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I saw the live presentation of Google wave at Google IO in 2009. I was in awe of the technology & wanted my hands on it as soon as possible. The product visio

I saw the live presentation of Google wave at Google IO in 2009. I was in awe of the technology & wanted my hands on it as soon as possible. The product vision was amazing and long term. But the product was just way ahead of its time. Apart from the performance issues and clunky UX, I feel the product overall was very cool. I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave.

tehlike 9y ago
I agree. I liked it back in the day, and the fact that you could attach people to subtrees of a conversation was rather cool. IT also fixes infinitely-deep email chain problem very well.
- mavhc 9y ago
  It reminded me of usenet in that respect, easy to ignore subtrees you don't care about. What surprised me was Wave is obviously best for business, where email chains CC'd to a load of people who don't care are the norm, yet they killed it only months after enabling it for Google Apps
wodenokoto 9y ago
A group of friends excitedly signed up for wave and never found out how it was better at anything than a Google doc and it's built in chat. We spend a lot of time just figuring out what we wanted to communicate about inside wave and settled on planning a trip abroad, and eventually migrated to docs.
mercer 9y ago
Google Wave had quite an effect on how I react to 'cool, new tech things'. I was very excited about it and convinced friends to try it out, but then in practice it just didn't 'click'. Ever since I've been paying a lot more attention to the somewhat indefinable 'feel' of a tool. Trello, for example, felt right despite its relative simplicity (or because of it?), so I felt like it had a bigger chance of working out. If I had to define it, I guess it would be something in the direction of what someone in an early React presentation described as the 'pit of success'. Using the tool feels like it was optimized for how 'you' use it, and I suppose if everyone feels that way, it's got a chance of succeeding. tl;dr: 'apart from the clunky UX' is probably a bad sign.
- bsimpson 9y ago
  Incidentally, "pit of success" is usually the goal in the standardization discussions for new web APIs. The anti-goal is a "footgun," which makes it too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
- ghaff 9y ago
  On the other hand for me, Trello is something I use now and then because some team I'm working with uses it for a workflow. But it's never really clicked for me and isn't something I use unless I have to.
  - Drdrdrq 9y ago
    Sure, but do you use something else? It's simply incredible how low-quality most "card apps" are (Jira leading the pack with awful UX/UI).
    - ghaff 9y ago
      No. Any "to do"/workflow apps I use, I go into with the best of intentions and I get out of the habit after a while. For on deck articles and other content I need to or am thinking about creating, upcoming conferences I may submit to or attend, etc. I mostly just use a Google Sheet with tabs for the various categories. And I mostly just use paper lists and a whiteboard for tracking both someday/maybe projects as well as stuff to get done this week. I mostly don't do software development except for the occasional learning project.
zmb_ 9y ago
> I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave. I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had made -- for not closing it down soon enough despite it losing users right from the beginning.
- duncanawoods 9y ago
  Interesting, do you have a link? I'm not really sure what Schmidt "does". Is he limited to running business processes and exploiting markets profitably or has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? If I want to successfully build the next Wave, I'm not sure if I want to be listening to him or not.
  - zmb_ 9y ago
    Here it is: https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 Transcript: "I made many, many mistakes as the CEO and I'm glad that the good things we did overcame the mistakes. A typical example is... Did anyone ever use a product called "Wave"? Some of you may have. We launched it and from day one its usage went straight down. And the question is: If you're the CEO, how many months of going down before you cancel it? ... Look at the numbers, three months, six months, nine months? Eighteen months. Not good. There are other examples of that category, and again, just bad decisions."
    - duncanawoods 9y ago
      Thanks. Sounds like management by metrics instead of vision.
      - throw_away 9y ago
        And if that's your metric, then why slow-roll the launch by making it invite only? If the answer is performance, like I suspect it may be, then why launch if you cannot achieve success by the sole metric you appear to be looking at?
      - 9y ago
digi_owl 9y ago
What seemed to sink Wave as that Google dropped their support for a federated internet. Keep in mind that Wave backbone was XMPP, the same XMPP that powered Google Talk, and could in theory allow any number of Wave instances around the world to talk to each other.

tehlike 9y ago

I agree. I liked it back in the day, and the fact that you could attach people to subtrees of a conversation was rather cool. IT also fixes infinitely-deep email chain problem very well.

mavhc 9y ago
It reminded me of usenet in that respect, easy to ignore subtrees you don't care about. What surprised me was Wave is obviously best for business, where email chains CC'd to a load of people who don't care are the norm, yet they killed it only months after enabling it for Google Apps

wodenokoto 9y ago

A group of friends excitedly signed up for wave and never found out how it was better at anything than a Google doc and it's built in chat. We spend a lot of time just figuring out what we wanted to communicate about inside wave and settled on planning a trip abroad, and eventually migrated to docs.

mercer 9y ago

Google Wave had quite an effect on how I react to 'cool, new tech things'. I was very excited about it and convinced friends to try it out, but then in practice it just didn't 'click'. Ever since I've been paying a lot more attention to the somewhat indefinable 'feel' of a tool. Trello, for example, felt right despite its relative simplicity (or because of it?), so I felt like it had a bigger chance of working out. If I had to define it, I guess it would be something in the direction of what someone in an early React presentation described as the 'pit of success'. Using the tool feels like it was optimized for how 'you' use it, and I suppose if everyone feels that way, it's got a chance of succeeding. tl;dr: 'apart from the clunky UX' is probably a bad sign.

bsimpson 9y ago
Incidentally, "pit of success" is usually the goal in the standardization discussions for new web APIs. The anti-goal is a "footgun," which makes it too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
ghaff 9y ago
On the other hand for me, Trello is something I use now and then because some team I'm working with uses it for a workflow. But it's never really clicked for me and isn't something I use unless I have to.
- Drdrdrq 9y ago
  Sure, but do you use something else? It's simply incredible how low-quality most "card apps" are (Jira leading the pack with awful UX/UI).
  - ghaff 9y ago
    No. Any "to do"/workflow apps I use, I go into with the best of intentions and I get out of the habit after a while. For on deck articles and other content I need to or am thinking about creating, upcoming conferences I may submit to or attend, etc. I mostly just use a Google Sheet with tabs for the various categories. And I mostly just use paper lists and a whiteboard for tracking both someday/maybe projects as well as stuff to get done this week. I mostly don't do software development except for the occasional learning project.

zmb_ 9y ago

> I still maintain that Google gave up too early on Wave. I was just listening to a talk by Eric Schmidt where he used Wave as an example of a mistake he had made -- for not closing it down soon enough despite it losing users right from the beginning.

duncanawoods 9y ago
Interesting, do you have a link? I'm not really sure what Schmidt "does". Is he limited to running business processes and exploiting markets profitably or has he proven a talent fostering the invention of ground-breaking tech? If I want to successfully build the next Wave, I'm not sure if I want to be listening to him or not.
- zmb_ 9y ago
  Here it is: https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 https://youtu.be/gKNrOIR0euY?t=2209 Transcript: "I made many, many mistakes as the CEO and I'm glad that the good things we did overcame the mistakes. A typical example is... Did anyone ever use a product called "Wave"? Some of you may have. We launched it and from day one its usage went straight down. And the question is: If you're the CEO, how many months of going down before you cancel it? ... Look at the numbers, three months, six months, nine months? Eighteen months. Not good. There are other examples of that category, and again, just bad decisions."
  - duncanawoods 9y ago
    Thanks. Sounds like management by metrics instead of vision.
    - throw_away 9y ago
      And if that's your metric, then why slow-roll the launch by making it invite only? If the answer is performance, like I suspect it may be, then why launch if you cannot achieve success by the sole metric you appear to be looking at?
    - 9y ago

digi_owl 9y ago

What seemed to sink Wave as that Google dropped their support for a federated internet. Keep in mind that Wave backbone was XMPP, the same XMPP that powered Google Talk, and could in theory allow any number of Wave instances around the world to talk to each other.