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When I read these news I'm always reminded of a certain old project. There once was a decentralized communication platform that promised to replace email, wiki

by etatoby 10y ago

When I read these news I'm always reminded of a certain old project. There once was a decentralized communication platform that promised to replace email, wikis, forums, article comment services, blogs, microblogs, you name it. It was technically very advanced: many people could work on the same document at the same time and they would see each other's changes in real time, even if they were working from different federated servers. The history of all changes was accessible as well, in a very user-friendly way (play button and time slider.) The GUI was not as fast as it could be, but it was cross-platform, user-friendly, and it worked. I'm talking about Google Wave. It was federated, it was very advanced, and it failed spectacularly. Keep that in mind as you make further predictions.

daveid 10y ago
Google closed it down. Like it also did with Google Reader and eventually XMPP federation for Google Talk (now Hangouts). Google developed a lot of cool tech for federation and the open web (some of the protocols my project and GNU social use, for example) and then had a change of heart sometime around the birth of G+. I'm not sure this says more about federated projects than Google itself?
est 10y ago
I thought you meant NNTP.
jklinger410 10y ago
Almost thought you were talking about Diaspora for a minute.
mxuribe 10y ago
Just my opinion, but I actually would have reported this differently. Firstly, Wave - the protocol - is still around; its an apache project: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ So technically and actually anyone could create their own (free or for-pay) service/instance. There's nothing stopping a couple of kids (or senior employees disgruntled with their current enterprise employer) from scrapping together a new project/venture to start a new social network based on Wave, etc. The platform didn't fail so much as Google let it die off (at least retired it from their infrastructure, retired it as a product they supported, etc.). As another person here has noted, google creates some cool tech. And, in this case, google either didn't know what to do with this cool tech., or felt they couldn't make money on it, or felt users couldn't adopt it, etc. Or, who knows, maybe it was a technology too far ahead of its time for google to really understand its potential. I myself thought it was a great idea.
catdog 10y ago
> The GUI was not as fast as it could be, but it was cross-platform, user-friendly, and it worked. The UI was slow as hell, even practically unusable on something like a netbook at the time. > I'm talking about Google Wave. It was federated, it was very advanced, and it failed spectacularly. Keep that in mind as you make further predictions. As far as I remember Google suddenly decided to drop it after a very very short time frame. This combined with the bad experience of a slow UI practically buried it in the ground and the world moved on. What failed there was Google, we do not really know if the general concept of wave is a fail neither if its federated protocol is a fail. Most importantly I don't think wave tells us anything about the prospects of federal social networks in general.

by etatoby 10y ago

daveid 10y ago

Google closed it down. Like it also did with Google Reader and eventually XMPP federation for Google Talk (now Hangouts). Google developed a lot of cool tech for federation and the open web (some of the protocols my project and GNU social use, for example) and then had a change of heart sometime around the birth of G+. I'm not sure this says more about federated projects than Google itself?

est 10y ago

I thought you meant NNTP.

jklinger410 10y ago

Almost thought you were talking about Diaspora for a minute.

mxuribe 10y ago

Just my opinion, but I actually would have reported this differently. Firstly, Wave - the protocol - is still around; its an apache project: https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ https://incubator.apache.org/wave/ So technically and actually anyone could create their own (free or for-pay) service/instance. There's nothing stopping a couple of kids (or senior employees disgruntled with their current enterprise employer) from scrapping together a new project/venture to start a new social network based on Wave, etc. The platform didn't fail so much as Google let it die off (at least retired it from their infrastructure, retired it as a product they supported, etc.). As another person here has noted, google creates some cool tech. And, in this case, google either didn't know what to do with this cool tech., or felt they couldn't make money on it, or felt users couldn't adopt it, etc. Or, who knows, maybe it was a technology too far ahead of its time for google to really understand its potential. I myself thought it was a great idea.

catdog 10y ago

> The GUI was not as fast as it could be, but it was cross-platform, user-friendly, and it worked. The UI was slow as hell, even practically unusable on something like a netbook at the time. > I'm talking about Google Wave. It was federated, it was very advanced, and it failed spectacularly. Keep that in mind as you make further predictions. As far as I remember Google suddenly decided to drop it after a very very short time frame. This combined with the bad experience of a slow UI practically buried it in the ground and the world moved on. What failed there was Google, we do not really know if the general concept of wave is a fail neither if its federated protocol is a fail. Most importantly I don't think wave tells us anything about the prospects of federal social networks in general.