12 ms·

Google Kills Wave

712 points by elfred 16y ago

keefe 16y ago
oh no but at least I can cross checkout google wave in detail from my todo......
zandorg 16y ago
They blew it big time by hyping it for RPGs, which never went anywhere. Get the RPGers on board, perhaps, and you can succeed.
- gigafemtonano 16y ago
  Kingdom of Loathing players were using it back in March, though they seem to be a more intellectual playerbase compared to most RPGs.
- Goosey 16y ago
  It's a widely accepted rule of thumb that no technology can succeed without RPGs being involved. ?:o
- brown9-2 16y ago
  They blew it by making it confusing to understand what you'd use it for, making it confusing to know which of your friends had accounts (no integration with gmail!) and confusing to know when someone sent you a new "wave" (no integration with gmail!).
  - spydez 16y ago
    ...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know. They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day, but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added. And this way works with all email, not just gmail! There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much integration do you want, exactly?
    - gecko 16y ago
      While you're correct, that option was added far too late. By the time that option was added, everyone in my organization had tried Wave and then given up on it. I revived its use in the last week, successfully, with that option, only to see that it's now going to die anyway. Really, all of Wave can be summarized by the fact that, at its launch, Wave deliberately refused to participate in any existing communications medium other than Wave. This meant that everyone you cared about had to get on Wave. Since that couldn't possibly happen, Wave was doomed from the start. Nothing about today's announcement is remotely a surprise to me.
      - fragmede 16y ago
        It also sucked. You would get an email that something changed, and the context given was the first message/blip/whatever in the wave instead of the message added at the end. It was a huge let down to log into wave just to read 'yeah' as the entirety of the update. Leaving me to ignore wave update emails even more.
    - thorax 16y ago
      That feature was so confusing I had to explain to my computer-literate-but-confused-by-Wave friends. Hard to edit your preferences, hard to get other people into it, hard to get reminders set up. If they could relaunch and make all those things better, Wave would be stellar. I almost wish they'd break backwards compatibility for people who loved the interface because it just went in the wrong direction.
    - brown9-2 16y ago
      Did they launch with these features? I distinctly recall thinking "how do I know who's on this thing?" and repeatedly going back to the site in hope that someone else I knew finally used the site and sent me a message. The technology might be great but the launch and execution were really, really weird.
      - spydez 16y ago
        They did not. Well, they did originally have "who's online" functionality, but they had to yank it when someone found an exploit, and it took them forever to get it working again. The "email me" option was much later - around the time they went from "Preview" to "Beta", I think. And as thorax said in his reply to me, Google flubbed the UI/usability of the preferences. As far as "who has a Wave account", it's the same scheme as email. You get a Wave address; you're responsible for letting all your friends know what your address is (e.g., mine's in my HN profile). Probably could've been improved by hooking into Facebook/Twitter/etc. and spamming out your Wave address to all your friends...
- spydez 16y ago
  My little group of friends is using it for a DnD RPG. It's orders of magnitude better than the IRC chatroom we were using before. It's going to be annoying having to go back to IRC.
  - DTrejo 16y ago
    http://pygowave.net/ http://pygowave.net/
    - Jd 16y ago
      They discontinued development themselves.
BobbyH 16y ago
I feel bad for the Etherpad guys, who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015
- DTrejo 16y ago
  I still miss etherpad. I use some of the alternatives, but it's not the same :( alternatives: http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html
  - peregrine 16y ago
    Google docs is very similar to what etherpad used to be. All be it far less user friendly you can watch others edit and update in real time.
    - param 16y ago
      http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/albeit.html http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/albeit.html
      - peregrine 16y ago
        Thanks for pointing that out.
    - jherdman 16y ago
      Yes, you're right, but "albeit" is the word you're looking for, not "all be it".
      - mjgoins 16y ago
        http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=albeit&oldid=9563626 http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=albeit&oldid=...
        16y ago
Goosey 16y ago
I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over. I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with "MY REPLY IN RED" company chain email threads from hell forever now.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  I blame it on never understanding the UI, the way it did things, or its usefulness. It's like a chat you can't delete things from, and everyone sees what you type and all your mistakes? And you can post pictures? I just don't get it.
  - whakojacko 16y ago
    Not to mention its crazy amount of javascript usage-Wave brought most of the browsers I tried it on to a crawl on my laptop. I really like the concept, but for many reasons never liked the execution.
  - spydez 16y ago
    There's an option on every blip in every wave that says "Delete This". You can even delete other people's blips! People can only see your mistakes if they're in the wave and looking while you type (ie, "Chat Mode"). If it's used like email (that is, checking it a few times per day), they see only the snapshots of what happened when the "Done" button was pressed. You can add pictures. You can embed YouTube videos. You can have links. Honestly, yeah, it takes some getting used to, but once you're used to it, it's no more complicated than Outlook. Personally, I think using Outlook to set up a meeting notice is harder than using Wave.
  - roc 16y ago
    The incredibly powerful, federated, open protocol/platform was what excited us geeks. The client always sucked and was, at the most generous, a tech demo of things the protocol/platform was capable of.
jacquesm 16y ago
That didn't take very long now did it? I never even got around to checking it out. Aren't they afraid that the next product they announce in this fashion will be met with some scepticism from potential early adopters, who might think 'I'll wait for a bit to see if it stays', which in turn will lead to a cycle where it gets harder and harder for google to release new stuff and get it adopted? edit: would be nice if they open sourced the code.
- evansolomon 16y ago
  They launched Wave in May of 2009. It's not like they yanked it all that quickly.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Microsoft announced, then released, spent $250M on advertising, and then killed a new phone in that time.
    - brown9-2 16y ago
      To be fair, Google did the same thing in the same time frame with the Nexus One, minus the ad budget. Sometimes disrupting existing markets and paradigms takes time, patience, and several iterations. (I'm still disappointed at how quickly they stopped the direct-sale idea with the Nexus One)
      - tomhogans 16y ago
        The biggest problem with selling the Nexus One direct was support. Carriers didn't want to support a phone that hadn't branded and Google couldn't accept that people don't want to ask a community message board and wait a few days for a reply when their phone doesn't work.
        bokchoi 16y ago
        The community message board support model doesn't work for google. My current peeve is this god-awful bug thread for adding an additional account to an Android phone: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=6981e6d970e2f29f&hl=en
noodle 16y ago
unfortunate. it was a good product, for the right market, but it was overhyped and it underdelivered.
- intranation 16y ago
  And what was the market, exactly? Seems to me that not a single person I knew actually wanted to use it, or thought it filled a niche they needed filling.
  - noodle 16y ago
    its my understanding groups that had to do a high level of collaboration across several people found it pretty useful. i know some people that still use it for this and are happy, although i'm sure that if it closes down, they'll find another product and carry on.
prs 16y ago
Based on the initial reactions to the first Google Wave demonstration by a few non-tech friends of mine I thought Google Wave might gain the necessary product adoption and momentum. I erred and so did many other folks. I applaud Google for their willingness to stop investing precious development resources in something that looked like the next big thing but turned out to be a great product without consumer approval.
tc 16y ago
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook? Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email. Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really does. ---- PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could run on your own network. PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations of the needed components. PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private (but federated) uptake as an email replacement.
- wmf 16y ago
  Too bad you could never run it inside the firewall AFAIK.
  - semanticist 16y ago
    There's no reason they couldn't provide an appliance (like the Google Search Appliance: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html) or simply make it available for a local install (like every mail server used by every company that cares about things being 'inside the firewall').
  - prosa 16y ago
    All the protocols were open-sourced as part of the initiative. I think they envisioned a world in which inside-the-wall installations existed in the same way the companies have Exchange servers today.
    - wmf 16y ago
      Except Microsoft is willing to sell you Exchange Server but Google wasn't willing to sell you a Wave server. Writing your own is very difficult; no one has managed to match Google's implementation.
dgrant 16y ago
When more people say "I tried it, haven't really used it though" than "I use it regularly" you know your product has failed.
- edash 16y ago
  You could say that about Twitter, though, and it's difficult to find anyone today who considers Twitter a failure.
watmough 16y ago
Is this the same thing as Buzz? If I want to 'connect' with friends, I have Facebook, and if I want to im work colleagues, I have Yahoo and MSN. For document collaboration I have email for non-realtime, Google Docs for near and actual real-time. I have a hard time seeing where my workflow needs any more collaboration tools.
Charuru 16y ago
The idea is excellent, the fail is the lack of 'product'. They should distribute Wave modules that every wordpress or phpbb user can install on their blogs and hook into their own communities... and then Wave will take off.
- Timothee 16y ago
  To me, the big problem was indeed the lack of a product. I have tried Google Wave and I don't know what "product" they're talking about. It seemed to be an interesting technological experiment but I wouldn't be able to tell you what it's for, what problem it solves, or anything besides the fact that technologically, it was interesting. In fact, I'm kind of surprised that they're killing it, because it felt like a first step with the technology part, with an upcoming second step where they would use said technology. I'm surprised that that was it. I would have expected Google to have plans beyond what Wave is today.
jakevoytko 16y ago
You can't make people solve problems they don't have. If Google failed with the Hype Winds at their backs, then I doubt anybody can do it.
- prosa 16y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. I would state it somewhat differently, though. I think Wave solved too many problems simultaneously, making it overly complex in some ways and hiding its true utility in others.
- icarus_drowning 16y ago
  While I agree that a large part of the blame for Wave's failure falls on Google, I think its hard to make the case that it "solve[s] problems [people] don't have". Anyone who's ever dealt with the horror of a multi-user email thread (>>>>>This sort of thing, or perhaps "My_Doc_CASEY'sVERSION.doc")knows that Wave at least solves that problem fairly well. Of course, no one really cares about that if you can't get your whole team onto Wave in the first place.
ary 16y ago
That was fast. I remember watching the announcement (in person) and wondering who it was really meant for. At the time it felt like a solution in search of a problem. What I did really like was the work they'd done on change-set propagation. Don't have a link to the session on hand, but it was quite interesting.
- ary 16y ago
  And here it is: http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/GoogleWaveUnderTheHood.html http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/GoogleWaveUnd...
justlearning 16y ago
Ouch Etherpad guys! Perhaps Google is coming out with WaveDocs (wave integrated google docs) soon?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
boots 16y ago
What suprises me is the short lifespan of the product to the public before killing it. While some of us may have had Wave invites for a while, it has been only been open to the public for less then 3 months.
- theoden 16y ago
  And the vast majority don't even know that it exists.
zavulon 16y ago
Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively) early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that. I really hope Buzz is next.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  The complement of Release Early/Often is probably Kill Early/Often. EDIT: spelling fixed, thanks!
  - thisisfmu 16y ago
    I think you wanted to say "complement".
  - pjscott 16y ago
    Peter Norvig has confirmed this, and says that the great majority of Google's projects die before anybody even hears about them. This lets them try things out cheaper, so the ideas they do invest a lot of time and money into will have a higher probability of success. http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/03/error-message-google-research-director-peter-norvig-on-being-wrong.aspx http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/...
  - frossie 16y ago
    You know what the complement of Kill Early/Often is? It's me never letting my shop use a new Google product ever again. People invest time in adopting these technologies. Sure, with a little startup you take into account the fact that they might not be able to survive, but with Google you think hey, okay, let's use this thing. And you start developing your process around it. And then you get burned when it gets dropped with "Oh well we lost interest, okay we love you, bye bye!". So today, my guys would have been better off sticking with their lousy wiki that having switched to Wave (despite the fact that they liked it and felt it increased their productivity - personally, I never warmed up to it). Fool me once...
    - 16y ago
jsdalton 16y ago
From last year... "Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354
sprout 16y ago
Wave may have been an idea whose time is yet to come. When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it. This was mostly because I was working in a company where getting people to document was enough of a difficulty without introducing new software. If I'd worked somewhere with a bunch of early-adopters, it would have been a fantastic tool. On the other hand, Wave seems like a tool that almost replicates all of the benefits of being in the same room as someone. I don't think there's a better way to do a distributed workplace. (Of course, I haven't tried.)
- thorax 16y ago
  > When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it. Slow? I can only assume people who said this weren't using the latest FF or Chrome. I've never considered Wave slow at all.
  - gloob 16y ago
    At the beginning, on Firefox, it was soul-deadeningly slow.
  - brg 16y ago
    The Chrome team valiantly tried to incorporate it into our design process, but stopped using it precisely because it was painfully slow.
alextgordon 16y ago
It failed because it was completely invisible. Facebook spams your inbox. They make sure you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc). With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I'm only just finding out now. What kind of a communication tool is that? It's like they're selling a phone that can't ring. The other UI and social issues were important but weren't fatal. If Google had actually notified users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer. Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.
- shikhar 16y ago
  it's not like twitter ever sends/sent an email when someone you follow tweets.
  - alextgordon 16y ago
    Twitter is ephemeral. You can quite easily leave it for a month and miss nothing important. Nobody will care, nobody will miss you. Twitter will continue to function as long as people have egos, which is to say forever. (not trying to bash twitter here even though it sounds like it.) Wave is quite different. It's designed for conversations and collaboration. In order for it to function, users need to be able to know when the other has responded quite quickly. Wave itself does nothing to ensure this.
    - skinnymuch 16y ago
      I feel the same way about Twitter, but still it seems like Twitter bashing. You're not proving a point in your first paragraph, merely your opinion. This is especially true with the "leave it for a month and miss nothing important". I'm sure some people (not me) would feel quite differently.
- runT1ME 16y ago
  You pose an interesting problem. It was (eventually) supposed to replace email, so I'm assuming it was envisioned everyone would check wave every day, or have it constantly open, etc. Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..
icarus_drowning 16y ago
This really makes me sad. I work in media, and I have found that the collaborative aspects of Wave really made that process easier. I scored an entire film earlier this year, and the producers and I only used Wave as our collaboration space. It was beautiful. Keeping track of various versions of each cue was easily 10x easier than my usual mode (email/FTP/Skype/Phone/etc). We started off with a collaborative list of every cue needed during the first run through, and then let that list grow bigger and bigger with inline replys. Wave's built-in media features meant that I could paste mp3's into the space and let the filmmakers hear my work immediately, and then download the file to put into the project. This meant that when it came time to FTP the big, uncompressed files, it was only the finals, which made things a lot easier. Likewise, collaborating with temp music was a breeze-- the filmmakers even scored a few sections of the film with temp music and then put the video right into the conversation. (No more folders full of giant quicktime files with different scores). I know that I'm going to miss that experience. Oh well. Perhaps someone will take the open-source'd code from Google and build a better product. I'm not holding my breath.
linaceballos 16y ago
It was time. That´s true that "You can't make people solve problems they don't have". But the idea was excellent,maybe later can work.
mixmax 16y ago
The problem with useradoption of wave largely came from their invite-only strategy. It's a social tool that requires my friends to have an account for it to be of any use. If they don't have invites and can't join it's useless. It's amazing that Google didn't see this.
- jgoewert 16y ago
  That is dead-on the reason I stopped using it. Woot! I got an invite. Dang, none of my friends did. Well... when can I get them one. Forget about this. Meh. Back to email, IM, IRC and Twitter.
  - ern 16y ago
    I managed to invite my friends, only to find one non-geek who didn't know how to install Chrome Frame, and couldn't run anything but IE on her work machine (corporate policy). The overhead of using IM group chats when she was in the conversation, and Wave when it was the rest of us, was too much, so we just dumped Wave.
cedsav 16y ago
That sucks, we left basecamp/campfire for Google Wave and it was a really good fit for us (collaborative work with a distributed team).
ilovecomputers 16y ago
They should really reprint this shirt, in light of this announcement, for hipsters to wear. http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts-sale/ http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts...
dpcan 16y ago
Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite IF they ever did. So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers. I would blame the launch for the failure of this one.
- Zak 16y ago
  I think that Google saw that artificial scarcity worked well with gmail and thought the same would be true for Wave. The problem, of course is that a Gmail account didn't depend on anyone else having one to be useful. Wave, in theory was an open standard as well, but in practice, Google was and is the only provider.
  - amackera 16y ago
    I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver. It's pure conjecture of course!
    - nl 16y ago
      It wasn't so much that they lacked infrastructure as that the early versions didn't scale so well. I got a very early invitation, and it was pretty slow, and got worse as they added more users. They fixed that of course, but it did slow down the roll-out.
      - mechanical_fish 16y ago
        So why not have another rollout? Sponsor some contests? Hold more demos in tech conferences? Build a Wave-to-Twitter gateway? Build a demo site which gives every HN article it's own wavelet, or whatever?
  - amackera 16y ago
mike463 16y ago
I think it was grievously hurt by google's slow-start "invite" thing. It was a catch-22. You needed people to collaborate with for it to catch on, but you needed to wait a long time to invite people.
rue 16y ago
Excellent. Wave was made using obsolete technology and some wrong choices made it in regarding push vs. pull, distribution, modularity, "social mediafication" and encryption among other things. There were some good things about it, and Hopefully we will now see some real contenders rise up to tackle the Future of Communication(tm). Preferrably not from Google. Sorry.
jonhohle 16y ago
I used Google wave for feature/ticket tracking. The only thing I could fault it for was the wacky interface which didn't always work correctly. It was nice to have a hosted, free ticket tracking app that did just enough to get by for that purpose (for personal use I don't need anything as complicated as Redmine, Trak, or Bugzilla; don't have much desire to host my own app; and I'm too cheap to pay someone to host something I could do myself). Now I'll have to move all of that state somewhere else.
vidar 16y ago
Everything that distracts from Google Me is obviously being shut down.
- DotSauce 16y ago
  I don't know what other services you're referring to, but that was my first thought.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
sofal 16y ago
Does anyone else here think that Etherpad could have been more successful than Google Wave?
- durin42 16y ago
  Personally I still use Etherpad more than Wave through the open source implementation.
abraham 16y ago
If Wave was launched with the Gmail integration of Buzz I think we would be discussing a completely different outcome.
- axod 16y ago
  Is buzz doing any better?
  - pavs 16y ago
    I think the problem is two-fold both with Buzz and Wave. First the implementation and the adoption. I think Wave idea is awesome, but their implementation (and performance) has been always an issue. My communication is already fragmented over so many places I don't want another domain for another form of communication. They should have added wave into Gmail by default. Wave always had horrible performance issues (still does). Buzz doesn't solve any communication problem that I can't use it on any other popular services. So Buzz adoption doesn't make sense to me whether its integrated to Gmail or not. Buzz is a "me too" product. Wave was not.
  - abraham 16y ago
    I believe Buzz has double digit millions of active users. I can not find the source currently though.
lionhearted 16y ago
That's a shame. I'd have used it if other friends and colleagues adopted it, it was pretty good at what it did. I think the issue was that it didn't solve any big enough problems for people to encourage them to get on.
j_baker 16y ago
I wanted to like wave. It just always seemed like a solution looking for a problem.
ig1 16y ago
Given there seems to be real demand for this product, it may well be an opportunity for a startup to build a competitor.
c1sc0 16y ago
This makes me feel a little better about the time when I sat on tons of invites & never really got around to using Wave. I'm one of those who never grokked wave.
robwgibbons 16y ago
Crap. How can I host my own?
agentultra 16y ago
I liked it, just didn't like the interface. I was an early adopter and very excited about the protocol. When I was looking at it, there wasn't enough client specification to bother working on an alternative client (ie: emacs). Hopefully that has changed (or will change before Google drops support). I found it really useful for collaborating with multiple parties. It allowed us to work on a document and keep the conversation all in one place yet clearly separated. Sometimes email can make that distinction difficult or unclear. At least it's not entirely closed source. :)
- twopoint718 16y ago
  This is what I thought. I wasn't going to pay attention until they specified the client protocol (Wave needs an Emacs mode). Most of the complaints I've heard about Wave stemmed from its AJAX-heavy user interface. How many people had new enough browsers to even use Wave?
InclinedPlane 16y ago
I said it before and I'll say it again: wave solved all of the wrong (easy) problems of communication and failed to tackle any of the hard problems. The result was a highly polished mashup of existing communication forms based on cutting edge technology that made for an excellent demo but a very poor (or at best niche) product. See also: the Segway. P.S. Re: hard vs. easy problems: Wave tackled some hard challenges in the implementation space, which I think may have led the engineers into thinking they were building something innovative and worthwhile. However, the important bit is whether or not you've actually solved anything in the problem space.
harscoat 16y ago
innovative technology feels like art sometimes, it should exist for the sake of it. "L'art pour l'art", Innovation for innovation!
newmediaclay 16y ago
Google put absolutely 0 muscle behind this product. Android got front page placement on Google and it has now overtaken iPhone. They either didn't truly believe in Wave or the marketing team just made a huge gaffe by not even making a half ass attempt to push this product to the consumer world.
jpablo 16y ago
I was thinking about this recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362223 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362223
slavin 16y ago
i don't get which problem was it solving. is it cool that they've introduced character-by-character typing? well, kinda.. but is it useful at all? it's also cool (for someone) that it looks like a desktop app, but is it needed? it's maybe cool that i have all my contacts from gmail there, but do i need this? i mean i don't even get why would i think of my gmail as a social network, it's my inbox, and it's fine for what it does. I mean its hard not to appreciate people trying to innovate, but it actually has to solve some sort of problem.. or maybe it's just me not getting the concept (however it's still so much more interesting than all these buzz, rule.fm etc)
- swombat 16y ago
  I wrote an article on the topic back then: http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html "What problems does Google Wave solve?" Wave solved many problems. Google are idiots to axe it after barely a year and a half.
antimatter15 16y ago
I guess my new wave client is even more dead. http://micro-wave.appspot.com http://micro-wave.appspot.com
antimatter15 16y ago
I guess my new wave client http://micro-wave.appspot.com http://micro-wave.appspot.com is a little more dead.
- agentultra 16y ago
  No, the protocol and a basic server implementation are still open source. You will need a new provider I guess. Keep it alive!
- retube 16y ago
  that link nails browser back button
- durin42 16y ago
  Is that open-source anywhere? That's actually pretty slick.
ritonlajoie 16y ago
in two words : It was a good idea, but badly implemented. I'm not telling I would have done a better job than their engineers, but just have a look at the slow interface they made, and you will get my point..
siglesias 16y ago
Wave was simply over-developed internally, and by the time it was released it had evolved an esoteric, private feature set and interface that had suited the Google beta testers. I for one was simply bewildered by the interface and found it difficult to incorporate into my workflow.
ashishbharthi 16y ago
"See my comments in RED" still rocks.
Dylanfm 16y ago
Understandable, but still a shame. We've got a wave going with about 14 people planning our trips to Ruby Kaigi in a few weeks. It's working really well and has definitely provided value that would be tricky to find elsewhere. Could Wave have worked better if it targeted a vertical? Or is that not how Google does things?
gcheong 16y ago
Microsoft Bobs. Google Waves.
- lesswavy 16y ago
  Apple OpenDocs.
InfinityX0 16y ago
This was Wave's failure: One year after release (and having never used it), I still don't really know what it does.
mhd 16y ago
So, that leaves us with 0 popular GWT applications? Or did Google build anything new / ported something old with it?
scotty79 16y ago
Can't they just stop improving it and keep it running? It's not like they need to save their server resources.
lwhi 16y ago
Wave was a bit too sci-fi. A bit too ahead of its time maybe. Maybe it's best if the technology is split up and spoon-fed to the general population ... that way people can get a taste. I think change needs to be incremental.
elv 16y ago
I think Wave is a creative and full of effort generalization of a basic idea: adding something to GMail to promote online work coordination and cooperation. They went way too far and they realized it. I would, istread of throwing everything away, rework the concept and see what can come out.
furtivefelon 16y ago
Is it just me or is the source not easily discoverable? I found the wave protocol sources, but i can't really find the individual components. If anyone could point me to the right repo it would be much appreciated!
bentoner 16y ago
It seems that at their scale, Google doesn't bother to (is unable to?) evolve individual products, rather they pivot by launching and killing entire projects. The same thing happened with Google's 3D world product, Lively, and the following comparison of Lively with IMVU by Eric Ries is pertinent: "By the time they [Google] actually managed to launch something, they were building the product that we had already discovered was not the right product 100 iterations ago. "But they launched it with such high fanfare and expectations; they were so convinced they got it right, that it was actually the mismatch between the expectations that Google--one of the most public companies in the world--put behind this product, and then its pathetic results... "The product wasn't a bad product and it's not like nobody wanted to use it (of course they wanted to use it for stuff that embarrassed Google) but it was the mismatch that really caused them to have to pull it; it was very embarrassing for them... "Even after they launched they really didn't give it enough time to learn and iterate because they had set the wrong expectations, a classic big-company [inaudible]." [http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup -- starting at 6:35 in the audio]
- elblanco 16y ago
  This is really a key point. Outside of a few wave template buttons, has any of the core interface problems with the Wave client been addressed since the initial semi-private-invite-only release? Wave seems fundamentally the same to me as a user as it did a year ago when I first saw it. Yet users in general have complained about the same problems the entire time, none of which appear to have been addressed.
dmnd 16y ago
I wonder if the team can continue working on an open source implementation in their 20% time.
senthilnayagam 16y ago
google wave is dead because of google. google provided limited accounts and google wave requests was being sold, so the hype got created. overcommit and underdelivery, 2009 was not 2004, gmail style launch for wave was the first nail in the coffin though you have your account, your friends dont, you were waiting alone, it was not the realtime communications I expected. what do I do, leave google wave, this has happened with so many people whom I know.
helwr 16y ago
long live the Wave. the time is right for a New Wave startup
mark_l_watson 16y ago
That is sad - I have written a few Wave Robots and wrote an article on Wave. I never thought of it as a user-facing system as-is, but instead liked it as a development platform. I probably invested a little less than 80 hours playing with Wave and writing Robots, and I think it was time fairly well spent, even if Wave is going away.
elblanco 16y ago
It's a nice case study of too much engineering and too much technology, with far too many unnecessary features to start with, with too much of a roll-out (the basic feature demo took over 45 minutes) to too few people without nearly enough thought into actual use cases of a rather complex piece of software that simply didn't perform that well in real world scenarios. "What's a Wave?" - should be answerable in a couple of sentences, I don't think it ever achieved that level of refinement before being put out into the world. Even though the basic idea was great, performance of the software in-browser has never been that great, server performance was problematic, especially when waves became too long, no export option of collaborate waves to documents, no real integration with email. Plus it was hard to organize waves. After it went pseudo-public nothing really new happened to it and old weird problems like the funky scrollbar were never addressed. That being said, I've used it on a number of projects, a couple quite big six-month ordeals, and found it an amazing collaborative environment if you disciplined your team a bit and organized things well at the start of the project. The concept, combining several, different, modes of communication in one environment is pretty sound actually, I just think that the modes were combined a little too singularly. Certain things like real-time chat and document collaboration are fundamentally different things that should have been relegated to different parts of the interface rather than jammed into one place. "But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." Duh, the rollout was rather botched and given what I think I've detailed it's no wonder. "What is Wave" should have been "a document collaboration tool with real-time side-channel chat and group email" would have been better for the use-cases my group fell into. What I was really excited about, and what never seemed to materialize in terms of a release from Google, was that ability to run my own Wave server and federate with other Wave servers. That's what I wanted, and what never happened.
c00p3r 16y ago
yet another hint that google have seen its better days..
googler 16y ago
I wonder how much pressure for canceling such an ambitious product came from people invested in the Apps team?
robertmarkbram 16y ago
This is very sad. I thought it was a great product but suffered from lack of good marketing AND positioning (as in it wasn't good enough to do what Google wanted it to, and it was never marketed adequately to fill a niche). In particular: - It isn't a good replacement for email because there is no integration with gmail or other established mail systems. - It isn't good enough for creating documents (blogs, company documents) because there was no security (ability to make something read-only to certain people). - It isn't good enough as a collaboration tool because after a few people edit a Wave, it looks so confusing - you lose all notion of it being a single consistent document because it looks too much like a complicated chat. I also wonder if it was just too heavy in terms of Javascript and network processing. Either way, this is a big shame - I was very much looking forward to Wave taking a greater part in my tech life.
kmilden 16y ago
Google needs to focus on their core competency which is search. Instead of competing with everyone they should find ways to integrate their search engine into everything. It boggles my mind we don't integrate Google search into everything like we do with the Twitter API. If they continually strive for second place in every category they may one day find themselves second in search as well. Wave is just another lesson in the long string of failures they will continue to produced until they get back to what made them great in the first place.
betterlabs 16y ago
I don't think Wave as a product failed. I think it failed as a product Google imagined/wanted it to be. They expected Wave to replace the way we use email. I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now, after the fact. The tech was cool and useful but changing consumers habits and especially on something like communication is very very hard. So I am not really surprised it did not get adoption. I agree with some of the comments below that if it was integrated tightly within Gmail, it would worked better and PERHAPS it would helped more users try it, like it and adopt it ..slowly.
thebootstrapper 16y ago
Google also wanted it to be tool for all the enterprise, what will happen to other implementation of Google wave for enterprises, for example say Novel's pulse?
k-zed 16y ago
Honestly I'm amazed by how unanimously friendly Hacker News (and Reddit) are to Wave. It was the anti-suckless - overengineered, XML and web-based, anti-privacy, pampering users instead of educating them (e.g. in a corporate environment, using a VCS together with IRC is a much better way to exchange information). I would've expected at least one contrary voice somewhere :) I say good riddance.
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
I think the reason for Wave's failure is simpler than most posts here suggest. Wave was just way too complicated as an end user tool. It is a technology wanting to be an application. I hope it can live on as a technology underlying real applications.
speleding 16y ago
A year is really short to get a revolutionary way of working to catch on. Why give up so easily? Maybe they couldn't figure out a working business model for this one.
signa11 16y ago
to me it seems that google-wave could not gather enough user adoption precisely because it was invite only. gmail could get away with it, because the _nature_ of email 'collaboration' (sic) doesn't mandate both endpoints to be gmail. whatever the reason, kind of sad anyways.
pasbesoin 16y ago
I wrote this elsewhere; it summarizes my opinion. I'll just add that, in addition to the below, Google also simply needs to allow sufficient time for such a new paradigm (albeit an amalgam of many separate, older, established paradigms) to gain adoption. -- I find this quite disappointing. Wave as a concept -- and apparently its underlying implementation -- is brilliant. It pretty much exactly fixes a number of significant barriers I've repeatedly, persistently encountered in professional, collaborative communication. However, in a fashion that's becoming all too typical for Google, the user interface was spartan and disjointed to the point of outright sucking for anyone who was not an "uebergeek" already at least passingly familiar with the paradigms they were using. Just like with their Android Nexus phone: They didn't need to improve the technology further as much as they needed to make it usable for the common user. In the phone's case, that meant real customer support. In Wave's case, that meant a meaningful, obvious user interface and much less spartan documentation, including non-linear textual references and not just so many overcute, time-consuming, and shared-environment-adverse videos many of which were broken into frustratingly small snippets. The videos did, I suppose, demonstrate the dynamic interface better than a bunch of text and static pictures might, but then this was in significant part the fault of the interface that gave no visual indicators of what to click or drag, much less what doing so would accomplish. Google really should give Wave more time, and devote a small cadre of staff to fixing the UI, and another small cadre of staff to some coherent, consistent promotion and public training/documentation. Once people grasp what it can do and how to do it in a quick, intuitive fashion, I argue they would have users aplenty. They've already added it as a beta feature to their Google Apps online office software suite. That crowd is ripe for adoption, if adoption is made straightforward.
known 16y ago
To tell you the truth I anticipated this when Google first launched it.
psycandrew 16y ago
Ouch!
jessriedel 16y ago
Isn't it obvious that the #1 reason wave failed was because it wasn't backwards compatible with email? If I could I have received all my email over wave, as well as new waves, I would have started using it immediately. But if its separate, I have to add yet another thing to check to my life? No thanks.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
flipbrad 16y ago
This was a product worthy of being spun out into a standalone company, free to pitch at the corporate market
jyothi 16y ago
Building community needs evangelizing it, building brand ambassadors out of your users and most important "listening to your users closely". One needs to set up a mode of direct conversation. This comes naturally when you start small like twitter or youtube. When you have few million user base ready to consume whatever you advertise on gmail or search - you are trying to buy out of old rewards. Worse users are non-forgiving and expectations are much high. So it sounds like a big company problem. But it really isn't. Yahoo does it really well with yahoo answers. There is even today a high response rate from yahoo team through "Ask Mike" Google should probably consider small teams within. Provide all the support through tech and hardware but let the teams launch these products on their own and grow the userbase naturally focusing on service too along with the product.
lakeeffect 16y ago
I think adobe connect is the way to go, as far as corporate collaboration tools.

712 points by elfred 16y ago

keefe 16y ago

oh no but at least I can cross checkout google wave in detail from my todo......

They blew it big time by hyping it for RPGs, which never went anywhere. Get the RPGers on board, perhaps, and you can succeed.

gigafemtonano 16y ago
Kingdom of Loathing players were using it back in March, though they seem to be a more intellectual playerbase compared to most RPGs.
Goosey 16y ago
It's a widely accepted rule of thumb that no technology can succeed without RPGs being involved. ?:o
brown9-2 16y ago
They blew it by making it confusing to understand what you'd use it for, making it confusing to know which of your friends had accounts (no integration with gmail!) and confusing to know when someone sent you a new "wave" (no integration with gmail!).
- spydez 16y ago
  ...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know. They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day, but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added. And this way works with all email, not just gmail! There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much integration do you want, exactly?
  - gecko 16y ago
    While you're correct, that option was added far too late. By the time that option was added, everyone in my organization had tried Wave and then given up on it. I revived its use in the last week, successfully, with that option, only to see that it's now going to die anyway. Really, all of Wave can be summarized by the fact that, at its launch, Wave deliberately refused to participate in any existing communications medium other than Wave. This meant that everyone you cared about had to get on Wave. Since that couldn't possibly happen, Wave was doomed from the start. Nothing about today's announcement is remotely a surprise to me.
    - fragmede 16y ago
      It also sucked. You would get an email that something changed, and the context given was the first message/blip/whatever in the wave instead of the message added at the end. It was a huge let down to log into wave just to read 'yeah' as the entirety of the update. Leaving me to ignore wave update emails even more.
  - thorax 16y ago
    That feature was so confusing I had to explain to my computer-literate-but-confused-by-Wave friends. Hard to edit your preferences, hard to get other people into it, hard to get reminders set up. If they could relaunch and make all those things better, Wave would be stellar. I almost wish they'd break backwards compatibility for people who loved the interface because it just went in the wrong direction.
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    Did they launch with these features? I distinctly recall thinking "how do I know who's on this thing?" and repeatedly going back to the site in hope that someone else I knew finally used the site and sent me a message. The technology might be great but the launch and execution were really, really weird.
    - spydez 16y ago
      They did not. Well, they did originally have "who's online" functionality, but they had to yank it when someone found an exploit, and it took them forever to get it working again. The "email me" option was much later - around the time they went from "Preview" to "Beta", I think. And as thorax said in his reply to me, Google flubbed the UI/usability of the preferences. As far as "who has a Wave account", it's the same scheme as email. You get a Wave address; you're responsible for letting all your friends know what your address is (e.g., mine's in my HN profile). Probably could've been improved by hooking into Facebook/Twitter/etc. and spamming out your Wave address to all your friends...
spydez 16y ago
My little group of friends is using it for a DnD RPG. It's orders of magnitude better than the IRC chatroom we were using before. It's going to be annoying having to go back to IRC.
- DTrejo 16y ago
  http://pygowave.net/ http://pygowave.net/
  - Jd 16y ago
    They discontinued development themselves.

BobbyH 16y ago

I feel bad for the Etherpad guys, who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015

DTrejo 16y ago
I still miss etherpad. I use some of the alternatives, but it's not the same :( alternatives: http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html
- peregrine 16y ago
  Google docs is very similar to what etherpad used to be. All be it far less user friendly you can watch others edit and update in real time.
  - param 16y ago
    http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/albeit.html http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/albeit.html
    - peregrine 16y ago
      Thanks for pointing that out.
  - jherdman 16y ago
    Yes, you're right, but "albeit" is the word you're looking for, not "all be it".
    - mjgoins 16y ago
      http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=albeit&oldid=9563626 http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=albeit&oldid=...
      - 16y ago

Goosey 16y ago

I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over. I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with "MY REPLY IN RED" company chain email threads from hell forever now.

StavrosK 16y ago
I blame it on never understanding the UI, the way it did things, or its usefulness. It's like a chat you can't delete things from, and everyone sees what you type and all your mistakes? And you can post pictures? I just don't get it.
- whakojacko 16y ago
  Not to mention its crazy amount of javascript usage-Wave brought most of the browsers I tried it on to a crawl on my laptop. I really like the concept, but for many reasons never liked the execution.
- spydez 16y ago
  There's an option on every blip in every wave that says "Delete This". You can even delete other people's blips! People can only see your mistakes if they're in the wave and looking while you type (ie, "Chat Mode"). If it's used like email (that is, checking it a few times per day), they see only the snapshots of what happened when the "Done" button was pressed. You can add pictures. You can embed YouTube videos. You can have links. Honestly, yeah, it takes some getting used to, but once you're used to it, it's no more complicated than Outlook. Personally, I think using Outlook to set up a meeting notice is harder than using Wave.
- roc 16y ago
  The incredibly powerful, federated, open protocol/platform was what excited us geeks. The client always sucked and was, at the most generous, a tech demo of things the protocol/platform was capable of.

jacquesm 16y ago

That didn't take very long now did it? I never even got around to checking it out. Aren't they afraid that the next product they announce in this fashion will be met with some scepticism from potential early adopters, who might think 'I'll wait for a bit to see if it stays', which in turn will lead to a cycle where it gets harder and harder for google to release new stuff and get it adopted? edit: would be nice if they open sourced the code.

evansolomon 16y ago
They launched Wave in May of 2009. It's not like they yanked it all that quickly.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Microsoft announced, then released, spent $250M on advertising, and then killed a new phone in that time.
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    To be fair, Google did the same thing in the same time frame with the Nexus One, minus the ad budget. Sometimes disrupting existing markets and paradigms takes time, patience, and several iterations. (I'm still disappointed at how quickly they stopped the direct-sale idea with the Nexus One)
    - tomhogans 16y ago
      The biggest problem with selling the Nexus One direct was support. Carriers didn't want to support a phone that hadn't branded and Google couldn't accept that people don't want to ask a community message board and wait a few days for a reply when their phone doesn't work.
      - bokchoi 16y ago
        The community message board support model doesn't work for google. My current peeve is this god-awful bug thread for adding an additional account to an Android phone: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=6981e6d970e2f29f&hl=en

noodle 16y ago

unfortunate. it was a good product, for the right market, but it was overhyped and it underdelivered.

intranation 16y ago
And what was the market, exactly? Seems to me that not a single person I knew actually wanted to use it, or thought it filled a niche they needed filling.
- noodle 16y ago
  its my understanding groups that had to do a high level of collaboration across several people found it pretty useful. i know some people that still use it for this and are happy, although i'm sure that if it closes down, they'll find another product and carry on.

prs 16y ago

Based on the initial reactions to the first Google Wave demonstration by a few non-tech friends of mine I thought Google Wave might gain the necessary product adoption and momentum. I erred and so did many other folks. I applaud Google for their willingness to stop investing precious development resources in something that looked like the next big thing but turned out to be a great product without consumer approval.

tc 16y ago

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook? Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email. Maybe Google just hoped Wave would appeal to a different market than it really does. ---- PS #1: I'm sure that corporate uptake of Wave in its current form was limited as well because of the absence of a reasonable client/server that you could run on your own network. PS #2: Hopefully there are enough of us who like the protocol that, over a number of years, we can build Apache Foundation-quality F/OSS implementations of the needed components. PS #3: It would be truly ironic if, say in 10 years time, Google finally integrated the Wave Protocol with Gmail because there had been enough private (but federated) uptake as an email replacement.

wmf 16y ago
Too bad you could never run it inside the firewall AFAIK.
- semanticist 16y ago
  There's no reason they couldn't provide an appliance (like the Google Search Appliance: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html) or simply make it available for a local install (like every mail server used by every company that cares about things being 'inside the firewall').
- prosa 16y ago
  All the protocols were open-sourced as part of the initiative. I think they envisioned a world in which inside-the-wall installations existed in the same way the companies have Exchange servers today.
  - wmf 16y ago
    Except Microsoft is willing to sell you Exchange Server but Google wasn't willing to sell you a Wave server. Writing your own is very difficult; no one has managed to match Google's implementation.

dgrant 16y ago

When more people say "I tried it, haven't really used it though" than "I use it regularly" you know your product has failed.

edash 16y ago
You could say that about Twitter, though, and it's difficult to find anyone today who considers Twitter a failure.

watmough 16y ago

Is this the same thing as Buzz? If I want to 'connect' with friends, I have Facebook, and if I want to im work colleagues, I have Yahoo and MSN. For document collaboration I have email for non-realtime, Google Docs for near and actual real-time. I have a hard time seeing where my workflow needs any more collaboration tools.

Charuru 16y ago

The idea is excellent, the fail is the lack of 'product'. They should distribute Wave modules that every wordpress or phpbb user can install on their blogs and hook into their own communities... and then Wave will take off.

Timothee 16y ago
To me, the big problem was indeed the lack of a product. I have tried Google Wave and I don't know what "product" they're talking about. It seemed to be an interesting technological experiment but I wouldn't be able to tell you what it's for, what problem it solves, or anything besides the fact that technologically, it was interesting. In fact, I'm kind of surprised that they're killing it, because it felt like a first step with the technology part, with an upcoming second step where they would use said technology. I'm surprised that that was it. I would have expected Google to have plans beyond what Wave is today.

jakevoytko 16y ago

You can't make people solve problems they don't have. If Google failed with the Hype Winds at their backs, then I doubt anybody can do it.

prosa 16y ago
That's an interesting perspective. I would state it somewhat differently, though. I think Wave solved too many problems simultaneously, making it overly complex in some ways and hiding its true utility in others.
icarus_drowning 16y ago
While I agree that a large part of the blame for Wave's failure falls on Google, I think its hard to make the case that it "solve[s] problems [people] don't have". Anyone who's ever dealt with the horror of a multi-user email thread (>>>>>This sort of thing, or perhaps "My_Doc_CASEY'sVERSION.doc")knows that Wave at least solves that problem fairly well. Of course, no one really cares about that if you can't get your whole team onto Wave in the first place.

ary 16y ago

That was fast. I remember watching the announcement (in person) and wondering who it was really meant for. At the time it felt like a solution in search of a problem. What I did really like was the work they'd done on change-set propagation. Don't have a link to the session on hand, but it was quite interesting.

ary 16y ago
And here it is: http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/GoogleWaveUnderTheHood.html http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/GoogleWaveUnd...

justlearning 16y ago

Ouch Etherpad guys! Perhaps Google is coming out with WaveDocs (wave integrated google docs) soon?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

boots 16y ago

What suprises me is the short lifespan of the product to the public before killing it. While some of us may have had Wave invites for a while, it has been only been open to the public for less then 3 months.

theoden 16y ago
And the vast majority don't even know that it exists.

zavulon 16y ago

Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively) early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that. I really hope Buzz is next.

mkramlich 16y ago
The complement of Release Early/Often is probably Kill Early/Often. EDIT: spelling fixed, thanks!
- thisisfmu 16y ago
  I think you wanted to say "complement".
- pjscott 16y ago
  Peter Norvig has confirmed this, and says that the great majority of Google's projects die before anybody even hears about them. This lets them try things out cheaper, so the ideas they do invest a lot of time and money into will have a higher probability of success. http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/03/error-message-google-research-director-peter-norvig-on-being-wrong.aspx http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/...
- frossie 16y ago
  You know what the complement of Kill Early/Often is? It's me never letting my shop use a new Google product ever again. People invest time in adopting these technologies. Sure, with a little startup you take into account the fact that they might not be able to survive, but with Google you think hey, okay, let's use this thing. And you start developing your process around it. And then you get burned when it gets dropped with "Oh well we lost interest, okay we love you, bye bye!". So today, my guys would have been better off sticking with their lousy wiki that having switched to Wave (despite the fact that they liked it and felt it increased their productivity - personally, I never warmed up to it). Fool me once...
  - 16y ago

jsdalton 16y ago

From last year... "Poll: What do you think of Google Wave?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635354

sprout 16y ago

Wave may have been an idea whose time is yet to come. When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it. This was mostly because I was working in a company where getting people to document was enough of a difficulty without introducing new software. If I'd worked somewhere with a bunch of early-adopters, it would have been a fantastic tool. On the other hand, Wave seems like a tool that almost replicates all of the benefits of being in the same room as someone. I don't think there's a better way to do a distributed workplace. (Of course, I haven't tried.)

thorax 16y ago
> When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it. Slow? I can only assume people who said this weren't using the latest FF or Chrome. I've never considered Wave slow at all.
- gloob 16y ago
  At the beginning, on Firefox, it was soul-deadeningly slow.
- brg 16y ago
  The Chrome team valiantly tried to incorporate it into our design process, but stopped using it precisely because it was painfully slow.

alextgordon 16y ago

It failed because it was completely invisible. Facebook spams your inbox. They make sure you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc). With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I'm only just finding out now. What kind of a communication tool is that? It's like they're selling a phone that can't ring. The other UI and social issues were important but weren't fatal. If Google had actually notified users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer. Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.

shikhar 16y ago
it's not like twitter ever sends/sent an email when someone you follow tweets.
- alextgordon 16y ago
  Twitter is ephemeral. You can quite easily leave it for a month and miss nothing important. Nobody will care, nobody will miss you. Twitter will continue to function as long as people have egos, which is to say forever. (not trying to bash twitter here even though it sounds like it.) Wave is quite different. It's designed for conversations and collaboration. In order for it to function, users need to be able to know when the other has responded quite quickly. Wave itself does nothing to ensure this.
  - skinnymuch 16y ago
    I feel the same way about Twitter, but still it seems like Twitter bashing. You're not proving a point in your first paragraph, merely your opinion. This is especially true with the "leave it for a month and miss nothing important". I'm sure some people (not me) would feel quite differently.
runT1ME 16y ago
You pose an interesting problem. It was (eventually) supposed to replace email, so I'm assuming it was envisioned everyone would check wave every day, or have it constantly open, etc. Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..

icarus_drowning 16y ago

This really makes me sad. I work in media, and I have found that the collaborative aspects of Wave really made that process easier. I scored an entire film earlier this year, and the producers and I only used Wave as our collaboration space. It was beautiful. Keeping track of various versions of each cue was easily 10x easier than my usual mode (email/FTP/Skype/Phone/etc). We started off with a collaborative list of every cue needed during the first run through, and then let that list grow bigger and bigger with inline replys. Wave's built-in media features meant that I could paste mp3's into the space and let the filmmakers hear my work immediately, and then download the file to put into the project. This meant that when it came time to FTP the big, uncompressed files, it was only the finals, which made things a lot easier. Likewise, collaborating with temp music was a breeze-- the filmmakers even scored a few sections of the film with temp music and then put the video right into the conversation. (No more folders full of giant quicktime files with different scores). I know that I'm going to miss that experience. Oh well. Perhaps someone will take the open-source'd code from Google and build a better product. I'm not holding my breath.

linaceballos 16y ago

It was time. That´s true that "You can't make people solve problems they don't have". But the idea was excellent,maybe later can work.

mixmax 16y ago

The problem with useradoption of wave largely came from their invite-only strategy. It's a social tool that requires my friends to have an account for it to be of any use. If they don't have invites and can't join it's useless. It's amazing that Google didn't see this.

jgoewert 16y ago
That is dead-on the reason I stopped using it. Woot! I got an invite. Dang, none of my friends did. Well... when can I get them one. Forget about this. Meh. Back to email, IM, IRC and Twitter.
- ern 16y ago
  I managed to invite my friends, only to find one non-geek who didn't know how to install Chrome Frame, and couldn't run anything but IE on her work machine (corporate policy). The overhead of using IM group chats when she was in the conversation, and Wave when it was the rest of us, was too much, so we just dumped Wave.

cedsav 16y ago

That sucks, we left basecamp/campfire for Google Wave and it was a really good fit for us (collaborative work with a distributed team).

ilovecomputers 16y ago

They should really reprint this shirt, in light of this announcement, for hipsters to wear. http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts-sale/ http://www.tee-junction.com/2009/twitter-killer-nerdy-shirts...

dpcan 16y ago

Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite IF they ever did. So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers. I would blame the launch for the failure of this one.

Zak 16y ago
I think that Google saw that artificial scarcity worked well with gmail and thought the same would be true for Wave. The problem, of course is that a Gmail account didn't depend on anyone else having one to be useful. Wave, in theory was an open standard as well, but in practice, Google was and is the only provider.
- amackera 16y ago
  I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver. It's pure conjecture of course!
  - nl 16y ago
    It wasn't so much that they lacked infrastructure as that the early versions didn't scale so well. I got a very early invitation, and it was pretty slow, and got worse as they added more users. They fixed that of course, but it did slow down the roll-out.
    - mechanical_fish 16y ago
      So why not have another rollout? Sponsor some contests? Hold more demos in tech conferences? Build a Wave-to-Twitter gateway? Build a demo site which gives every HN article it's own wavelet, or whatever?
- amackera 16y ago

mike463 16y ago

I think it was grievously hurt by google's slow-start "invite" thing. It was a catch-22. You needed people to collaborate with for it to catch on, but you needed to wait a long time to invite people.

rue 16y ago

Excellent. Wave was made using obsolete technology and some wrong choices made it in regarding push vs. pull, distribution, modularity, "social mediafication" and encryption among other things. There were some good things about it, and Hopefully we will now see some real contenders rise up to tackle the Future of Communication(tm). Preferrably not from Google. Sorry.

jonhohle 16y ago

I used Google wave for feature/ticket tracking. The only thing I could fault it for was the wacky interface which didn't always work correctly. It was nice to have a hosted, free ticket tracking app that did just enough to get by for that purpose (for personal use I don't need anything as complicated as Redmine, Trak, or Bugzilla; don't have much desire to host my own app; and I'm too cheap to pay someone to host something I could do myself). Now I'll have to move all of that state somewhere else.

vidar 16y ago

Everything that distracts from Google Me is obviously being shut down.

DotSauce 16y ago
I don't know what other services you're referring to, but that was my first thought.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sofal 16y ago

Does anyone else here think that Etherpad could have been more successful than Google Wave?

durin42 16y ago
Personally I still use Etherpad more than Wave through the open source implementation.

abraham 16y ago

If Wave was launched with the Gmail integration of Buzz I think we would be discussing a completely different outcome.

axod 16y ago
Is buzz doing any better?
- pavs 16y ago
  I think the problem is two-fold both with Buzz and Wave. First the implementation and the adoption. I think Wave idea is awesome, but their implementation (and performance) has been always an issue. My communication is already fragmented over so many places I don't want another domain for another form of communication. They should have added wave into Gmail by default. Wave always had horrible performance issues (still does). Buzz doesn't solve any communication problem that I can't use it on any other popular services. So Buzz adoption doesn't make sense to me whether its integrated to Gmail or not. Buzz is a "me too" product. Wave was not.
- abraham 16y ago
  I believe Buzz has double digit millions of active users. I can not find the source currently though.

lionhearted 16y ago

That's a shame. I'd have used it if other friends and colleagues adopted it, it was pretty good at what it did. I think the issue was that it didn't solve any big enough problems for people to encourage them to get on.

j_baker 16y ago

I wanted to like wave. It just always seemed like a solution looking for a problem.

ig1 16y ago

Given there seems to be real demand for this product, it may well be an opportunity for a startup to build a competitor.

c1sc0 16y ago

This makes me feel a little better about the time when I sat on tons of invites & never really got around to using Wave. I'm one of those who never grokked wave.

robwgibbons 16y ago

Crap. How can I host my own?

agentultra 16y ago

I liked it, just didn't like the interface. I was an early adopter and very excited about the protocol. When I was looking at it, there wasn't enough client specification to bother working on an alternative client (ie: emacs). Hopefully that has changed (or will change before Google drops support). I found it really useful for collaborating with multiple parties. It allowed us to work on a document and keep the conversation all in one place yet clearly separated. Sometimes email can make that distinction difficult or unclear. At least it's not entirely closed source. :)

twopoint718 16y ago
This is what I thought. I wasn't going to pay attention until they specified the client protocol (Wave needs an Emacs mode). Most of the complaints I've heard about Wave stemmed from its AJAX-heavy user interface. How many people had new enough browsers to even use Wave?

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I said it before and I'll say it again: wave solved all of the wrong (easy) problems of communication and failed to tackle any of the hard problems. The result was a highly polished mashup of existing communication forms based on cutting edge technology that made for an excellent demo but a very poor (or at best niche) product. See also: the Segway. P.S. Re: hard vs. easy problems: Wave tackled some hard challenges in the implementation space, which I think may have led the engineers into thinking they were building something innovative and worthwhile. However, the important bit is whether or not you've actually solved anything in the problem space.

harscoat 16y ago

innovative technology feels like art sometimes, it should exist for the sake of it. "L'art pour l'art", Innovation for innovation!

newmediaclay 16y ago

Google put absolutely 0 muscle behind this product. Android got front page placement on Google and it has now overtaken iPhone. They either didn't truly believe in Wave or the marketing team just made a huge gaffe by not even making a half ass attempt to push this product to the consumer world.

jpablo 16y ago

I was thinking about this recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362223 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1362223

slavin 16y ago

i don't get which problem was it solving. is it cool that they've introduced character-by-character typing? well, kinda.. but is it useful at all? it's also cool (for someone) that it looks like a desktop app, but is it needed? it's maybe cool that i have all my contacts from gmail there, but do i need this? i mean i don't even get why would i think of my gmail as a social network, it's my inbox, and it's fine for what it does. I mean its hard not to appreciate people trying to innovate, but it actually has to solve some sort of problem.. or maybe it's just me not getting the concept (however it's still so much more interesting than all these buzz, rule.fm etc)

swombat 16y ago
I wrote an article on the topic back then: http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html "What problems does Google Wave solve?" Wave solved many problems. Google are idiots to axe it after barely a year and a half.

antimatter15 16y ago

I guess my new wave client is even more dead. http://micro-wave.appspot.com http://micro-wave.appspot.com

antimatter15 16y ago

I guess my new wave client http://micro-wave.appspot.com http://micro-wave.appspot.com is a little more dead.

agentultra 16y ago
No, the protocol and a basic server implementation are still open source. You will need a new provider I guess. Keep it alive!
retube 16y ago
that link nails browser back button
durin42 16y ago
Is that open-source anywhere? That's actually pretty slick.

ritonlajoie 16y ago

in two words : It was a good idea, but badly implemented. I'm not telling I would have done a better job than their engineers, but just have a look at the slow interface they made, and you will get my point..

siglesias 16y ago

Wave was simply over-developed internally, and by the time it was released it had evolved an esoteric, private feature set and interface that had suited the Google beta testers. I for one was simply bewildered by the interface and found it difficult to incorporate into my workflow.

ashishbharthi 16y ago

"See my comments in RED" still rocks.

Dylanfm 16y ago

Understandable, but still a shame. We've got a wave going with about 14 people planning our trips to Ruby Kaigi in a few weeks. It's working really well and has definitely provided value that would be tricky to find elsewhere. Could Wave have worked better if it targeted a vertical? Or is that not how Google does things?

gcheong 16y ago

Microsoft Bobs. Google Waves.

lesswavy 16y ago
Apple OpenDocs.

InfinityX0 16y ago

This was Wave's failure: One year after release (and having never used it), I still don't really know what it does.

mhd 16y ago

So, that leaves us with 0 popular GWT applications? Or did Google build anything new / ported something old with it?

scotty79 16y ago

Can't they just stop improving it and keep it running? It's not like they need to save their server resources.

lwhi 16y ago

Wave was a bit too sci-fi. A bit too ahead of its time maybe. Maybe it's best if the technology is split up and spoon-fed to the general population ... that way people can get a taste. I think change needs to be incremental.

elv 16y ago

I think Wave is a creative and full of effort generalization of a basic idea: adding something to GMail to promote online work coordination and cooperation. They went way too far and they realized it. I would, istread of throwing everything away, rework the concept and see what can come out.

furtivefelon 16y ago

Is it just me or is the source not easily discoverable? I found the wave protocol sources, but i can't really find the individual components. If anyone could point me to the right repo it would be much appreciated!

bentoner 16y ago

It seems that at their scale, Google doesn't bother to (is unable to?) evolve individual products, rather they pivot by launching and killing entire projects. The same thing happened with Google's 3D world product, Lively, and the following comparison of Lively with IMVU by Eric Ries is pertinent: "By the time they [Google] actually managed to launch something, they were building the product that we had already discovered was not the right product 100 iterations ago. "But they launched it with such high fanfare and expectations; they were so convinced they got it right, that it was actually the mismatch between the expectations that Google--one of the most public companies in the world--put behind this product, and then its pathetic results... "The product wasn't a bad product and it's not like nobody wanted to use it (of course they wanted to use it for stuff that embarrassed Google) but it was the mismatch that really caused them to have to pull it; it was very embarrassing for them... "Even after they launched they really didn't give it enough time to learn and iterate because they had set the wrong expectations, a classic big-company [inaudible]." [http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup http://venturehacks.com/articles/lean-startup -- starting at 6:35 in the audio]

elblanco 16y ago
This is really a key point. Outside of a few wave template buttons, has any of the core interface problems with the Wave client been addressed since the initial semi-private-invite-only release? Wave seems fundamentally the same to me as a user as it did a year ago when I first saw it. Yet users in general have complained about the same problems the entire time, none of which appear to have been addressed.

dmnd 16y ago

I wonder if the team can continue working on an open source implementation in their 20% time.

senthilnayagam 16y ago

google wave is dead because of google. google provided limited accounts and google wave requests was being sold, so the hype got created. overcommit and underdelivery, 2009 was not 2004, gmail style launch for wave was the first nail in the coffin though you have your account, your friends dont, you were waiting alone, it was not the realtime communications I expected. what do I do, leave google wave, this has happened with so many people whom I know.

helwr 16y ago

long live the Wave. the time is right for a New Wave startup

mark_l_watson 16y ago

That is sad - I have written a few Wave Robots and wrote an article on Wave. I never thought of it as a user-facing system as-is, but instead liked it as a development platform. I probably invested a little less than 80 hours playing with Wave and writing Robots, and I think it was time fairly well spent, even if Wave is going away.

elblanco 16y ago

It's a nice case study of too much engineering and too much technology, with far too many unnecessary features to start with, with too much of a roll-out (the basic feature demo took over 45 minutes) to too few people without nearly enough thought into actual use cases of a rather complex piece of software that simply didn't perform that well in real world scenarios. "What's a Wave?" - should be answerable in a couple of sentences, I don't think it ever achieved that level of refinement before being put out into the world. Even though the basic idea was great, performance of the software in-browser has never been that great, server performance was problematic, especially when waves became too long, no export option of collaborate waves to documents, no real integration with email. Plus it was hard to organize waves. After it went pseudo-public nothing really new happened to it and old weird problems like the funky scrollbar were never addressed. That being said, I've used it on a number of projects, a couple quite big six-month ordeals, and found it an amazing collaborative environment if you disciplined your team a bit and organized things well at the start of the project. The concept, combining several, different, modes of communication in one environment is pretty sound actually, I just think that the modes were combined a little too singularly. Certain things like real-time chat and document collaboration are fundamentally different things that should have been relegated to different parts of the interface rather than jammed into one place. "But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." Duh, the rollout was rather botched and given what I think I've detailed it's no wonder. "What is Wave" should have been "a document collaboration tool with real-time side-channel chat and group email" would have been better for the use-cases my group fell into. What I was really excited about, and what never seemed to materialize in terms of a release from Google, was that ability to run my own Wave server and federate with other Wave servers. That's what I wanted, and what never happened.

c00p3r 16y ago

yet another hint that google have seen its better days..

googler 16y ago

I wonder how much pressure for canceling such an ambitious product came from people invested in the Apps team?

robertmarkbram 16y ago

This is very sad. I thought it was a great product but suffered from lack of good marketing AND positioning (as in it wasn't good enough to do what Google wanted it to, and it was never marketed adequately to fill a niche). In particular: - It isn't a good replacement for email because there is no integration with gmail or other established mail systems. - It isn't good enough for creating documents (blogs, company documents) because there was no security (ability to make something read-only to certain people). - It isn't good enough as a collaboration tool because after a few people edit a Wave, it looks so confusing - you lose all notion of it being a single consistent document because it looks too much like a complicated chat. I also wonder if it was just too heavy in terms of Javascript and network processing. Either way, this is a big shame - I was very much looking forward to Wave taking a greater part in my tech life.

kmilden 16y ago

Google needs to focus on their core competency which is search. Instead of competing with everyone they should find ways to integrate their search engine into everything. It boggles my mind we don't integrate Google search into everything like we do with the Twitter API. If they continually strive for second place in every category they may one day find themselves second in search as well. Wave is just another lesson in the long string of failures they will continue to produced until they get back to what made them great in the first place.

betterlabs 16y ago

I don't think Wave as a product failed. I think it failed as a product Google imagined/wanted it to be. They expected Wave to replace the way we use email. I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now, after the fact. The tech was cool and useful but changing consumers habits and especially on something like communication is very very hard. So I am not really surprised it did not get adoption. I agree with some of the comments below that if it was integrated tightly within Gmail, it would worked better and PERHAPS it would helped more users try it, like it and adopt it ..slowly.

thebootstrapper 16y ago

Google also wanted it to be tool for all the enterprise, what will happen to other implementation of Google wave for enterprises, for example say Novel's pulse?

k-zed 16y ago

Honestly I'm amazed by how unanimously friendly Hacker News (and Reddit) are to Wave. It was the anti-suckless - overengineered, XML and web-based, anti-privacy, pampering users instead of educating them (e.g. in a corporate environment, using a VCS together with IRC is a much better way to exchange information). I would've expected at least one contrary voice somewhere :) I say good riddance.

fauigerzigerk 16y ago

I think the reason for Wave's failure is simpler than most posts here suggest. Wave was just way too complicated as an end user tool. It is a technology wanting to be an application. I hope it can live on as a technology underlying real applications.

speleding 16y ago

A year is really short to get a revolutionary way of working to catch on. Why give up so easily? Maybe they couldn't figure out a working business model for this one.

signa11 16y ago

to me it seems that google-wave could not gather enough user adoption precisely because it was invite only. gmail could get away with it, because the _nature_ of email 'collaboration' (sic) doesn't mandate both endpoints to be gmail. whatever the reason, kind of sad anyways.

pasbesoin 16y ago

I wrote this elsewhere; it summarizes my opinion. I'll just add that, in addition to the below, Google also simply needs to allow sufficient time for such a new paradigm (albeit an amalgam of many separate, older, established paradigms) to gain adoption. -- I find this quite disappointing. Wave as a concept -- and apparently its underlying implementation -- is brilliant. It pretty much exactly fixes a number of significant barriers I've repeatedly, persistently encountered in professional, collaborative communication. However, in a fashion that's becoming all too typical for Google, the user interface was spartan and disjointed to the point of outright sucking for anyone who was not an "uebergeek" already at least passingly familiar with the paradigms they were using. Just like with their Android Nexus phone: They didn't need to improve the technology further as much as they needed to make it usable for the common user. In the phone's case, that meant real customer support. In Wave's case, that meant a meaningful, obvious user interface and much less spartan documentation, including non-linear textual references and not just so many overcute, time-consuming, and shared-environment-adverse videos many of which were broken into frustratingly small snippets. The videos did, I suppose, demonstrate the dynamic interface better than a bunch of text and static pictures might, but then this was in significant part the fault of the interface that gave no visual indicators of what to click or drag, much less what doing so would accomplish. Google really should give Wave more time, and devote a small cadre of staff to fixing the UI, and another small cadre of staff to some coherent, consistent promotion and public training/documentation. Once people grasp what it can do and how to do it in a quick, intuitive fashion, I argue they would have users aplenty. They've already added it as a beta feature to their Google Apps online office software suite. That crowd is ripe for adoption, if adoption is made straightforward.

known 16y ago

To tell you the truth I anticipated this when Google first launched it.

psycandrew 16y ago

Ouch!

jessriedel 16y ago

Isn't it obvious that the #1 reason wave failed was because it wasn't backwards compatible with email? If I could I have received all my email over wave, as well as new waves, I would have started using it immediately. But if its separate, I have to add yet another thing to check to my life? No thanks.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

flipbrad 16y ago

This was a product worthy of being spun out into a standalone company, free to pitch at the corporate market

jyothi 16y ago

Building community needs evangelizing it, building brand ambassadors out of your users and most important "listening to your users closely". One needs to set up a mode of direct conversation. This comes naturally when you start small like twitter or youtube. When you have few million user base ready to consume whatever you advertise on gmail or search - you are trying to buy out of old rewards. Worse users are non-forgiving and expectations are much high. So it sounds like a big company problem. But it really isn't. Yahoo does it really well with yahoo answers. There is even today a high response rate from yahoo team through "Ask Mike" Google should probably consider small teams within. Provide all the support through tech and hardware but let the teams launch these products on their own and grow the userbase naturally focusing on service too along with the product.

lakeeffect 16y ago

I think adobe connect is the way to go, as far as corporate collaboration tools.