8 ms·

Retiring Wave

165 points by sprt 9y ago

upbeatlinux 9y ago
A single and solemn wave goodbye.
lsiebert 9y ago
People who aren't aware, this was the continuation of Google Wave, the real time collaboration tool that was, for a while, built into gmail, and then taken over by apache. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave
- deefour 9y ago
  > tool that was, for a while, built into gmail Do you have a source for this? I don't remember it ever being part of Gmail.
  - V-eHGsd_ 9y ago
    it wasn't. when it was release, it was actually introduced (internally) as something like, "what would email look like if were invented today?"
    - taeric 9y ago
      Not just internally. I remember the massive hype around this being the "next email." I excitedly got as many of my friends onto there as I could. I can't really pinpoint any one thing. There really was a mass of mistakes that all lead to this imploding heavily. I seem to recall that the fate of GWT was intertwined heavily with it. Very heavyweight widgets to support the general idea of massive collaboration in real time. I suspect the killer is that "real time" portion. People love to talk about that. Few actually want it. (Fewer still need it.)
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        > I suspect the killer is that "real time" portion. Real time is good for collaboration but it sucks for messaging. A good messaging platform allows you to ignore it until you are ready for it.
        taeric 9y ago
        I suspect "fast" is good. Real time is just an indulgence that can demo well if it has been well rehearsed.
      - TheSmiddy 9y ago
        Pretty sure the biggest mistake was the same as Google Plus': the invite system that artificially hampers growth. Since these platforms need to capture an entire network of people at the same time if there is something preventing someone from bringing all their friends/collegues in at the same time then it is doomed to fail.
        wlesieutre 9y ago
        Yeah, this worked fine for Gmail's early years because you can talk to people on other email systems. But Google tried to apply the same system to both Wave and Plus where the exclusivity made them comparatively useless. I think they've learned the lesson by now at least, since their latest communication systems (Duo and Allo) had open signups. If those two fail it'll be because they were pointless (from a user perspective) entries into a crowded market of established players who already had network effect lock-in working them.
        taeric 9y ago
        More than just the invite, I think they really soured a larger portion of their market than they thought. The impression seemed to be that they would kill buzz/reader/wave, and the folks would just naturally turn to what they then offered. The reality seemed as much that many of us were unwilling to try anything else from them until it was clear it was good and going to stick around.
      - 9y ago
  - waldir 9y ago
    They're probably mixing it up with Google Buzz.
    - lsiebert 9y ago
      I totally was! In my defense it was rather a while ago and I did use both.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
urda 9y ago
This is the way Wave ends, Not with a bang but a whimper. I remember seeing how incredible Wave was at the time, such a shame to see it end like this. But that's how the world goes sometimes.
stablemap 9y ago
I learned about this from the recent popular article, “How not to replace email”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452
tux3 9y ago
While the Apache Foundation hosts a lot of great projects, it also looks to me like a place where big projects go to die. I'm thinking of the whole Apache Open-Office fiasco, among other things. Looking at their list of projects sorted by number of committers[0], event at the top I don't get the idea that most of those have a lot of momentum. Do I just have a completely wrong impression? I'm curious if there's something to learn from this. [0]: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Yeah, no, your impression is correct. Apache is and always has been a bit of an open source graveyard. There's counter-examples but even they have me worried. Airflow, originating from AirBNB, is now Apache Airflow: https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow -- And I've been super hesitant to throw weight at it because of that, even though it looks actively maintained.
  - liveoneggs 9y ago
    airflow is too tightly integrated into a single project/requirements.txt for my tastes. It should do less.
    - tedmiston 9y ago
      Can you explain your position a bit more, like which parts you think would be better decoupled?
      - liveoneggs 9y ago
        I like airflow the dag/re-run/cron stuff but have a project running in py2.7 and one in 3.6, what do I do?
        tedmiston 9y ago
        That's definitely a good question, and one that I don't think is clearly addressed in the docs (so I might take the opportunity to turn this into a little blog post later). tl;dr - Airflow can support running multiple Python versions. Here's a three-pronged answer: 1. PythonOperator - Assuming you're running Airflow on 3.6, you can run your 3.6 functions with the normal PythonOperator. 2. PythonVirtualenvOperator - Then, if upgrading your 2.7 code to 3.6 is an option, I would; if that's a hurdle... You can run multiple Python versions mixed using the PythonVirtualenvOperator [1] to run the other tasks in dedicated 2.7 etc virtual environments. That's pretty simple if it satisfies your requirements, but it's not a foolproof solution if your reason for being on 2.7 is complex or some system-level dependency that requires more. 3. DockerOperator - If the setup requires more complex things to be installed, you can use the DockerOperator [2] and build out a simple Python Docker image e.g., [3]. This is the method we use to run other languages like Scala and JavaScript via Airflow. Feel free to reach out via email if you'd like to discuss more or have questions - taylor [at] astronomer.io. We like to help people get started with our Airflow and have written a bit of content for it. [1]: https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow/blob/ba126926d7d8a3d8d5bae548c12b5ce4b2a9fbd8/airflow/operators/python_operator.py#L162 https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow/blob/ba126926d7d... [2]: https://airflow.apache.org/code.html?highlight=dockeroperator#airflow.operators.docker_operator.DockerOperator https://airflow.apache.org/code.html?highlight=dockeroperato... [3]: https://hub.docker.com/_/python/ https://hub.docker.com/_/python/
rlglwx 9y ago
I wonder if Wave and Reader are hanging out in heaven somewhere.
- taeric 9y ago
  I miss Reader much more than I miss Wave. Wave helped sour me to hyped ideas. Reader made me bitter to even attempted google+. To the point that i forget google+ still exists quite commonly. I almost feel guilty that I don't know more about it.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Nobody misses wave, lots of people miss reader. You can take the number of reader re-launches after Google shuttered it as proof of that.
  - fphhotchips 9y ago
    I miss what Wave could have been. Some of the core ideas had promise, but never really quite hit the mark.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Yes, that's true. But even at the time Google had a reputation for throwing a lot of stuff out there and then pulling the rug out from under them if they did not develop traction fast enough and a thing like Wave did not look like it would be a fast grower. So I told myself I'd really get into it if it lasted 5 years. This 'try to not be first' attitude has definitely cost me some opportunities over the years but it has also saved me betting on horses that ended up as also-rans many times.
- martin-adams 9y ago
  If heaven is in the clouds, then I don't think they are hanging out in the cloud anymore.
  - heroprotagonist 9y ago
agentultra 9y ago
Wave was absolutely the best way to play play-by-post RPGs online. It was really cool stuff.
tambourine_man 9y ago
Interesting tech that no one wanted
- askvictor 9y ago
  Interesting tech where the roll-out was botched. My organisation desperately wanted to use this, but since invites were limited and rolled out slowly, we couldn't, since you can't have half of the org using a collaboration tool like this. So the initial buzz about this was killed quickly when no-one could use it for any serious work, then once it was generally available, people had lost interest. Google has a habit of botching roll-outs like this. Google Docs in its current form has a lot of features that were in Wave, and people seem to like and use that.
- Blackthorn 9y ago
  I wanted it for playing online RPGs. It was a great use case :-(
ramon 9y ago
I remember the headlines about Google reinventing email with Wave, the world without emails.. I guess it will never die, long live the emails :p.
- jaakl 9y ago
  For the below-25 crowd email is quite dead : they only read it when asked via proper chat or “social” channels, and send one as last resort. For the older gen email is near dead due to spam. In few years it will be new telefax.
  - stonogo 9y ago
    People have been claiming that email is dying since the mid-90s. And here we are, with the only messaging protocol that's available to everyone on the internet: email.
    - ramon 9y ago
      I believe you can take space from email like these messenger apps for the mobile phone but to say that's dead or going to die I think it's a mistake to make this type of statement. Try to enroll in these social media networks without an email, they require you to have an email, try to enrol anywhere they ask you for an email confirmation. Email is not dying it's just changing the purpose.
  - ramon 9y ago
    I don't see that, only if you're talking to a kid maybe. But everyone still has emails, I think WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger did gain space on communications taking space from email in daily usage but email still has its space, ask anyone if they have email.
jrcii 9y ago
I invented the design for this protocol, Google stole it from me, and I have the digitally signed emails with Google to prove it. Not that anyone cares now.
dvt 9y ago
Google Wave was really the spark that inspired me to "build a startup." With that said, it was a mess. It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. It had "everything" in the worst of ways. It really was a Frankenstein; I distinctly remember threaded conversations that wouldn't collapse, weird and inconsistent results when contributing to the same "wave," and an interface that was honestly pretty awful (not to mention cramped on the screens of yesteryear). There's more: Google wanted to create a protocol but the tech was invite-only (???), it wanted to replace email but no one else adopted it. The whole thing made no sense. But after watching the Google I/O talk, I was enthralled. I thought to myself "I bet I could build that!" And really, even if Google Wave failed horribly, it did contribute to the "real-time" web we all enjoy today.
- derefr 9y ago
  > It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. In other words, it was Lotus Notes 2.0. One of these days, someone's gotta make a Lotus Notes 3.0 that actually makes good on the original premise, without screwing it up by adding too much other stuff (like Lotus+IBM did) or by forgetting what the problem being solved is (like Google did.) The original premise is pretty cool, once you see through to it. Notes did two important things: 1. Notes takes email message bodies and turns them into, essentially, the initial response-bodies of (gradually-enhanced) HTML5 web-applications. Each message body contains a common "program"—which may or may not require any bandwidth to deliver, depending on whether the receiving server already has other copies of it—and then, along with that program, it contains some initialization data customized for the recipient (like the initial response-body HTML in a gradually-enhanced webapp.) Your mail-reader becomes equivalent to a modern web browser (i.e. it's a zero-install application sandbox), except that there are no URLs—instead, you get pushed new pages [or new versions of pages] by other people, and then they stick around in your "cache" (your inbox) until you delete them. 2. Notes then gives those little email applets persistent "cloud" storage, in the form of Firebase-like synchronization to tiny per-applet databases that live on—or next to—the message author's IMAP server. (Notes' applet database server is called Domino, but it was essentially just Firebase's API backed by a bunch of BDB DB files on a disk—usually on the same machine that the IMAP mbox files were held on.) Together, that meant that you had a federated, vendor-neutral method of composing little applications like straw polls of what to get for lunch, or interactive infographics with live source data. Each applet's program would travel around by regular email; and each applet's data would be canonically on the applet-author's mail-server, but would be synced with anyone any time they opened the applet message. And then, along with that, you also get federated, vendor-neutral, PKI-keypair-based ACLs giving identity to every read or write, enforced by the applet DB server, that applet authoring software could then turn into simple access control settings for each Firebase-like object type. Wave took the whole distributed infrastructure of Notes and puts it into Google's cloud, but without any of the federated/vendor-neutral/client-synced stuff that was the whole point of the design. You got the same essential architecture (applets live inside messages; applets get shared cloud backend storage; the system syncs the state of "your" applets to local storage), but you no longer got any advantage from it: since you were talking to a cloud that could run arbitrary compute anyway, anyone in an enterprise who wanted to "author an applet" could just write (or rely on authoring software to generate) a little Google App Engine app, which would store its data in Google Cloud Datastore and use GSuite OAuth for login. All the same benefits, but now it's just a web-page. Open it in a tab, bookmark it, whatever. No need to push the app; just email people a link to it.
dang 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452
grzm 9y ago
For the curious, I think this might be the first submission related to Wave on HN (May 28, 2009; 169 points, 99 comments): "Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427 Top comment starts out > "This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of communication."
pedalpete 9y ago
Being based in Sydney, I occasionally meet people who worked on Wave. They should be commended for ushering in a new vision for what the web could do. So much tech in there that is now considered standard. As a product, it didn't fit a real purpose and was trying to do to much, but it should be remembered for opening our eyes to what was possible. Tonight I'll raise a drink to all those who committed time to Wave and showed us the way (and I'm in Bondi, if anyone is around and wants to meet-up).
frakturfreund 9y ago
Can't stop the signal, Mal.
Analemma_ 9y ago
I've said this before, but while I know for a lot of people Reader is the axed Google product they miss most, for me it will always be Wave. I know a lot of people didn't get it, and I can't blame them, but I was part of a six-person software team using Wave for a brief project and, despite its faults, it was the greatest communication tool any of us had ever used, and remains so to this day. Slack/Discord/Teams/Trello/whatever still don't come close. (Which makes it all the more appropriately ironic that it had a bunch of Firefly references and easter eggs inside. It's like they knew.) Anyway, I'm pouring one out for Wave tonight.
- edo 9y ago
  What made Google wave so great to you? (Even better than slack/Discord/Trello)?
  - jamesgeck0 9y ago
    Some people hated real-time typing, but it made interactions feel even more immediate than Slack. I also like that comments were a first-class citizen; part of the document. You could have an in-line conversation about a paragraph, then distill the results into the text and delete the conversation. Comments weren't another "mode" like they are in Google Docs; they were just document bubbles nested in a parent document bubble. I've apparently flip-flopped on this; looking at a post I wrote at the time, I thought it felt wrong to delete comments.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    It was the complete package, encompassing all of: - That communication could be both synchronous (like chat) and asynchronous (like email) and you could use whichever worked best for you at the time. You could even switch in the middle of a thread- maybe it stared out asynchronous, but then both people were online and decided to have a conversation. - Threads were a better way of breaking up topics than channels - The ability to post a document and then have people comment on it let you basically incorporate Google Docs-style document revision into your chat application, but like the other comment says, the comments were a first-class citizen of the interface, rather than bubbles that are totally out of context - I like real-time chats, where you could see the individual characters the other person was typing. This, admittedly, is an aesthetic preference I know not everyone shares.
sitkack 9y ago
git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-android.git git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-docs.git git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave.git Does it even build? Wave is one of those things that everyone raves about but has never used. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
gwbas1c 9y ago
I remember doing a deep dive on Wave, specifically because I was interested in trying to figure out what I could build on top of the protocol. Fundamentally, there was no way to persist the data. The open-source version was little more than a demo. At that point I realized it was mostly hot air, said so at the wave meet up I was going to, and then stopped paying attention.
dreamfactored 9y ago
Wave was highly ambitious, but under resourced with a horribly botched rollout. It could have killed Twitter, Facebook, and preempted Slack, or better shifted them to a common open source framework which would have allowed a thousand twitters and fbs to bloom and interact. Real shame that OStatus couldn't get traction.
toddmorey 9y ago
Will never forget the launch event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
- sidcool 9y ago
  This was an excellent launch. I watched live and was enthralled.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  I remember it for the amount of demos that went wrong. It takes courage or desperation to demonstrate a project in that state. Also, somewhere in there is a quote by the project lead that I still remember today, something like this: "There aren't many companies that can afford to mess up a demo. [pause] We're not one of them." The last part sounded like a panicked attempt to backpedal on what he just said.
sidcool 9y ago
Google Wave didn't fall, it inspired me and many more for ambitious thinking. Its tech was adopted by other products. It changed something intangible and inherent to tech.
wbillingsley 9y ago
They made the mistake of thinking the cool demo was the finished product.
onion-soup 9y ago
Why don't apache update web interface. It's just not fun anymore, I get all retrograde feel to it, but in 2018 it's plain annoyingly ugly and hard to understand what's going on on the page.
neals 9y ago
I've got different kind of annecdote that I need to share now that the thing got retired. I missed the entire wave thing. Don't know how or why. But I just missed it. And I never ever miss these kind of things. My job at the time was consulting and advising startups and I just looked silly when "wave" came up in a meeting and I had no idea what it was. I remember the CEO saying "You didn't see the video of the developers cheering with their laptops above their head?" ... which I did not. It's one of those things that comes back to haunt me when I can't sleep. You know, one of those awkward social interactions that nobody but yourself remembers. So good bye Wave. Bane of my existence.
a_imho 9y ago
Probably I was not the target audience but I never got the hype with Wave.
fosco 9y ago
I used Wave along with a group of friends when it first came out often. I also setup WIAB which was almost usable but never was as 'smooth' as the google hosted Wave. what was smooth you ask? I never had issues, I even played people in some of the games they had to great enjoyment (was never able to get this on my WIAB) I joined Apache Wave with great excitement when it first was accepted and yet disappointed in my inability to contribute. I am not a software engineer but I tried multiple times with different IDs and the response was (paraphrasing) go check this site and pick something to work on. as the years went on multiple attempts were made to retire Apache Wave with last minute efforts by multiple people trying to keep it going. I knew this day would come and it is still sad to see. I am not sure if there was a better 'onboarding' for noobs available if I would have done much but I think many open source projects may fair better if their barrier to entry for them were clearer
dcuthbertson 9y ago
Didn't this start out as EtherPad? I remember that being an eye-catching demo of a way to collaborate on documents over the web. How/where did that go wrong?

165 points by sprt 9y ago

A single and solemn wave goodbye.

People who aren't aware, this was the continuation of Google Wave, the real time collaboration tool that was, for a while, built into gmail, and then taken over by apache. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave

deefour 9y ago
> tool that was, for a while, built into gmail Do you have a source for this? I don't remember it ever being part of Gmail.
- V-eHGsd_ 9y ago
  it wasn't. when it was release, it was actually introduced (internally) as something like, "what would email look like if were invented today?"
  - taeric 9y ago
    Not just internally. I remember the massive hype around this being the "next email." I excitedly got as many of my friends onto there as I could. I can't really pinpoint any one thing. There really was a mass of mistakes that all lead to this imploding heavily. I seem to recall that the fate of GWT was intertwined heavily with it. Very heavyweight widgets to support the general idea of massive collaboration in real time. I suspect the killer is that "real time" portion. People love to talk about that. Few actually want it. (Fewer still need it.)
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      > I suspect the killer is that "real time" portion. Real time is good for collaboration but it sucks for messaging. A good messaging platform allows you to ignore it until you are ready for it.
      - taeric 9y ago
        I suspect "fast" is good. Real time is just an indulgence that can demo well if it has been well rehearsed.
    - TheSmiddy 9y ago
      Pretty sure the biggest mistake was the same as Google Plus': the invite system that artificially hampers growth. Since these platforms need to capture an entire network of people at the same time if there is something preventing someone from bringing all their friends/collegues in at the same time then it is doomed to fail.
      - wlesieutre 9y ago
        Yeah, this worked fine for Gmail's early years because you can talk to people on other email systems. But Google tried to apply the same system to both Wave and Plus where the exclusivity made them comparatively useless. I think they've learned the lesson by now at least, since their latest communication systems (Duo and Allo) had open signups. If those two fail it'll be because they were pointless (from a user perspective) entries into a crowded market of established players who already had network effect lock-in working them.
      - taeric 9y ago
        More than just the invite, I think they really soured a larger portion of their market than they thought. The impression seemed to be that they would kill buzz/reader/wave, and the folks would just naturally turn to what they then offered. The reality seemed as much that many of us were unwilling to try anything else from them until it was clear it was good and going to stick around.
    - 9y ago
- waldir 9y ago
  They're probably mixing it up with Google Buzz.
  - lsiebert 9y ago
    I totally was! In my defense it was rather a while ago and I did use both.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

urda 9y ago

This is the way Wave ends, Not with a bang but a whimper. I remember seeing how incredible Wave was at the time, such a shame to see it end like this. But that's how the world goes sometimes.

stablemap 9y ago

I learned about this from the recent popular article, “How not to replace email”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452

tux3 9y ago

While the Apache Foundation hosts a lot of great projects, it also looks to me like a place where big projects go to die. I'm thinking of the whole Apache Open-Office fiasco, among other things. Looking at their list of projects sorted by number of committers[0], event at the top I don't get the idea that most of those have a lot of momentum. Do I just have a completely wrong impression? I'm curious if there's something to learn from this. [0]: https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number

scrollaway 9y ago
Yeah, no, your impression is correct. Apache is and always has been a bit of an open source graveyard. There's counter-examples but even they have me worried. Airflow, originating from AirBNB, is now Apache Airflow: https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow -- And I've been super hesitant to throw weight at it because of that, even though it looks actively maintained.
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  airflow is too tightly integrated into a single project/requirements.txt for my tastes. It should do less.
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    Can you explain your position a bit more, like which parts you think would be better decoupled?
    - liveoneggs 9y ago
      I like airflow the dag/re-run/cron stuff but have a project running in py2.7 and one in 3.6, what do I do?
      - tedmiston 9y ago
        That's definitely a good question, and one that I don't think is clearly addressed in the docs (so I might take the opportunity to turn this into a little blog post later). tl;dr - Airflow can support running multiple Python versions. Here's a three-pronged answer: 1. PythonOperator - Assuming you're running Airflow on 3.6, you can run your 3.6 functions with the normal PythonOperator. 2. PythonVirtualenvOperator - Then, if upgrading your 2.7 code to 3.6 is an option, I would; if that's a hurdle... You can run multiple Python versions mixed using the PythonVirtualenvOperator [1] to run the other tasks in dedicated 2.7 etc virtual environments. That's pretty simple if it satisfies your requirements, but it's not a foolproof solution if your reason for being on 2.7 is complex or some system-level dependency that requires more. 3. DockerOperator - If the setup requires more complex things to be installed, you can use the DockerOperator [2] and build out a simple Python Docker image e.g., [3]. This is the method we use to run other languages like Scala and JavaScript via Airflow. Feel free to reach out via email if you'd like to discuss more or have questions - taylor [at] astronomer.io. We like to help people get started with our Airflow and have written a bit of content for it. [1]: https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow/blob/ba126926d7d8a3d8d5bae548c12b5ce4b2a9fbd8/airflow/operators/python_operator.py#L162 https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow/blob/ba126926d7d... [2]: https://airflow.apache.org/code.html?highlight=dockeroperator#airflow.operators.docker_operator.DockerOperator https://airflow.apache.org/code.html?highlight=dockeroperato... [3]: https://hub.docker.com/_/python/ https://hub.docker.com/_/python/

rlglwx 9y ago

I wonder if Wave and Reader are hanging out in heaven somewhere.

taeric 9y ago
I miss Reader much more than I miss Wave. Wave helped sour me to hyped ideas. Reader made me bitter to even attempted google+. To the point that i forget google+ still exists quite commonly. I almost feel guilty that I don't know more about it.
jacquesm 9y ago
Nobody misses wave, lots of people miss reader. You can take the number of reader re-launches after Google shuttered it as proof of that.
- fphhotchips 9y ago
  I miss what Wave could have been. Some of the core ideas had promise, but never really quite hit the mark.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Yes, that's true. But even at the time Google had a reputation for throwing a lot of stuff out there and then pulling the rug out from under them if they did not develop traction fast enough and a thing like Wave did not look like it would be a fast grower. So I told myself I'd really get into it if it lasted 5 years. This 'try to not be first' attitude has definitely cost me some opportunities over the years but it has also saved me betting on horses that ended up as also-rans many times.
martin-adams 9y ago
If heaven is in the clouds, then I don't think they are hanging out in the cloud anymore.
- heroprotagonist 9y ago

agentultra 9y ago

Wave was absolutely the best way to play play-by-post RPGs online. It was really cool stuff.

tambourine_man 9y ago

Interesting tech that no one wanted

askvictor 9y ago
Interesting tech where the roll-out was botched. My organisation desperately wanted to use this, but since invites were limited and rolled out slowly, we couldn't, since you can't have half of the org using a collaboration tool like this. So the initial buzz about this was killed quickly when no-one could use it for any serious work, then once it was generally available, people had lost interest. Google has a habit of botching roll-outs like this. Google Docs in its current form has a lot of features that were in Wave, and people seem to like and use that.
Blackthorn 9y ago
I wanted it for playing online RPGs. It was a great use case :-(

ramon 9y ago

I remember the headlines about Google reinventing email with Wave, the world without emails.. I guess it will never die, long live the emails :p.

jaakl 9y ago
For the below-25 crowd email is quite dead : they only read it when asked via proper chat or “social” channels, and send one as last resort. For the older gen email is near dead due to spam. In few years it will be new telefax.
- stonogo 9y ago
  People have been claiming that email is dying since the mid-90s. And here we are, with the only messaging protocol that's available to everyone on the internet: email.
  - ramon 9y ago
    I believe you can take space from email like these messenger apps for the mobile phone but to say that's dead or going to die I think it's a mistake to make this type of statement. Try to enroll in these social media networks without an email, they require you to have an email, try to enrol anywhere they ask you for an email confirmation. Email is not dying it's just changing the purpose.
- ramon 9y ago
  I don't see that, only if you're talking to a kid maybe. But everyone still has emails, I think WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger did gain space on communications taking space from email in daily usage but email still has its space, ask anyone if they have email.

jrcii 9y ago

I invented the design for this protocol, Google stole it from me, and I have the digitally signed emails with Google to prove it. Not that anyone cares now.

dvt 9y ago

Google Wave was really the spark that inspired me to "build a startup." With that said, it was a mess. It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. It had "everything" in the worst of ways. It really was a Frankenstein; I distinctly remember threaded conversations that wouldn't collapse, weird and inconsistent results when contributing to the same "wave," and an interface that was honestly pretty awful (not to mention cramped on the screens of yesteryear). There's more: Google wanted to create a protocol but the tech was invite-only (???), it wanted to replace email but no one else adopted it. The whole thing made no sense. But after watching the Google I/O talk, I was enthralled. I thought to myself "I bet I could build that!" And really, even if Google Wave failed horribly, it did contribute to the "real-time" web we all enjoy today.

derefr 9y ago
> It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. In other words, it was Lotus Notes 2.0. One of these days, someone's gotta make a Lotus Notes 3.0 that actually makes good on the original premise, without screwing it up by adding too much other stuff (like Lotus+IBM did) or by forgetting what the problem being solved is (like Google did.) The original premise is pretty cool, once you see through to it. Notes did two important things: 1. Notes takes email message bodies and turns them into, essentially, the initial response-bodies of (gradually-enhanced) HTML5 web-applications. Each message body contains a common "program"—which may or may not require any bandwidth to deliver, depending on whether the receiving server already has other copies of it—and then, along with that program, it contains some initialization data customized for the recipient (like the initial response-body HTML in a gradually-enhanced webapp.) Your mail-reader becomes equivalent to a modern web browser (i.e. it's a zero-install application sandbox), except that there are no URLs—instead, you get pushed new pages [or new versions of pages] by other people, and then they stick around in your "cache" (your inbox) until you delete them. 2. Notes then gives those little email applets persistent "cloud" storage, in the form of Firebase-like synchronization to tiny per-applet databases that live on—or next to—the message author's IMAP server. (Notes' applet database server is called Domino, but it was essentially just Firebase's API backed by a bunch of BDB DB files on a disk—usually on the same machine that the IMAP mbox files were held on.) Together, that meant that you had a federated, vendor-neutral method of composing little applications like straw polls of what to get for lunch, or interactive infographics with live source data. Each applet's program would travel around by regular email; and each applet's data would be canonically on the applet-author's mail-server, but would be synced with anyone any time they opened the applet message. And then, along with that, you also get federated, vendor-neutral, PKI-keypair-based ACLs giving identity to every read or write, enforced by the applet DB server, that applet authoring software could then turn into simple access control settings for each Firebase-like object type. Wave took the whole distributed infrastructure of Notes and puts it into Google's cloud, but without any of the federated/vendor-neutral/client-synced stuff that was the whole point of the design. You got the same essential architecture (applets live inside messages; applets get shared cloud backend storage; the system syncs the state of "your" applets to local storage), but you no longer got any advantage from it: since you were talking to a cloud that could run arbitrary compute anyway, anyone in an enterprise who wanted to "author an applet" could just write (or rely on authoring software to generate) a little Google App Engine app, which would store its data in Google Cloud Datastore and use GSuite OAuth for login. All the same benefits, but now it's just a web-page. Open it in a tab, bookmark it, whatever. No need to push the app; just email people a link to it.

dang 9y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452

grzm 9y ago

For the curious, I think this might be the first submission related to Wave on HN (May 28, 2009; 169 points, 99 comments): "Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427 Top comment starts out > "This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of communication."

pedalpete 9y ago

Being based in Sydney, I occasionally meet people who worked on Wave. They should be commended for ushering in a new vision for what the web could do. So much tech in there that is now considered standard. As a product, it didn't fit a real purpose and was trying to do to much, but it should be remembered for opening our eyes to what was possible. Tonight I'll raise a drink to all those who committed time to Wave and showed us the way (and I'm in Bondi, if anyone is around and wants to meet-up).

frakturfreund 9y ago

Can't stop the signal, Mal.

Analemma_ 9y ago

I've said this before, but while I know for a lot of people Reader is the axed Google product they miss most, for me it will always be Wave. I know a lot of people didn't get it, and I can't blame them, but I was part of a six-person software team using Wave for a brief project and, despite its faults, it was the greatest communication tool any of us had ever used, and remains so to this day. Slack/Discord/Teams/Trello/whatever still don't come close. (Which makes it all the more appropriately ironic that it had a bunch of Firefly references and easter eggs inside. It's like they knew.) Anyway, I'm pouring one out for Wave tonight.

edo 9y ago
What made Google wave so great to you? (Even better than slack/Discord/Trello)?
- jamesgeck0 9y ago
  Some people hated real-time typing, but it made interactions feel even more immediate than Slack. I also like that comments were a first-class citizen; part of the document. You could have an in-line conversation about a paragraph, then distill the results into the text and delete the conversation. Comments weren't another "mode" like they are in Google Docs; they were just document bubbles nested in a parent document bubble. I've apparently flip-flopped on this; looking at a post I wrote at the time, I thought it felt wrong to delete comments.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  It was the complete package, encompassing all of: - That communication could be both synchronous (like chat) and asynchronous (like email) and you could use whichever worked best for you at the time. You could even switch in the middle of a thread- maybe it stared out asynchronous, but then both people were online and decided to have a conversation. - Threads were a better way of breaking up topics than channels - The ability to post a document and then have people comment on it let you basically incorporate Google Docs-style document revision into your chat application, but like the other comment says, the comments were a first-class citizen of the interface, rather than bubbles that are totally out of context - I like real-time chats, where you could see the individual characters the other person was typing. This, admittedly, is an aesthetic preference I know not everyone shares.

sitkack 9y ago

git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-android.git git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-docs.git git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave.git Does it even build? Wave is one of those things that everyone raves about but has never used. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

gwbas1c 9y ago

I remember doing a deep dive on Wave, specifically because I was interested in trying to figure out what I could build on top of the protocol. Fundamentally, there was no way to persist the data. The open-source version was little more than a demo. At that point I realized it was mostly hot air, said so at the wave meet up I was going to, and then stopped paying attention.

dreamfactored 9y ago

Wave was highly ambitious, but under resourced with a horribly botched rollout. It could have killed Twitter, Facebook, and preempted Slack, or better shifted them to a common open source framework which would have allowed a thousand twitters and fbs to bloom and interact. Real shame that OStatus couldn't get traction.

toddmorey 9y ago

Will never forget the launch event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

sidcool 9y ago
This was an excellent launch. I watched live and was enthralled.
gmueckl 9y ago
I remember it for the amount of demos that went wrong. It takes courage or desperation to demonstrate a project in that state. Also, somewhere in there is a quote by the project lead that I still remember today, something like this: "There aren't many companies that can afford to mess up a demo. [pause] We're not one of them." The last part sounded like a panicked attempt to backpedal on what he just said.

sidcool 9y ago

Google Wave didn't fall, it inspired me and many more for ambitious thinking. Its tech was adopted by other products. It changed something intangible and inherent to tech.

wbillingsley 9y ago

They made the mistake of thinking the cool demo was the finished product.

onion-soup 9y ago

Why don't apache update web interface. It's just not fun anymore, I get all retrograde feel to it, but in 2018 it's plain annoyingly ugly and hard to understand what's going on on the page.

neals 9y ago

I've got different kind of annecdote that I need to share now that the thing got retired. I missed the entire wave thing. Don't know how or why. But I just missed it. And I never ever miss these kind of things. My job at the time was consulting and advising startups and I just looked silly when "wave" came up in a meeting and I had no idea what it was. I remember the CEO saying "You didn't see the video of the developers cheering with their laptops above their head?" ... which I did not. It's one of those things that comes back to haunt me when I can't sleep. You know, one of those awkward social interactions that nobody but yourself remembers. So good bye Wave. Bane of my existence.

a_imho 9y ago

Probably I was not the target audience but I never got the hype with Wave.

fosco 9y ago

I used Wave along with a group of friends when it first came out often. I also setup WIAB which was almost usable but never was as 'smooth' as the google hosted Wave. what was smooth you ask? I never had issues, I even played people in some of the games they had to great enjoyment (was never able to get this on my WIAB) I joined Apache Wave with great excitement when it first was accepted and yet disappointed in my inability to contribute. I am not a software engineer but I tried multiple times with different IDs and the response was (paraphrasing) go check this site and pick something to work on. as the years went on multiple attempts were made to retire Apache Wave with last minute efforts by multiple people trying to keep it going. I knew this day would come and it is still sad to see. I am not sure if there was a better 'onboarding' for noobs available if I would have done much but I think many open source projects may fair better if their barrier to entry for them were clearer

dcuthbertson 9y ago

Didn't this start out as EtherPad? I remember that being an eye-catching demo of a way to collaborate on documents over the web. How/where did that go wrong?