9 ms·

Save Google Wave

134 points by icodemyownshit 16y ago

antimatter15 16y ago
I guess my new wave client http://micro-wave.appspot.com http://micro-wave.appspot.com is a little more dead.
jerf 16y ago
I know the protocol is a bit complicated, but didn't they say a while back they're going to open source a reference implementation of the server? Is this it?: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/ http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/ I do not know if that's a complete Wave server, or if it's missing a piece. But if it is a complete Wave server, there's nothing to "save". It's already been saved. You just need to run it yourself, and possibly support from Google for exporting your data once. If it isn't, maybe some people will fill in the blanks. If nobody steps forward to fill in the blanks then the demand probably wasn't there in the first place.
- derefr 16y ago
  What people want to "save" is Google's backing, proselytization, and continued investment into the project. The demand was never there—because Google never gave Wave a big marketing push, the way they did with, say, Chrome (no Wave TV commercial?) Wave is a new and unadopted protocol, and as such it won't grow organically; it needs a big company to force it down people's throats. People want to "save" the unfulfilled (implicit) promise that Google was going to be that company.
  - jbooth 16y ago
    That's terrible reason. If it was a startup, they'd either sink or swim. Maybe better marketing would have helped, maybe the client sucks, maybe the concept sucks. But there's no reason for Google to throw good money after bad, it's not like there's nothing else they could be working on (including the next, better Wave from the etherpad guys).
    - derefr 16y ago
      > But there's no reason for Google to throw good money after bad That's the thing—they haven't thrown any money at the problem at all. The whole problem is that it was a half-hearted effort from the start; Google didn't put Wave anywhere visible, they didn't integrate it with Gmail or Google Talk, or do anything else to get traction. They just sort of put it out there and hoped people would subscribe. That's how products work, but Wave isn't a product, it's a technology—and you have to sell a technology, company by company, until it's in use in a sufficiently large user-base that it becomes self-sustaining. Imagine if the concept of "electronic mail" was invented today. You couldn't pull that off as a startup; you'd have to be Google-sized to even get off the ground. Now, what Google could have done, would be to go to Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and whoever else that has any product or service that's vaguely message-/chat-oriented, and offer to help them rebuild that product/service on top of Wave. Wave Facebook walls, Wave MSN, Wave Flickr, etc. Just making one crappy AJAX client is exactly not the winning strategy.
      - jbooth 16y ago
        Well, sure. But maybe if the one client they had was better or the protocol more natural it would've had more uptake. Or maybe there's just not enough of a need for those rival corporations to take up anything wave-like. At this point, considering the Etherpad acquisition, you have to figure they're scrapping it and starting over -- not knowing anything about the situation I'd generally assume that was the right move.
      - roc 16y ago
        > "Imagine if the concept of "electronic mail" was invented today. " I don't think it'd be all that different from launching the concept of microblogging or social networks. Startups did fine with that. What Google should have done, having a technology on their hands and not a product, was make their other products either built on Wave or compatible with Wave (Docs, Chat, Mail - using Wave. Calendar, Pages integrated via robots, etc). Then, you'd have a huge built-in user base that can ignore the complexity until they grok it and if they want it. And all their data will be waiting for them. In the meantime, Google could develop and throw robots into their products as features. Being able to directly send messages to a robot for publishing on your blog platform of choice, or directly drag attachments to a robot that populates Dropbox/Flickr/whatever? Being able to add a plugin to schedule a party into an email chain that automatically updates Google Calendar? Having a service that detects tracking numbers and provides mouse-over summaries? Even for users who would never want a Wave-like client, those features would make Google's existing products better and stickier. And none of it would involve burying every would-be user in complexity on day 1.
  - hs_100 16y ago
    Well said! If a company like Google is not going to invest in such technologies who will. This makes me think if Google is turning into a company which jumps on to a bandwagon once it starts rolling rather than be a creator of new ideas and technologies.
- elblanco 16y ago
  I haven't run it, but by the description installing this software will get not you a whole heck of a lot closer to having your own Wave implementation in terms of server-protocol-web client that I think everybody is envisioning.
axod 16y ago
[Wait several minutes for a large complex unwieldy UI to load]
- redorb 16y ago
  at the time I went it had 300+ people in the wave and over 170 threads; above what I suspect was the average user case; try loading a regular wave.. with less than 20 people and its good to go. (use chrome if you can also; its faster.)
durbin 16y ago
Its open source, save it for yourself.
seldo 16y ago
The ridiculously confusing interface to the Wave loaded on this page, plus the fact that it takes 30 seconds to load and then runs like a dog, is the perfect explanation of why Wave is being shut down. It's almost like that's what they were trying to demonstrate.
- moultano 16y ago
  What browser are you using? Loads in less than a second for me. The interface doesn't seem any more complicated than a hackernews comment thread.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cabal 16y ago
    I think you're being disingenuous, or just trying to get a rise out of people. There's little debate on these points, it was slow and the UI was unnecessarily complex. Whether or not it should be killed remains a valid topic of discussion.
    - moultano 16y ago
      I was talking about the same thing the parent was talking about. The page linked in this submission. Why are you talking in the past tense?
  - ori_b 16y ago
    Firefox 3.6, Linux, 4 gigs of RAM, 1.86 ghz CPU, 10 mbit connection. 9 second load time. And the scrollbar is uselessly broken. (Nonstandard behavior, arrow keys don't work, etc)
    - moultano 16y ago
      Not that this is really a defense of the product, but you should try it in chrome. You'll have a better experience.
pvg 16y ago
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
thingsilearned 16y ago
nah
brapse 16y ago
Many of the problems wave aimed to remedy still stand. It's my hope that google will bow out gracefully, leaving behind the work they have done and allow other to pick up where they left off. This seems to be the plan, although they haven't open sourced the entirety of the effort.
redorb 16y ago
I do think the announcement to kill it off was a bit early :( - I use wave daily and have for a while for basic 'group meetings' with people who work remote. I am also surprised that Google didn't keep it alive for internal use (where Gmail came from) ~ perhaps they have something entirely new in the pipe.
- elblanco 16y ago
  I'd bet that lack of internal adoption is 50% of the equation here.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
mmj2f 16y ago
#savewave
charisma 16y ago
I have never understood the power of petitions.. no matter how many people add themselves to this petition will that make a difference? Will google change its mind if a 300 odd (or even 3000 or even 30000) people add themselves to this?
- po 16y ago
  Especially when google says in their shutdown notice "despite … numerous loyal fans" They know a small but loyal following uses wave. They are shutting down because that wasn't what they had in mind for wave. They were aiming big and failed. That's ok, but only if it doesn't continue to drain from the company.
- jgilliam 16y ago
  Google actually does. Here's one example http://act.ly/3o http://act.ly/3o, where people in Romania were petitioning to get street level data added to Google Maps. Google responded fairly quickly and about a month later had data, which they then asked all the people who tweeted the petition to beta test.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
shortformblog 16y ago
This site … it's like they turned Google Wave into a mix of http://YourWorldOfText.com http://YourWorldOfText.com and 4chan. THAT use of the technology would be awesome.
zrbecker 16y ago
I never found out what Google Wave was for, so it is really not a big loss.
- Devilboy 16y ago
  Do people really think like this?
  - DrStalker 16y ago
    It wasn't obvious to me what it was for or how to use it, no-one I knew personally was using it, and I don't have the free time to casually learn an entire new paradigm to do... whatever it was you did with Wave.
    - Devilboy 16y ago
      How can you say 'no big loss' just because you personally didn't find it useful?
      - DrStalker 16y ago
        Would you care more or less if Wave was made by a startup instead of a massive existing company like Google? New products fail all the time. When the company making the product fails to even explain what the product does and just heaps buzzwords together I don't feel any sense of loss when the product goes away. This wouldn't even be newsworthy if it wasn't Google behind it.
    - elblanco 16y ago
      I think that's actually fair. Until I got 6 or 7 people using it regularly with me it was kind of a head scratcher.
    - Concours 16y ago
      Google wave is not really that complex, first thing to do before using it is to watch the video demo (I'm almost sure very few peoples did it), it's a collaboration and productivity tool, so you just can't invite your friends to use it at this stage, you can invite your colleagues and employess, but it's not a product targeting any casual Joe friend, but google seems to expect peoples to adopt it as such. You probably won't ask your friends to use a task management tool to keep in touch with you or what you do. I'm glad it may stick around for sometime,I hope forever, too bad, they will no more work on it.
MrRage 16y ago
Warning: The petition just got overtaken by an army of trolls.
noarchy 16y ago
I'd rather they just integrate Wave with Gmail, something that I wanted from the start. I had no use for Wave, on its own, especially in the early days when invites were slow to go out. For a long time, Wave sat there, unused. By the time more of my friends and colleagues got access, no one cared anymore. This is a shame, because Wave has tons of potential.
invisible 16y ago
The most obvious feature Google should have invested 5,000 man hours in: making Wave seamless in GMail as a standard. If you are talking to another GMail user, Wave should be automatically turned on for that message. I do not understand why this wasn't deathly obvious to them from the day that they announced Wave at Google IO 2009.
- elblanco 16y ago
  They were too busy botching the Buzz rollout.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  It could be that there were turf wars involved in this. It is not inconceivable for the Gmail product manager to not want Wave integrated. People switching to Wave could mean the end of his clout in company. I don't know enough about internal Google to really say whether this is probable or not, but I've worked for companies where that would have been the case.
  - roc 16y ago
    I'd be willing to accept that if we were talking about Microsoft. I thought Google was still better than that?
- kanzure 16y ago
  One reason this might not have happened is because you don't fuck with gmail. That's 180 million users right there. Repeat: you don't fuck with gmail. (But I would have liked the wave/gmail rollout, yes.)
njharman 16y ago
No Please Don't. Google had the good sense and humility to let a failure fail. Don't y'all go fucking that up.
j15e 16y ago
.... not
Groxx 16y ago
Yes, this will work. Everybody listens to anonymous internet petitions.
hdeshev 16y ago
Funny. I wouldn't want to be in Novell's shoes now after having invested in building a product on top of Wave: http://www.novell.com/products/pulse/ http://www.novell.com/products/pulse/
- jpablo 16y ago
  Pulse is not in top of Wave and really is a separated product that doesn't depend on Wave at all. And in fact is what a lot of people are asking: Wave behind your firewall. (Disclaimer: I'm a Novell employee but I don't speak for them).
  - hdeshev 16y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. This blog post is also helpful: http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2836 http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2836
smallegan 16y ago
Has Google ever sold off a product or service? They certainly acquire but if I am not mistaken it is also common practice for large corporations to rid themselves or projects they are no longer interested in and sometimes this involves a monetary transaction in their favor.
pasbesoin 16y ago
I definitely want to see Wave saved. Further, I'll argue that since Google effectively took away our common, central access to the EtherPad service (even though the source code remains), they in some sense "owe" the community the effort of giving Wave more of a shot -- although I expect a common response will be that "business doesn't owe you anything that doesn't make money (in an legal fashion)". My other comments (e.g. interface, lack of documentation and post-launch publicity) are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578127 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578127
morphir 16y ago
open source this thing so I can sudo apt-get wave, it would go good with googles, "don't be evil"-slogan.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
gengstrand 16y ago
There's nothing left to save. Google has already added collaboration capability into their Documents and Buzz is what they went with for microblogging in their mail app. http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-wave-rip-40451 http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-wave-rip-4... goes into 6 reasons why killing off Wave is the right thing to do.

134 points by icodemyownshit 16y ago

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

jerf 16y ago

I know the protocol is a bit complicated, but didn't they say a while back they're going to open source a reference implementation of the server? Is this it?: http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/ http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/ I do not know if that's a complete Wave server, or if it's missing a piece. But if it is a complete Wave server, there's nothing to "save". It's already been saved. You just need to run it yourself, and possibly support from Google for exporting your data once. If it isn't, maybe some people will fill in the blanks. If nobody steps forward to fill in the blanks then the demand probably wasn't there in the first place.

derefr 16y ago
What people want to "save" is Google's backing, proselytization, and continued investment into the project. The demand was never there—because Google never gave Wave a big marketing push, the way they did with, say, Chrome (no Wave TV commercial?) Wave is a new and unadopted protocol, and as such it won't grow organically; it needs a big company to force it down people's throats. People want to "save" the unfulfilled (implicit) promise that Google was going to be that company.
- jbooth 16y ago
  That's terrible reason. If it was a startup, they'd either sink or swim. Maybe better marketing would have helped, maybe the client sucks, maybe the concept sucks. But there's no reason for Google to throw good money after bad, it's not like there's nothing else they could be working on (including the next, better Wave from the etherpad guys).
  - derefr 16y ago
    > But there's no reason for Google to throw good money after bad That's the thing—they haven't thrown any money at the problem at all. The whole problem is that it was a half-hearted effort from the start; Google didn't put Wave anywhere visible, they didn't integrate it with Gmail or Google Talk, or do anything else to get traction. They just sort of put it out there and hoped people would subscribe. That's how products work, but Wave isn't a product, it's a technology—and you have to sell a technology, company by company, until it's in use in a sufficiently large user-base that it becomes self-sustaining. Imagine if the concept of "electronic mail" was invented today. You couldn't pull that off as a startup; you'd have to be Google-sized to even get off the ground. Now, what Google could have done, would be to go to Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and whoever else that has any product or service that's vaguely message-/chat-oriented, and offer to help them rebuild that product/service on top of Wave. Wave Facebook walls, Wave MSN, Wave Flickr, etc. Just making one crappy AJAX client is exactly not the winning strategy.
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Well, sure. But maybe if the one client they had was better or the protocol more natural it would've had more uptake. Or maybe there's just not enough of a need for those rival corporations to take up anything wave-like. At this point, considering the Etherpad acquisition, you have to figure they're scrapping it and starting over -- not knowing anything about the situation I'd generally assume that was the right move.
    - roc 16y ago
      > "Imagine if the concept of "electronic mail" was invented today. " I don't think it'd be all that different from launching the concept of microblogging or social networks. Startups did fine with that. What Google should have done, having a technology on their hands and not a product, was make their other products either built on Wave or compatible with Wave (Docs, Chat, Mail - using Wave. Calendar, Pages integrated via robots, etc). Then, you'd have a huge built-in user base that can ignore the complexity until they grok it and if they want it. And all their data will be waiting for them. In the meantime, Google could develop and throw robots into their products as features. Being able to directly send messages to a robot for publishing on your blog platform of choice, or directly drag attachments to a robot that populates Dropbox/Flickr/whatever? Being able to add a plugin to schedule a party into an email chain that automatically updates Google Calendar? Having a service that detects tracking numbers and provides mouse-over summaries? Even for users who would never want a Wave-like client, those features would make Google's existing products better and stickier. And none of it would involve burying every would-be user in complexity on day 1.
- hs_100 16y ago
  Well said! If a company like Google is not going to invest in such technologies who will. This makes me think if Google is turning into a company which jumps on to a bandwagon once it starts rolling rather than be a creator of new ideas and technologies.
elblanco 16y ago
I haven't run it, but by the description installing this software will get not you a whole heck of a lot closer to having your own Wave implementation in terms of server-protocol-web client that I think everybody is envisioning.

axod 16y ago

[Wait several minutes for a large complex unwieldy UI to load]

redorb 16y ago
at the time I went it had 300+ people in the wave and over 170 threads; above what I suspect was the average user case; try loading a regular wave.. with less than 20 people and its good to go. (use chrome if you can also; its faster.)

durbin 16y ago

Its open source, save it for yourself.

seldo 16y ago

The ridiculously confusing interface to the Wave loaded on this page, plus the fact that it takes 30 seconds to load and then runs like a dog, is the perfect explanation of why Wave is being shut down. It's almost like that's what they were trying to demonstrate.

moultano 16y ago
What browser are you using? Loads in less than a second for me. The interface doesn't seem any more complicated than a hackernews comment thread.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Cabal 16y ago
  I think you're being disingenuous, or just trying to get a rise out of people. There's little debate on these points, it was slow and the UI was unnecessarily complex. Whether or not it should be killed remains a valid topic of discussion.
  - moultano 16y ago
    I was talking about the same thing the parent was talking about. The page linked in this submission. Why are you talking in the past tense?
- ori_b 16y ago
  Firefox 3.6, Linux, 4 gigs of RAM, 1.86 ghz CPU, 10 mbit connection. 9 second load time. And the scrollbar is uselessly broken. (Nonstandard behavior, arrow keys don't work, etc)
  - moultano 16y ago
    Not that this is really a defense of the product, but you should try it in chrome. You'll have a better experience.

pvg 16y ago

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

thingsilearned 16y ago

nah

brapse 16y ago

Many of the problems wave aimed to remedy still stand. It's my hope that google will bow out gracefully, leaving behind the work they have done and allow other to pick up where they left off. This seems to be the plan, although they haven't open sourced the entirety of the effort.

redorb 16y ago

I do think the announcement to kill it off was a bit early :( - I use wave daily and have for a while for basic 'group meetings' with people who work remote. I am also surprised that Google didn't keep it alive for internal use (where Gmail came from) ~ perhaps they have something entirely new in the pipe.

elblanco 16y ago
I'd bet that lack of internal adoption is 50% of the equation here.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

mmj2f 16y ago

#savewave

charisma 16y ago

I have never understood the power of petitions.. no matter how many people add themselves to this petition will that make a difference? Will google change its mind if a 300 odd (or even 3000 or even 30000) people add themselves to this?

po 16y ago
Especially when google says in their shutdown notice "despite … numerous loyal fans" They know a small but loyal following uses wave. They are shutting down because that wasn't what they had in mind for wave. They were aiming big and failed. That's ok, but only if it doesn't continue to drain from the company.
jgilliam 16y ago
Google actually does. Here's one example http://act.ly/3o http://act.ly/3o, where people in Romania were petitioning to get street level data added to Google Maps. Google responded fairly quickly and about a month later had data, which they then asked all the people who tweeted the petition to beta test.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

shortformblog 16y ago

This site … it's like they turned Google Wave into a mix of http://YourWorldOfText.com http://YourWorldOfText.com and 4chan. THAT use of the technology would be awesome.

zrbecker 16y ago

I never found out what Google Wave was for, so it is really not a big loss.

Devilboy 16y ago
Do people really think like this?
- DrStalker 16y ago
  It wasn't obvious to me what it was for or how to use it, no-one I knew personally was using it, and I don't have the free time to casually learn an entire new paradigm to do... whatever it was you did with Wave.
  - Devilboy 16y ago
    How can you say 'no big loss' just because you personally didn't find it useful?
    - DrStalker 16y ago
      Would you care more or less if Wave was made by a startup instead of a massive existing company like Google? New products fail all the time. When the company making the product fails to even explain what the product does and just heaps buzzwords together I don't feel any sense of loss when the product goes away. This wouldn't even be newsworthy if it wasn't Google behind it.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    I think that's actually fair. Until I got 6 or 7 people using it regularly with me it was kind of a head scratcher.
  - Concours 16y ago
    Google wave is not really that complex, first thing to do before using it is to watch the video demo (I'm almost sure very few peoples did it), it's a collaboration and productivity tool, so you just can't invite your friends to use it at this stage, you can invite your colleagues and employess, but it's not a product targeting any casual Joe friend, but google seems to expect peoples to adopt it as such. You probably won't ask your friends to use a task management tool to keep in touch with you or what you do. I'm glad it may stick around for sometime,I hope forever, too bad, they will no more work on it.

MrRage 16y ago

Warning: The petition just got overtaken by an army of trolls.

noarchy 16y ago

I'd rather they just integrate Wave with Gmail, something that I wanted from the start. I had no use for Wave, on its own, especially in the early days when invites were slow to go out. For a long time, Wave sat there, unused. By the time more of my friends and colleagues got access, no one cared anymore. This is a shame, because Wave has tons of potential.

invisible 16y ago

The most obvious feature Google should have invested 5,000 man hours in: making Wave seamless in GMail as a standard. If you are talking to another GMail user, Wave should be automatically turned on for that message. I do not understand why this wasn't deathly obvious to them from the day that they announced Wave at Google IO 2009.

elblanco 16y ago
They were too busy botching the Buzz rollout.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
It could be that there were turf wars involved in this. It is not inconceivable for the Gmail product manager to not want Wave integrated. People switching to Wave could mean the end of his clout in company. I don't know enough about internal Google to really say whether this is probable or not, but I've worked for companies where that would have been the case.
- roc 16y ago
  I'd be willing to accept that if we were talking about Microsoft. I thought Google was still better than that?
kanzure 16y ago
One reason this might not have happened is because you don't fuck with gmail. That's 180 million users right there. Repeat: you don't fuck with gmail. (But I would have liked the wave/gmail rollout, yes.)

njharman 16y ago

No Please Don't. Google had the good sense and humility to let a failure fail. Don't y'all go fucking that up.

j15e 16y ago

.... not

Groxx 16y ago

Yes, this will work. Everybody listens to anonymous internet petitions.

hdeshev 16y ago

Funny. I wouldn't want to be in Novell's shoes now after having invested in building a product on top of Wave: http://www.novell.com/products/pulse/ http://www.novell.com/products/pulse/

jpablo 16y ago
Pulse is not in top of Wave and really is a separated product that doesn't depend on Wave at all. And in fact is what a lot of people are asking: Wave behind your firewall. (Disclaimer: I'm a Novell employee but I don't speak for them).
- hdeshev 16y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. This blog post is also helpful: http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2836 http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2836

smallegan 16y ago

Has Google ever sold off a product or service? They certainly acquire but if I am not mistaken it is also common practice for large corporations to rid themselves or projects they are no longer interested in and sometimes this involves a monetary transaction in their favor.

pasbesoin 16y ago

I definitely want to see Wave saved. Further, I'll argue that since Google effectively took away our common, central access to the EtherPad service (even though the source code remains), they in some sense "owe" the community the effort of giving Wave more of a shot -- although I expect a common response will be that "business doesn't owe you anything that doesn't make money (in an legal fashion)". My other comments (e.g. interface, lack of documentation and post-launch publicity) are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578127 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1578127

morphir 16y ago

open source this thing so I can sudo apt-get wave, it would go good with googles, "don't be evil"-slogan.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

gengstrand 16y ago

There's nothing left to save. Google has already added collaboration capability into their Documents and Buzz is what they went with for microblogging in their mail app. http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-wave-rip-40451 http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-wave-rip-4... goes into 6 reasons why killing off Wave is the right thing to do.