Google Kills Wave Development 327
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."
I really liked it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is, there aren't many small dispersed groups needing hyper rapid content development. If you weren't as dispersed, or had the time for consecutive (rather than concurrent) editing, other traditional tools were better. The interface, and its tendency to bog down once the wave sizes grew large, didn't help either.
But as I fell into the small niche it was really useful for, rather than just as a novelty, I will miss it.
Prediction: Gmail integration (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll predict that we'll instead see most of Wave's functionality/technology incorporated into gmail, either as a separate panel like Buzz or integrated pop-ups like Google Talk is. It really didn't make sense to have it be a dedicated site, since it made it harder to integrate with one's other activities. I imagine that within a few months Gmail will probably introduce functionality to convert an existing email and/or chat thread into a wave.
Thanks Google for aquiring and killing! (sarcasm) (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I used it all the time. Our development team does scrum/agile, and we have some remote team members. We used to use Etherpad for doing collaborative sprint planning, but when Google bought and killed it, folding those developers into Wave development, we were forced onto Wave. It's been useful (though I liked Etherpad better), and now we're in a position of wondering what tool we can use to fill this need.
Anyone have any suggestions??
Re:So, the obvious next step (Score:4, Interesting)
I knew it was bullshit, really. (Score:1, Interesting)
Wanna know how I knew Wave wasn't the future? It's because no one -- I mean fucking no one -- could describe it. After all this time, I still don't know what Wave is/was.
It probably sounds like I'm proud of my ignorance, or that I'm implying that I'm oh-so-clever and above it all. No, no, no, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that if Wave had substance, someone, I mean anyone with even a moderate-to-bad gift for words, would have been able to fucking explain what Wave is!! If the only answer you can ever get is, "You've just got to try it," then there's just nothing there.
Nothing else in life is like that. The web wasn't like that. Google wasn't like that. Beer isn't like that, sex isn't like that, ann rock'n'roll isn't like that. Sometimes "you've just got to try it" may very well be the best answer, but it's never the only answer, unless the subject is just totally underwhelming and empty.
Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh. (Score:1, Interesting)
And it works like a charm. Everyone one-off, non-IT, IT department is clamouring to get their hands on "Sharepoint". Most of the "IT Directors" are promoted from other parts of the business and have absolutely no idea what they're doing. So when Microsoft tells them something is a "Best Practice" and that it's "Best of Breed" and "Web 2.0" and "SaaS" and on and fucking on, these douche bags swallow it hook, line, sinker and pole.
Re:Closed beta killed it (Score:3, Interesting)
Closed beta, plus when you finally found someone with an invite to give you, then you'd still have to wait for a few days for some reason. What did they need those three days for? Were they doing background checks on me? Did they have one stressed out intern entering all the invitees' email addresses into a database? I was excited when one of my buddies offered me the invite, but by the time I actually got to sign up, much of that excitement had already passed.
Re:SURVEY SAYS?? ...Meh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sharepoint is Microsoft's implementation of an enterprise content management (ECM [wikipedia.org]) system. You can do much of the same these days with a large number of open-source projects (Alfresco 3.x is great out of the box), most of which work well with each other due to open standards. I bet you're glad you never had to deal with a sucky SP 1.0 implementation in a windows only shop. It may not suck that bad anymore, but it was great to get away from that hell.
Re:UI was weird (Score:3, Interesting)
They did not realize that today everyone has a favorite mean of communication, wether it's email, im, twitter, whatever. Wave was not integrated with anything.
Until fairly recently there was no mail notification, no twitter update, nothing that would allow you to know that something happened in wave. I got invited to waves and found out weeks or months later as I connected by chance to have a look at something else that someone had tried to talk to me.
The activity level was never high enough that I would log in every day, add little to no notifications and it quickly fell off my radar ie I got bored.
Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely.
I use it to coordinate a web development team. I have a team of four people, all in different towns, collaborating through wave.
The graphic designer can drag her work in and have everyone comment.
The CSS coder can tell the PHP coder what he needs done, and vice versa.
The accesibility adviser can tell us what to change.
I can check on progress.
I will seriously miss wave.
Re:Closed beta killed it (Score:1, Interesting)
Did they have one stressed out intern entering all the invitees' email addresses into a database?
I seem to recall a contact at Google telling me that, initially, they WERE sending out invites manually.
Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Second that.
I really love Google Wave but it was simply too unstable to use very often. Slowdowns and sometimes even crashes were often, either by wave or the browser having problems with it. It's brilliant technology that has a lot of potential in the future, but I don't think it's ready for most production usage yet.
Re:This will hurt google in the future (Score:5, Interesting)
So now the projects will actually have to have some merit? Sounds good to me.
Google Wave had tons of merit. But three months out of closed beta just isn't enough time for any new software product to prove itself. None of the big, successful tools you use today would be here if they had been dropped that quickly.
Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't Google Docs offer the same?
Not quite- In wave, when rapidly evolving a text based document, you could tell exactly where other people were working. This meant people could dive into any part of the document that needed work without any additional organization of who was doing what. While google docs synchronizing every few seconds and showing who is editing approaches this, that last step actually makes quite a big difference.
I'd like to see docs color code the paragraph by the active editor, then it would have the same functionality to me.
Re:So, the obvious next step (Score:1, Interesting)
It's really fast. It requires a mix of high and low level I/O code, see Jetty's manual about continuations. There is another technical component to this technology that I could mention but for selfish reasons (we have our own implementation of it) I won't.
These ideas are out there, some with Google's consent, but for whatever reason they declined to package it all up as an implementation. This is part of Google's 'speed is a feature' mantra.
Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Dissapointed (Score:3, Interesting)
I was disappointed with Wave. About a year ago I spent a week trying to understand their source code because I wanted to use their data structures as a database and eventually build it into ObjectCloud [objectcloud.com]. Their code was about 20,000 lines that essentially ran a text-based chat with no way to persist the data. I asked twice on their mailing list which interfaces I should plug into to persist the data, but I got no responses.
Basically, they tried to solve too many problems at once. If they just open-sourced a nice way to have concurrent data structures, it might have taken off; but the system for concurrent data structures was too difficult to understand or work with.
Google promoted Wave well, I remember sitting behind some Wave developers at Google shortly before they were going to show it off and they kept saying things like, "when everyone's using Wave..." Well, it takes a long time to build that kind of critical mass!
No tables (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend and I tried using it, mostly as a joke, and one of the first things I discovered was that there was no obvious way to make a table. I know the web is based around format-independent data, but I wish more sites would provide a simple way to do aligned columns. It makes so many things so much easier to read.
That's a shame. (Score:2, Interesting)
Not being developed isn't the same as deleted, at least. It's still functional for the time being.
Failed because people didnt grok it (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, WE did. But the people I tried to get using it for meetings and the like just didn't want to know. They're happy with their voice conferences plus one person presenting a powerpoint over a screen sharing app.
A theory. Wave doesn't fit long term strategy. (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has publicly stated. "That the future is mobile platforms."
How does Wave fit into this future of mobile platforms? It doesn't. It's gone.
Buzz is arguably a bigger dud. But it is still hanging on. ( How much longer is debatable. ) Why? Buzz can work on a mobile platform.
Just a theory.
"Wave has taught us a lot" Urs Hölzle, SVP Go (Score:2, Interesting)