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Yes. And the vision for Google Wave was great. The execution was just abominably bad (primarily on the frontend/UI side), and Google's failures in execution car
by lucideer 8y ago
Yes. And the vision for Google Wave was great. The execution was just abominably bad (primarily on the frontend/UI side), and Google's failures in execution carried over reputationally to the—now dead—Apache incubator.
- vidarh 8y agoNot just the UI side. The underlying protocol was also pointlessly over-engineered. SMTP is still around because it is simple. You can get a basic SMTP client running in an hour or two. You can get a basic server running in a similar amount of time, at least in a higher level language. That matters, not because anyone will have anything usable in that time, but because it lets you start to experiment very, very easily. Wave suffered from a UI that was a mess layered on top of a protocol that made it really hard for people to get started on experimenting with alternative frontends, and without a user-base giving people a reason to persist figuring out how to interoperate with it. Had the protocol been simpler, the UI mess might not have mattered so much - people might have come up with their own ideas.
- arethuza 8y agoYou don't even need a client - connecting with telnet and sending emails is pretty straightforward. I guess the modern equivalent is checking if a REST API is usable just with curl.
- sjwright 8y agoThe S in SMTP literally stands for Simple. And it was developed in 1982. So it was considered simple in 1982. That gives you some idea how simple it is. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821
- PaulHoule 8y agoIt is simple today, except for the authentication. Of course, if the authentication doesn't work, nothing works!