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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."
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.
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.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
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.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
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).
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.