Apathy kills Google's new-age Wave Google is closing down development of its new-age communications platform Wave due to lack of interest. The Chocolate Factory said Wednesday that it's stopping development of Wave as a stand-alone product because of a lack of user adoption. The Wave site is being put on life support until the end of the year, with the …
Why on earth would anyone be a "fanboi" for search engines / email / online mapping? Maybe lots of people like it and use it because it works, and is generally better than the competition? Sounds more like you have an anti-Google agenda, rather than anyone else being particularly pro-Google.
not upset just disagreement..Whilst I also am of the habit of saying I could do better, 'I' do think that in comparisson with the other (free) alternatives google do some things very well.
Note that I don't wish to change your mind or persuade you otherwise. I just wish to express My disagreement with your view of the truth.
I hate the deliberately misspelt "fanboi" tag... So childish. I happen to be a google services user, and do have slight concerns about privacy and exposing too much info to a search and ad provider, but please "shitty code"? Get real, as a proprietary software provider they are no worse and IMHO far better than most proprietary or open-source providers.
Please justify your assertions, without resorting to the hurrr-durrr google is shit and <insert competitor here> are far better.
...it just didn't solve comms problem any better than anything else. And some of the features just sucked donkey ball (showing people what you type, as you type? Pun-leeze).
It was newsgroups for Web 2.0 and it managed to not be as good as newsgroups.
Oh, and not havig stand-along apps was a fail. I don't want my comms in a browser, I want them integrated to my device/desktop.
I am sure that we'll see components/ideas in other offerings despite it's problems.
Want to solve my comms problems? Give me voice, video, instant messaging and email; all integrated. Encrypted, based on Open Standards and working seamlessly with MS Office (no matter how good OpenOffice is (and it is pretty good, i use it at home) it does not format/render documents etc *identically* to MS Office and some of us have to use it....grr...).
MS. Did you not see only the other day: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/30/microsoft_street_slide/
Mind, it was the first piece of experimental stuff I've seen from them for ages (other than stuff like F# on the developer side).
The lack of invitations was a big problem early - I had an invite but nobody else I knew. But as wave was slow, buggy and confusing, I decided to wait for a better release.
Several months later I got more invites and tried again - still slow, buggy and hard to use. I lodged bug reports and voted up feature requests.
A month ago wave added to my apps domain so all my colleagues could use it. But it was still slow, buggy and hard to use. Bugs I saw and reported months ago still present.
Fail.
The poor invites process did hurt wave. But its deeper problems are what killed it. In the end the lack of invites mainly saved me embarrassment by limiting the number of people who's time I wasted.
The general idea - of blending chat, email, collaborating on documents, etc., into a single thing - was a good one.
But the execution was woeful. It's not much use unless it's accessible to all your friends/colleagues - and the invitation scheme didn't deliver that (well, not at the right time). The main round of invitations came out before it was really ready. The tutorials were too long and dull. I don't want to watch a video. It didn't integrate with anything else, so you HAD to learn that new interface, and you got no notifications when there was new stuff on your waves - so you had to go looking. And the procedure for adding the interesting gadgets was truly arcane, so for most people it looked like nothing other than a slightly confusing chat system.
The idea deserves to come back - maybe in an extended version of gmail. A much more incremental roll-out could make it quite attractive.
"The general idea - of blending chat, email, collaborating on documents, etc., into a single thing - was a good one."
Nah. We tried that back in the early '70s. See RFC 196, for one, and the XeroxPARC Alta's Pup protocol, et alia ... It didn't take half a decade to figure out that separate protocols and interfaces/methodologies for different communications methods just makes more sense than trying to unify 'em into one.
Note I'm talking interface and presentation here, not transport ...
well, the history of computing is all about re-inventing wheels... (both the round ones, and the less successful polygons)
but there *are* integrations that work - mail and calendar in Outlook or Thunderbird, for example. Or Facebook, which is part homepage, part instant message, part usenet, part photo-sharing, part link-sharing, part spam-laden crapware.
I thought WAVE was pretty good. My only issue with it was the fact that GMAIL was not integrated into it. I did not want to juggle 2 email systems.
Had GMAIL worked with in WAVE I think they would of had a much better response.... kind of silly they did not do it, maybe there was some technical reason for it I don't know?
I work as part of a team spread out geographically, and we tested it briefly. It didn't really do anything any better than our existing tools, and I for one hated the real-time typing thing: all it did was expose how clumsy I am with my two fingers and a thumb!
Plus all that scripting and whatnot was leaving it wide open to hacks etc in the long run. Solution looking for a problem.
The only person I ever spoke to who was enthusiastic about Wave was a friend who was just going through the first flush of a social networking obsession and had also just bought herself an iPhone. My god that was a nauseating few hours. On top of that she had slagged me off back in the day for using LiveJournal ("Oh my god why don't you just go to the pub and speak to people in real life like everyone else you total geek?").
I know an "IT person" who is a non-stop fan of anything Google puts out, and at the time of it's release was both praising it and repeating the marketing speak about how e-mail was obsolete and this was the "wave" of the future.
Big hint---if people really don't understand what your product is and it takes several tutorial videos to even grasp the concept, it's not gong to work. Maybe some good ideas, but a woeful execution.
Showing people character by character text messages was interesting but was it necessary, other than to see how poor a typist most of us really are? And like most people I was scratching my head---the document collaboration was useful, but aside from that just what to do with it?
It was also ironic (as many people are pointing out) that it didn't integrate with the e-mail it was supposed to replace. Sigh...I'd show this to that IT person but he's already forgotten about it and is on to the next widget that will save the world.
For similar functionality within an office network, there is OneNote - it doesn't have a browser's limitations so is much easier and simpler to use and of course the content it supports is much richer. Wave was limited by JS and HTML and so it was a slightly weaker collaboration tool.
BUT, Wave was better for talking and sharing with people who weren't within the office network. I'm a bit surprised that there wasn't enough adoption!
I got used to Facebook, halfway used to Twitter (as in seeing the point-I barely do still), and like Tumblr for simple articles that look silly posted only on FB.
However, despite using other Google software for years, the Wave never actually made sense. It never broke over the rock of my understanding or made a splash in my online life.
Can anyone explain where your meant to go or what you are meant to do with this thing? :-).
The really big idea behind Wave was federation of the platform. Increasingly we rely on monolithic platforms such as Google Apps and Facebook. With Wave, we could all run our own Wave servers but still communicate with each other, much as we do with email.
Sooner or later email must die. Something will need to replace it. Much as we don't want to rely on a single company to provide all of the world's email or DNS services, we won't want to rely on a single company to provide our messaging/collaboration services. Wave may not be the answer, but we will need something along similar lines.
At least they're trying - it's better to try new things and see what value can be made from them than sticking with the same old crap and avoiding all forms of innovation. (i.e. MS Outlook - still featuring many of the same bugs and savage usability problems as it did 10 years ago)
So some things don't work out - lessons can be learnt, better plans made next time and anything useful in it may be useful in the future. This is much better than stagnation.
My opinion would have likely been 'meh', it often is to google and apple stuff, but this idea of exclusive invites just pushes me away.
I don't needlessly sign up for stuff and give my email to yet another marketing dept (at best - or spam merchant at worst) so as a result i am not on any early adopter lists and did not get an invite to wave or spotify.
As a result, I wont go to the trouble of installing wave since i don't know what it is supposed to be and i am quite happy with pirate bay over spotify as most people i know listen to rubbish music.
The concept that a company will exclusively allow me to be their customer is absurd! Its like queuing to get into a shop to buy something. Wave is an example of when the company believes its own hype too much.
It was an interesting idea, although fellow monitored tanned folk didnt really get into it and figure out cool things to do with it.
One of its main failings is that it wasnt integrated. no single sign on intergration with other google products - i seem to recall it didnt even mail you to let you know there had been an update!?
have they shut down Buzz yet, or what everther their twitter like service was?
and finally, is it just me or is google groups also not the best implementation of discussion groups/forums/bbs the world had seen either?
however, as others have said... Search, Mail, Map/Street View are great. From a revenue perspective the Ads have been a sucess and sometimes to give you interesting and relveant ad links related to mail/searched
With toys made from gears.
But, seriously, being one of the older crowd, we still do lots of comms among friends via never-dead (until someone reboots the host) GNU Screen + BitchX. My much younger betrothed uses Facebook and SMS. Solution in search of a problem.
My disabled daughter's trust manages all her day-to-day admin work via Wave, keeping trustees, family and friends in touch. The trust's regular meetings are minuted and available to everyone who has an interest in my daughter's care and wellbeing.
Sure, Wave is a bit clunky and it could do with a little streamlining here and there, but it's useful and free. Where Google is happy creating its own "Evil Empire" in some areas, it has been positively cuddly and kindly in others, and Wave will be missed greatly in this household. Not perfect, it's true, but a handy tool that has kept those involved apprised of my daughter's health and care requirements and has, to my knowledge, kept prying eyes away from confidential information.
We could use Facebook or one of several other methods of staying in touch, of course, but Wave's very obscurity has, for us at least, been one of its chief strengths.
Sad to see it go, frankly, but pleased that Google gave it a go.
So goofgle (I'll leave that typo as its far to appropriate!) said to themselves what if email didn't exist? How would we make it today? and voila Wave was born...
Anyway what Google Failed to realise that releasing an alternative email system would probably only work IF email didn't exist in the first place.... so just as has been posted above. Wave was always second to email and just extra hassle. What google should have done was integrate Gmail into wave so that there was just ONE application, with multiple types of email/wave threads.
Wave was good, but in the end it was too much hassle to manage multiple apps. In the same way that people dont have myspace bebo twitter and facebook.. but instead just stick to one.
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Google Wave is the most useful new service I've seen on the web in many years. It's confusing at first, but all it takes is an ounce of imagination to see how it can be used.
Now my band uses it to plan everything we do. When it gets shut down, we'll find it hugely annoying to go back to some archaic combo of emails, attachments and IMs.
Google needs a little dedication to their products. There has been a distressing trend recently of them having great ideas that are ahead of their time, but then cancelling them before the world has a change to catch up. Thank God that didn't happen with Android.
It's a real shame. The real-time multi-user apps supported by wave have a great future. We have a Google Wave travel-planner called "Travel WithMe",
and people love the real-time experience.
Sensing that wave might not be going places, we've put it on facebook now as well, but still with Google Wave's realtime features. It's at apps.facebook.com/travel-withme.
...Rather liked it myself. Liked the collaboration, the ability for a newcomer to the wave to replay its history, the instant translation robot and the whole idea. Never quite reached a critical mass of colleagues or friends to make it actually useful, and I rather suspect that's what put paid to it in our case.
That, and the lack of integration with "old-fashioned" email.
It'd be nice to see it resurface in slicker form in Gmail or Google Docs or similar. For people who will miss the collaborative aspect of it, you could try using Google Spreadsheets to collaborate with; it's not perfect, but it's free and easy... ;)
Google was interesting, but I disliked the idea that you had to have a separate email address for it. The other problem was that Google did not see all that committed to it. Google needed to do a lot more to promote Wave. I think Google's decision to abandon Wave so quickly demonstrates their lack of commitment.
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