Google Wave Looking To Join Apache Software Foundation

MMacFadden writes "The Google Wave team has officially submitted the open source version of Wave to the Apache Software Foundation as a candidate Incubator project. Google hopes that the wave technology will continue to grow, supported by the new open source community (which is made up of Google and non-Google employees alike). Here is the proposal itself."

Comments

Hope

[Konsalik]

I really hope Wave lives on. It is really a great idea albeit a bit to ambitious for its time (The whole lets replace email overnight thing). Maybe with some TLC from the OS community and a while in the incubator we can have a truly ripe and great piece of software.

Re:Hope

[Bieeanda]

Really, claiming that it was an e-mail replacement/killer/evolution was the biggest mistake they made. Wave is what it is: very inexpensive collaboration software. That's an absolutely fantastic thing for teleconferencing, but just shy of totally useless for the average consumer's everyday purposes. I think it's fantastic that they've open sourced the project, and I do hope that it makes it into an incubator, because similar software from outfits like Adobe and Co. are loopily expensive, and this could be a real benefit for organizations that run on a fraying shoestring budget. I just hope that people can get past the claim that Wave's apple was really an orange.

Re:Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen wave used by small teams very effectively.

Player Corporations in Eve Online running a wave for each corp project worked out well.

Discussing a small FOSS projects with a group worked for those of us not logged into IRC 24x7. Setup your trac or build environment to post. Start feeding build reports into it and starting waves for project forks.

Sure, if you live on Facebook or in IRC and mailing lists wave is more of a 'why would I care?'

Needing to put effort in is the key problem with any paradigm changer. A wave is a great way to discuss a project but you won't may not see much benefit until you put in quite a bit of effort. Same with wikis. Google DOCs are easy: it's just another way to share your old Word Documents. A wiki requires collaboration. A wave requires participation.

In a consumer culture that's too much effort. In my experience one can spot the people who complain loudly that it doesn't work. They have few logins on the product and no contributions. They didn't cross the minimal effort threshold so it is worthless to them. The scary part is that it probably is just a waste of their time.

Then again, some tools just take too much to put into them to get any benefits out. That threshold for wave is rather high compared with customary tools. Unless you are mandated to use it, you probably won't (excepting the neophytes and early adopters here.)

Reminds me of a Simpson's episode where Grandpa Simpson was sitting around watching the first Superbowl. He complained that everybody needs to support this thing or it will just die off.

I guess there just weren't enough Grandpa Simpson's of the Google Wave world.

Re:Hope

[i.r.id10t]

Me too, since with a little more glue code and maybe integration into some existing Free software it could be several parts of a really good learning management system.

Re:Hope

[cloudcreator]

Indeed, it is a collaboration software. The problem was that Google targeted it to wrong audience. I mean they tried to make a very tough social network out of it. But in fact, it'd be more recognized as a collaboration software for the companies, professional groups, etc. Wave is useless without a purpose.

Re:Hope

[mcvos]

I think the idea of Wave is still brilliant, but it does need some polishing. My biggest beef is with the user interface. A big wave can quickly turn into a confusing mess. What's new? What's old? What do I still need to respond to?

I need more tools to manage my view on the wave. Close bits, split different subthreads with diverging topics into separate waves, flag messages as read, unread, important, interesting to others, archive-worthy, etc.

The technology is very powerful, but it needs a better UI to do it justice.

Re:Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if you live on Facebook or in IRC and mailing lists wave is more of a 'why would I care?'

Considering that the userbase of the internet can be classified based on their accumulated-years-using-the-internet, and based on that classification, they fall generally into four categories:

Those that live on IRC
Those that live on mailing lists
Those that live on Facebook
Those that live on Twitter

Then the audience for Wave is merely the fourth category. Given their ADHD, it's no wonder Wave didn't take off!

Re:Hope

[techknackblogs]

It was really a big blunder from Google for claiming it as a Email killer www.techknackblogs.com

Re:Hope

[thetoadwarrior]

I think wave's problem is that it was freaking awesome for business communication but pretty shit amongst consumer communication.

Not a bad protocol per se

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked the idea of SOME of the things in wave. My hesitation came from the fact that I couldn't easily port it over to my email. If I could do everything in one place, I'd have been happy. You also had so much crap going on in a single wave that it was impossible to tell what the hell was happening. I felt like I needed a diff to figure out what was going on.

The wave protocol, if I remember, was pretty open and allowed distributed servers. I'd like to see that take off at some point.

Re:Not a bad protocol per se

[cranos]

The protocols themselves are open and yes it allows distributed servers. Wave In A Box, the reference implementation is one such project and there are a small number of us who are running testing versions of this server.

Hosted Wave

[rshimizu12]

I would be cool if someone were to host Google Wave for now. I never understood why Google did not let Wave continue.

Re:Hosted Wave

[Konsalik]

Read the linked article, they go into the details. "Unfortunately, Google did a poor job of clarifying the potential of Wave or helping users understand how to embrace and utilize it. The initial excitement gave way to confusion, followed by apathy, and eventually to Google deciding to kill the project--at least as far as Google hosting and supporting it is concerned."

Re:Hosted Wave

[Cinder6]

Maybe I need to RTFA, but I just went to http://google.com/wave and it worked fine. I know it's no longer developed, but it still exists

Re:Hosted Wave

[stiggle]

Part of the incubator project is WAIB (Wave in a Box) - which you can download now off the main Wave Protocol website (www.waveprotocol.org) which allows you to run your own Wave Server - including a supplied web interface. The Wave protocol includes federation so you can link up WAIB.

Re:Hosted Wave

[WWWWolf]

Maybe I need to RTFA, but I just went to http://google.com/wave and it worked fine. I know it's no longer developed, but it still exists

Not for long. Earlier, Google announced that they would wrap things up with Wave, but they also said that the service would stay alive at least until the end of this year. (They probably just want to give people a headstart if they want to move their stuff away from Wave.) After that, it's anyone's guess.

Good

[Niris]

I didn't even hear about Wave until the last three months of it being supported by Google, but I liked what I saw from the demonstration on Youtube from their convention, and from actual use. If only they had integrated Gmail into it so I wouldn't need two different windows open and if it were something like a mix of Meebo (browser based instant messaging) then it'd be perfect.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have a link to the youtube video?

Re:Good

[CohibaVancouver]

Do you have a link to the youtube video?

Here you go:

http://tinyurl.com/yjuygc3

Re:Good

[CohibaVancouver]

How come everyone who replies to a post with unintelligent angry profanity does so as an anonymous COWARD? And yes, it does link to the to video in question - It's something like the third hit.

Re:Good

[Just Some Guy]

Please don't use URL shorteners here. They make it impossible to see what domain the URL actually points to, and there's no practical limit on how long of a link you can use in an <a href> tag on Slashdot.

I just hope that Google cleans up their act

[bogaboga]

Here's why:

I have a Chrome bug to submit, log onto my Google account, type details of my bug and sadly, I find the 'submit' button disabled.

Sometimes, I am not surprised that Google Wave "bit the dust."

Re:I just hope that Google cleans up their act

[gmor]

"Summary" is a required field when you report an issue. Type something and you can submit the bug.

Re:I just hope that Google cleans up their act

[brunes69]

Yes, because all software undert he ASF envelope is 100% bug free and feature complete.

What kind of nonsense is this? What does a minor bug on a web-page have to do with submitting a project as open source?

Re:I just hope that Google cleans up their act

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Slashdot, how low have you fallen?

Re:I just hope that Google cleans up their act

[magus_melchior]

In this sense, developers are a lot like users-- they don't know how to interpret the gobbledygook that is a stack trace or memory dump unless they know to some degree of precision how the program got there, and if the problem is predictable and/or repeatable. Unless the dump matches a previous case perfectly, a null pointer (for example) can be due to any reference to memory.

Long story short, tell the devs as much as you can if you really want the bug fixed.

Latex collaboration

[Anonymous Coward]

I used google wave the previous term to write group lab reports. It was great for editing stuff together but translating the document into latex at the end was a pain. Anyone know some decent tool that would fit this purpose, if possible without having to set up a server in my PC? Basically, I need

• Synchronization between everyone's copy of the report
• Latex output
• Latex WYSIWYG. Not all my team mates are willing to learn latex, so with this feature I could avoid having to format their contributions.

The best I've come up with is github + some easy-to-use git client for Windows + LyX, but it'd be better to skip explaining git to the rest of the team.

Any ideas?

It was the packaging that killed it

[ka9dgx]

Selling wave as an email replacement was a mistake.

The packaging that wave came it was what killed it.

A group of people could work on a document, or stream of thoughts, refining things as they went... that part was brilliant.

The insistence that each person had to "own" a piece of it.. meant each document was a chain of links, instead of a seamless whole.

This packaging choice killed the usability, and lead to the downfall of wave.

Let's hope this can be overcome in the next iteration.

great app, lousy implementation

[t2t10]

I think a second problem with Wave was that the implementation sucked. They built Wave using some kind of Java toolkit that hid the JavaScript frontend code from programmers. As a result, the page the user interacted with was slow and inflexible. There was more Java library and framework bloat on the server. Writing extensions for it also was unnecessarily cumbersome. For example, the content of a wavelet wasn't in XHTML subset as you might expect, it was in some weird attributed text format. Just getting the text out of that was work.

If they had hand-coded the frontend and written a lightweight backend, Wave would likely still be around. As it was, it was probably sucking up developer resources big time and causing Google developers to jump ship.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[RazorSharp]

For me it depended on the browser. With Firefox it was slow, okay with Safari, and seamless with Chrome. Not surprising, and probably wouldn't still be the case had they not abandoned the project. Although it's a niche product, it's really good at what it does and has the potential to be great. Hopefully the open source community does some neat things with it.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[davros-too]

I agree the implementation was lousy. Unfortunately, now that Google isn't backing wave, fixing the implementation will not prevent wave from languishing in obscurity. By its nature wave is only useful if many of the people you know or work with are signed up. Open source can fix the implementation, but its lousy at marketing.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[cranos]

Well there are certainly a number of smaller and bigger organisations still looking into Wave. Novell is using Wave based tech for Pulse (no federation as yet but you never know) and at the summit we had a number of people keen to ensure that wave survives so they can build on it and make money.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[davros-too]

Fair points. Wave may indeed be successfully used in collaboration products like Pulse, and that would be good. But for me that would still be a very disappointing outcome and is what I had in mind when I wrote 'languishing in obscurity'. The great promise and potential, which sadly won't be fulfilled, was for collaboration and communication across broader communities beyond one company or group of friends.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[cranos]

Fair points. Wave may indeed be successfully used in collaboration products like Pulse, and that would be good. But for me that would still be a very disappointing outcome and is what I had in mind when I wrote 'languishing in obscurity'. The great promise and potential, which sadly won't be fulfilled, was for collaboration and communication across broader communities beyond one company or group of friends.

There's nothing stopping someone from setting up a service similar to Google Wave using the open source implementation. Let us get version 1.0 out the door and we'll see what happens :)

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[t2t10]

Making an Amazon EC2 image might help.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[t2t10]

It's not just the fact that it was slow; the user interface had problems, it didn't work on mobile devices, and the APIs were bad in places as well.

I'm not sure WIAB a good thing to build on; PyGoWave may be a better platform to build on.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[am 2k]

They built Wave using some kind of Java toolkit that hid the JavaScript frontend code from programmers.

Let's call the demon by its name: Google Web Toolkit.

If they had hand-coded the frontend and written a lightweight backend, Wave would likely still be around.

I'm not so sure about that. Wave didn't fail for technical reasons. It failed because there was no transition path (No mail gateway for a mail replacement? wtf? XMPP-IM at least gets that part right.) and bad management (they expected a private beta for a walled garden solution to take off immediately).

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[canistel]

The developers themselves are on video stating that they couldn't have achieved what they did without the use of GWT (which is just a java to javascript compiler).

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[Anonymous Coward]

the current wave client is quite responsive and an extremely impressive example of what can be accomplished with GWT. It's in my eyes one of the most impressive webapp UIs I've ever used.

" They built Wave using some kind of Java toolkit that hid the JavaScript frontend code from programmers. As a result, the page the user interacted with was slow and inflexible. "

You probably like Glenn Beck and the Tea Party right? This is just the kind of non-logic that they use to make assertions. There is no argument in your statement.

XHTML subset? Why do you pretend to speak with authority on a subject you clearly are ignorant of?

"If they had hand-coded the frontend and written a lightweight backend, Wave would likely still be around. As it was, it was probably sucking up developer resources big time and causing Google developers to jump ship."

You're a fucking genius buddy. Google should have hired you to sort it out.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[t2t10]

Adding SMTP and other features isn't rocket science. The reason it took so long was probably because they were bogged down by their unwieldy software infrastructure.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[t2t10]

Well, what they accomplished was to have their project killed within 3 months of general release, so, yeah, I tend to agree.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[cduffy]

Having written applications with GWT, I find it anything but unwieldy.

Bringing static checking, JUnit-based testing, and modern code coverage tools to JavaScript (and doing a ton of micro-optimizations during the compilation process under the hood) does a world of good. Letting Java-based debugging tools be seamlessly used for debugging JavaScript is even better.

I've seen attempts to implement a GWT-like toolchain for other languages (Python, Scheme) -- and the competition all falls down not on having effective code compilation, but on having an effective debugging toolchain and workflow. Google, by contrast, got that part right.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[t2t10]

The "software infrastructure" I was referring to wasn't just GWT.

Furthermore, while GWT makes you happy as a Java programmer, it made me unhappy as a user, since there was no reason Wave had to be that slow and have so many browser incompatibilities.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[cduffy]

GWT builds faster-executing JavaScript than I can write by hand in a reasonable amount of time, just as a C compiler builds faster assembly than most people can build without digging in and hand-optimizing. Likewise, it builds code optimized for different "targets" -- an IE6-optimized version, an IE7-optimized version, a Firefox-optimized version, etc etc. As such, it provides the tools to build a faster site with wider browser compatibility than one would necessarily be able to build without it.

Is this to say that people can't build slow, browser-incompatible sites using GWT? Of course not -- just as people can write spaghetti code using Python; having a helpful toolchain doesn't absolve the actual developer of responsibility.

Google uses GWT for AdWords -- their cash-cow infrastructure. With such successes, pinning even partial blame for failures on that same tooling just doesn't make sense without a more detailed explanation.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[t2t10]

Why are you so hung up on GWT? I blamed GWT for the bad user interface, not the delays. Get over it.

Re:great app, lousy implementation

[cduffy]

You didn't make it clear exactly which issue you were blaming on which piece. The clarification is appreciated.

Wave still works?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never used Wave - I read the article, Googled it, signed up and am now sitting in my er, I guess, Google Wave account. All the functionality seems to work...I got the impression from the comments above that Wave had been dropped / disabled?

Still seems to work okay unless I'm missing something.

Re:Wave still works?

[mcvos]

It works fine. Google is just not going to push it anymore. They hope other people are going to pick it up and turn it into something cool. Who knows, they might even jump on board again when it gets some impetus. Joining Apache is certainly a good step in that direction.

WAVE still exists!

[LoudMusic]

Why are people saying things about Google killing Wave? It's still there, people. Still fully functional. They just don't advertise it because it's still being developed.

http://wave.google.com/

Re:WAVE still exists!

[batkiwi]

It's going to be shut off in about 2 months, and they reassigned the entire team to other projects and the creator left to go to facebook, who just days ago announced an effort on a project "to replace email" with something more collaborative and real time.

Where have you been?

Re:WAVE still exists!

[batkiwi]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

Re:WAVE still exists!

[vikstar]

who just days ago announced an effort on a project "to replace email" with something more collaborative and real time.

What? Reference, please.

Re:WAVE still exists!

[CyDharttha]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/01/lars-rasmussen-why-i-quit_n_776807.html
http://gizmodo.com/5690405/facebook-email
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/rasmussen-facebook-google/
http://www.google.com/

Re:WAVE still exists!

[Anonymous Coward]

And, Wave is included in the new Google Apps single sign on.

Re:WAVE still exists!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I hate how Google never advertises all those beta projects

Re:WAVE still exists!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you just got schooled. Shut up and take your medicine like a man.

Re:WAVE still exists!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, he shouldn't have just linked to google, he should have linked to an lmgtfy.com search. Then you would have been pwned in style.

And the other AC is also right.

Re:WAVE still exists!

[k1v1n]

It's there now, but I suspect will be going away in a few months. We can hope though!

Wave is Perfect for Real Estate

[chocolatetrumpet]

Look at a Real Estate transaction: Clients, Realtors, Attorneys, and Bankers all collaborating on documents.

Right now we fax, mail, and email them around.

Imagine a wave-based real estate transaction where everyone makes tracked changes to a single document. It's perfect!

All that remains is the hardest part: the social engineering aspect. Because wave isn't useful if only one party is using it!

Re:Wave is Perfect for Real Estate

[badkarmadayaccount]

Easy - make a SharePoint/Exchange combo replacement by simply integrating the Wave protocol with LibreOffice.

Re:I am just glad that epSos.de is helpful

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is overwhelmed with bug reports.
Go to their support group forums for developers where the actual employees read.

Personally never liked Wave

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me ignorant, perhaps since I've never looked at any of those introduction videos, neither do I spend any time to read tutorials (I suspect this to be the case for a large majority of users out there), but I never really got all the hype about Wave in the first place.
I mean, I can see some places where it would be really useful, but, email killer? I think not.

I had a group project where some members decided to use Google Wave instead of email for communication. This was a few months back, but I recall that it didn't work on Opera, and Firefox had problems with file attachments. So I had to use Chrome (wasn't going to waste time finding other browsers which might work) and I'm not really a fan of Chrome. Anyway, the script would also crash every so often, but I assume all these issues are due to it being in beta and/or not all browsers supporting all the HTML5 features it uses, so will probably go away over time. Fair enough I guess.

But ignoring that, I failed to see many benefits in the system. It didn't seem to save your last read position, so every time you wanted to see a reply, you had to scroll through a huge list of replies and find where you left off. It's more difficult to personally arrange information, for example, with email, you can delete/move/mark emails for yourself that are important/unimportant and whatnot, without affecting anyone else.
Overall, it really seemed nothing much more than a private chatroom. Maybe there's a lot more possible with it, but as said earlier, I didn't bother really investigating it much.

They always get the WHY of it wrong.

[Jartan]

Wave was an amazing idea with some really poor implementation. Having wiki capabilities but no revision control? Duh. No way to create some sort of social grouping or mailing list or whatever. Not letting the wave creator kick people from the wave. Not letting the wave creator set even basic editing privileges. Wave didn't fail to take off because it was confusing. It failed to take off because it wasn't even ready for alpha status. They should of spent less time trying to shove it as some sort of email replacement and more time making it at least work.

Re:They always get the WHY of it wrong.

[k1v1n]

Wave had revision control. You could roll back. It might not have been a perfect implementation but it was there.

You could create groups, add them to waves, and have them notified through email. It again wasn't that friendly/easy, but it was there.

You could kick people from a wave. It wasn't there in the early versions but was implemented and working in later revisions.

You could allow people read and/or read/write capabilities. This too wasn't there in the early versions but was implemented in later revisions. It worked. This isn't a wide list of editing permissions, but they were there. One of the complaints about Wave was that it was too complicated. Want to make it more complicated--- add complex work flow and privs. At least this part of Wave was simple.

If you just used it as a collaborative work tool it wasn't even that confusing. I never saw anyone when invited to a wave struggle to participate. They could come in cold and manage to participate.

You are right that Google got the "why" wrong. It was an incredibly effective small workgroup collaboration tool. I don't think that was the niche that Google thought Wave would fill. Regardless, it worked great for this purpose, and really was the killer app.

It's nice to see so much of Wave making its way into other Google apps. I wouldn't be surprised to see Wave come back in some new form within the Google Apps. The early versions of WiaB is really quite simple to use, and shows promise as being Wave done right and with focus.

Re:They always get the WHY of it wrong.

[BitZtream]

...

Let me help you out with your why wave failed ...

It had nothing to do with how well it worked.

Wave 'failed' because no one found any usefulness to it. It tried to fill a roll that no one needed filled.

Re:They always get the WHY of it wrong.

[k1v1n]

That wasn't our experience at all. We used the hell out of it, and still do. We'll also be running WiaB. We don't have anything to replace it, and we don't want to go backwards. It absolutely filled a hole that we were needing filled.

Re:They always get the WHY of it wrong.

[Jartan]

If you think nobody has any use for group collaboration software you are nuts.

Re:They always get the WHY of it wrong.

[Kashgarinn]

I agree, Wave is an amazing idea.

Love it, and would want to work more with it, hope the change makes it easier for people to start picking it apart and doing more cool things with it.

What's not to love? It's an instant protocol over the web. Wonderful.

Screw the Openness

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I just have my data back, please?

Re:Screw the Openness

[asvravi]

From the blog

In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Re:Screw the Openness

[markkezner]

You can export your waves right now.

Big Damn Protocol

[Arancaytar]

What did they expect after making those references?

Now please go and do the impossible. :P

Re:Big Damn Protocol

[Anonymous Coward]

And it was cancelled after just about 14 month. Someone at Google has a pretty cruel sense of humor.