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Google Wave Looking To Join Apache Software Foundation

Posted by samzenpus on from the part-of-the-gang dept.

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."

22 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Hope by Konsalik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Hope by Bieeanda · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.

    3. Re:Hope by mcvos · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:Hosted Wave by Konsalik · · Score: 3, Informative

    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."

  3. I just hope that Google cleans up their act by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."

    1. Re:I just hope that Google cleans up their act by gmor · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  4. great app, lousy implementation by t2t10 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:great app, lousy implementation by RazorSharp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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."
    2. Re:great app, lousy implementation by davros-too · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
    3. Re:great app, lousy implementation by cranos · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:great app, lousy implementation by t2t10 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Making an Amazon EC2 image might help.

    5. Re:great app, lousy implementation by am+2k · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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).

  5. Re:Hosted Wave by Cinder6 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

    --
    If you can't convince them, convict them.
  6. Re:WAVE still exists! by batkiwi · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  7. Re:WAVE still exists! by batkiwi · · Score: 2, Informative

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

  8. Wave is Perfect for Real Estate by chocolatetrumpet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

    --
    Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
  9. Re:Good by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 3, Informative

    Do you have a link to the youtube video?

    Here you go:

    http://tinyurl.com/yjuygc3

  10. Re:WAVE still exists! by CyDharttha · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/

  11. Re:Not a bad protocol per se by cranos · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  12. They always get the WHY of it wrong. by Jartan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  13. Re:Hosted Wave by stiggle · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.