I got somethin' real important to give you
So just sit down and listen
Girl you know we've been together such a long long time
(such a long time)
And now I'm ready to lay it on the line
(Wooow) You know it's Christmas and my heart is open wide
Gonna give you something so you know what's on my mind
A gift real special, so take off the top
Take a look inside -- it's my Wave in a box
Not gonna get you a diamond ring
That sort of gift don't mean anything
Not gonna get you a fancy car
Girl ya gotta know you're my shining star
Not gonna get you a house in the hills
A girl like you needs somethin' real
Wanna get you somethin' from the heart
Somethin' special girl
It's my Wave in a box, my Wave in a box babe
It's my Wave in a box, my Wave in a box girl
See I'm wise enough to know when a gift needs givin'
(yeah)
And I got just the one, somethin' to show ya that you
are second to none
To all the fellas out there with ladies to impress
It's easy to do just follow these steps
1: Cut a hole in a box
2: Put your Wave in that box
3: Make her open the box
And that's the way you do it
It's my Wave in a box... my Wave in a box babe
It's my Wave in a box, my Wave in a box girl
Christmas; Wave in a box
Hanukkah; Wave in a box
Kwanzaa; a Wave in a box
Every single holiday a Wave in a box
Over at your parent's house a Wave in a box
Mid day at the grocery store a Wave in a box
Backstage at the CMA's a Wave in a box (yeah-wow-wow-wow-wow-wow)
a Wave in a box...
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Mod this man up.
"Like a form in a web site, that's highly interactive and can be accessed collaboratively by many people at once."
I can't see what problem that actually solves, unless the writers/contributors have control over when others can write/contribute to the wave. I mean, how often have you sat down to write an email, or a document, or make a PPT presentation and said to yourself "You know, it would be really cool if my colleagues could see me putting this together and could then jump in at any time and edit or discuss what I'm writing."
To me, that would be immensely annoying to the point of utter lunacy.
"In this paper, I shall show how a perpetual motion machine can be assembled from simple household items and ..."
"BZZT! Dude! You're full of shit!"
"Look, let me finish this please - you've not read the...."
"Dave - what? Are you seriously going to try to convince me that you can defy the laws of physics?"
"Oh FFS Frank, if I wanted to put commas all over the place, I would OK! Just stop editing my damn paper before I'm finished with it OK!!!!! Huh?? What has that video got anything to do with this??!!" ... and so on.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
In many ways it was an experiment into seeing what people would do with it. Throw out this big platform and see what happens. They have already implemented the simultaneous writing stuff into Google Docs. I could see many of these small services sometime combining into something bigger (perhaps the oft rumored social thing).
I could already easily do that with other solutions like google docs, zimbra, etherpad etc. Google Wave was /worse/ for it because it didn't have importable, exportable formats, cumbersome modifications etc. I tried to use it for development, event planning, instant messaging - It didn't seem as good as the existing solutions I had to do that.
This is ignoring all the bugs mind you, like vast histories on waves that lead to it eating loads of ram or locking up the browser.
Feel free to explain the potential to me when in my case, it was taking more time for less work. It's not like I didn't try.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You guys do realize that google docs now has real-time letter-by-letter collaboration, right?
Wave is not dead, the concept and technology is just silently being integrated into existing products.