Google Kills Wave Development 327
Posted
by
timothy
from the harshing-on-mellow dept.
from the harshing-on-mellow dept.
We've mentioned several times over the past two years Wave, Google's ambitiously multi-channel, perhaps plain overwhelming entry in the social media wars. Now, reader mordejai writes "Google stated in its official blog that they will not continue developing Wave as a standalone product. It's sad, because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses."
Gaming (Score:3, Informative)
We used it to run games but it got so overwhelmed we'd have to create new Waves every 50 or so posts. So I'd have a In Character 1, In Character 2, Table Talk 1, GM to Player 1, GM to Player 2, etc... At one point we had 30 or so different Waves.
[John]
Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks Google for aquiring and killing!
I entirely agree with your sentiment. We've watched over the years Microsoft turn into what they hate (IBM), and now we get to watch Google turn into what they hate (Microsoft). That said, if you want Etherpad on your own server, Etherpad's full open source code [google.com] is available.
Except Sharepoint actually makes money (Score:4, Informative)
Except Sharepoint actually makes money. And not just a few bucks, but $1B in yearly revenue (I know, it's not profit, but it's profitable).
http://www.ameinfo.com/152875.html [ameinfo.com]
And that's not counting the sales of SQL and Windows Server CALs that you will need to run it properly. If you study this market carefully (I did) you will see that Sharepoint is the only semi-decent product, and, e.g. Alfresco (which positions itself as the strongest competitor to Sharepoint) is a half-baked, broken piece of crap, with or without the yearly support contract.
Re:Completely Google's Fault (Score:3, Informative)
I disagree with your assertion that the effort has been a waste of time. A lot of the ideas and methods that were developed for Wave are already being used in some of their other products. Have you had a look at the real-time collaboration features in Google Documents lately? From TFA:
We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
I have a feeling we will start seeing more and more Wave-like features making there way into other Google products. Also, a lot of the code is already open source.
Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score:3, Informative)
http://etherpad.com/ [etherpad.com]
They provide alternatives.
Re:UI was weird (Score:4, Informative)
But most of all, it didn't have a clear 30-seconds or less explanation on what exactly it should be used to
They should have just said:
It is a wysiwyg, distributed, real-time, personal, sharable wiki, with a few extra features that any good wiki could use including tracking conversation threads, subscribing to updates for a page, notifying friends of pages you think they'd be interested in, and easy user access control. In detail:
Ok, maybe that was more than 30 seconds, but you get the idea. When I thought of it as "chat" or "e-mail" it didn't make sense, because I already have perfectly good chat and e-mail. What I don't have is a wiki where I can put my private notes or share my designs with colleges to let them update/fix/annotate them.
It is a shame Google is giving up on it. Fortunately if you drop the distributed aspect (which I think got Wave bogged down in technical details), it shouldn't be too hard to clone the ideas there. For that matter, with just a few tweaks it could even be a Facebook killer. After all, being "wysiwyg, real-time, personal, sharable" isn't too far from being "social". (I mean "social" in the sense of Facebook, not just "social" in the sense of collaborative content creation.) Google came this close to inventing the "social wiki". Now I guess it is up to us.
Re:Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcas (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you you might be the uninformed arse here. Last time I tried (and *I* actually tried, not just googled it and then ran my mouth on /.) to install Etherpad it was not a straightforward install, the source was full of hard-coded crap, it lacked many of the features the website had, the docs were bad, and when it finally got up and running it was flakey.
Yes some people have had success, but Google put almost no effort or man power into it, and it was in many ways a better tool than wave.
Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh. (Score:5, Informative)
That's because it's chat with a couple of features
Only in the sense that a car is a horse with a couple of features, otherwise, youre just wrong. Among its "couple of features" (unashamedly pulled from an earlier post, as it seems this, like so many myths, persist...)
Therefore, a downstream wave provider can verify that the wave provider is not spoofing wavelet operations. It should not be able to falsely claim that a wavelet operation originated from a user on another wave provider or that it was originated in a different context.
Thus, spam really ceases to be an issue
There are of course a ton of other reasons [slashdot.org] why Wave was more than just "chat with a couple of features", but these were big. Wave had the chance to completely redo how we communicated, freeing people from having to keep track of 10 different IM networks + email + forums + blog comments. All of this was, and is in its current implentation, able to be taken care of from a wave inbox. Spam would have taken a hit, as would phishing, because you wouldnt be able to forge "accountservices@capitolone.com". Email chains would have ceased to be a gigantic disaster of people forwarding, reforwarding, editing, reforwarding, and generally mucking up inboxes with garbage. Most importantly, a portable interface could have been crafted around all this, practically for free-- dont need a custom client for each feature, just a client for wave.
Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern). I understand why, sort of, since it really wasnt explained at all, and it took me several hours of screwing with to figure out just what it was, and could do. But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good" rather than "that looks complicated, im going to stick with what I know because this scares me".
I mean, if its taking this long to get IPv6 rolled out, and this just failed to take off, what hope have we of ever being rid of rickety old SMTP? Do we just need to keep extending the thing to death until its major flaws are fixed (if thats even possible)? Are we to be stuck fiddling around with seperate interfaces for every form of communication we use (IM, IRC, email, messageboards, comments) for the forseeable future?
Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt that was completely opened to the public (source for the servers was released!)? Is everyone really that in love with MS Exchange?
Re:Except Sharepoint actually makes money (Score:3, Informative)
Guess what, people just need something to conveniently share documents first and foremost. And all your other "ASP.NET based CMS products" suck at that.
>> you plan to use the "out of box" Sharepoint
>> installation, with little or no customization work
Which his how it is deployed in 95% of the cases.