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Google Wave To Live On As 'Wave In a Box'

Posted by timothy on from the snl-sketch-comes-to-mind dept.

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."

7 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. The only reason wave should be used... by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The only reason wave should be used... by JimWise · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think there are MANY uses for Google Wave, but that is part of its problem. They are all very small, niche uses, which makes it hard to give a succinct description of it to someone and tell them how it could be relevant and useful to them. Also, since Wave is for coordinating with others it doesn't help to just persuade one person to try checking it out. They have to see a use for it and convince all the others on their project to give it an honest try too.

      With GMail, the brand new Google Phone, etc, I just had to see that it could possibly be useful for me and try it out on my own. If it works for me, then great, I can just go ahead and use it. I can tell friends how useful they are, and since they are fairly single purpose tools they are easy to describe and simple for others to figure out if they are likely to be useful for them or not. Google Wave is much more amorphous.

      Most of my friends are fairly geeky (yes, I know, quite a shocker for a slashdotter.) Back in March we started planning a group trip to Washington D.C.. We only had three weeks to plan (a friend's cousin was getting married out there and he mentioned to the rest of us just weeks in advance about it and in passing asked if any of us would like to take some days off to join in and do some sight-seeing.) Since we had limited time and couldn't all get together easily to plan we put Wave to great use. We were able to share links to points of interest, the metro system, possible places to stay; we created a roughed out itinerary that we could modify and you could click on each entry and it would show the location on the map so we could see what locations were in the vicinity to try to reduce unnecessary traveling back and forth, we put up a couple of polls for voting on what were the most and least desired to see by the group as we had to weed down a bit on what all we could do on our five day trip, and at the end of the trip we were able to share our photos with eachother. Wave allowed us to comment during lunch breaks and after work as time allowed, so even though we were unable to meet up in person or even on-line at the same time we could have group discussions about what we would like to see and do. Our trip went VERY smoothly and with the pre-planning we were able to pack in a LOT more than we ever could have otherwise on a trip like that.

      My older sister just started up a new on-line magazine. She wanted to coordinate with others to figure out what format the magazine should take, be able to share and group edit the articles and layouts, have discussions about all of the physical, legal, IT logistics of getting the magazine started with the others involved, and asked me if I knew of something that could help them do all of that. I suggested Google Wave, and although the bulk of the people involved were from an English/Arts background they jumped in and found Wave to be indispensable since they all have "other" jobs while they are getting this off the ground so they do not have matching schedules or locations.

      Wave can definitely start to get too unwieldy for large groups or very long running projects, so I agree with the "small projects" part, but I would definitely remove the "OSS" part.

    2. Re:The only reason wave should be used... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Eh, i used it for a while as an Instant Messenger service, it really was pretty good at that... up until a point.
      And that point is, yes, you guessed it, the point where Wave turns 80 years old and goes sooo ssslllooowww.
      If they had the ability to archive Wave contents in the Wave data, that would be really nice.

      It makes for a great IM, until multi-convos arrive and people start inserting messages all over the place. Worse because the entire page shifts regardless.
      It would have been better if replies above and below your current viewport were hidden behind an expansion arrow / box / whatever.
      If one of them is still active as you hover over it, it could auto-expand. (an OPTION that you can set will disable this, doubt it would go in, Google and Options = no-no...)

      The main problem i have with Wave is they are doing WAY too much with it.
      There is so many useless event handlers and bloated data running in the code, that kind of thing really slows the whole thing down like crazy, despite web workers.
      Everything, date, menus, everything should be hidden behind the avatar that posted it. One handler. One handler to rule them all.
      They need to get rid of all the fancy crap as well. This isn't an application, and despite the fact that browsers have gotten much faster over the past decade, browsers are still terribly slow. It isn't (just?) a JS issue, it is a rendering issue. This is why it ends up hitting a gig of memory usage in some large waves.

      There isn't a whole lot they needed to do to fix Wave. Shame they never learned any of that from Etherpad.

      captcha: perished. :(

  2. Re:Google's Wave product was dead on arrival! by istartedi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just do not understand the logic behind their modus operandi of having usage by invite only

    I think they thought that it would create buzz like Gmail did. Gmail was invite only too when it started. I think their failure was in not realizing "special invite to join Google's email" was far more enticing than "special invite to join Google's experimental thingamabob".

    Of course there were other problems with Wave too. It looked like it skipped the "do one thing well" stage and went straight to bloatware.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  3. Re:Google's Wave product was dead on arrival! by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Communications technologies depend on network effects. Gmail succeeded, despite restricting the number of subscribers, because it already had a vast network of email users to interact with. Mobile phones worked because they interacted with the existing phone system.

    Wave was restricted to communicating with Wave. Getting the people you wanted to use it to sign up, grok it, then use it, was too much of an obstacle.

  4. Re:Economy behind wave? by drolli · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Please contrast: google chat: i dont think much data is transported google voice: a moderate amount of data has to be relayed (1 hour of talking may be less than 10MB) - and not much storage at google is required (at least thats what i hope) google wave: if user a in Australia, user b in Europe and User c in America use the same wave, and keep it open over weeks in the expectation that, as soon as they sit down the system will react instantaneously, it will impose strong requirements on the database. If 100 Million users keep 20 waves requiring several MBytes open (remember what google suggested you do with it), then you may run into problem when you try to finance that on a free basis (which they had to do to circumvent the chicken-egg problem).

  5. Re:Economy behind wave? by zuperduperman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Both chat and voice are relatively easy on CPU and servers generally.

    Wave uses a fascinating Operational Transform algorithm which verges on aspects of AI to keep all clients in sync. It's a really fascinating approach but I can see that it is far more intensive for servers than otherwise.

    Having said that, I think if Wave had even the tiniest hope of being successful Google would have kept it going. The cost of servers is nothing to Google compared to that of having dozens of their phd's and probably hundreds of other staff occupied with it while they could be working on, for eg: Google Me.