Google Wave Looking To Join Apache Software Foundation 79
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."
Hope (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a bad protocol per se (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
I just hope that Google cleans up their act (Score:4, 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."
great app, lousy implementation (Score:3, 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.
Wave is Perfect for Real Estate (Score:3, 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!
Re:Hope (Score:2, Interesting)
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:great app, lousy implementation (Score:2, Interesting)
Making an Amazon EC2 image might help.
They always get the WHY of it wrong. (Score:3, 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.