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It was a great product, but it became 'another inbox' to me. It was designed to make communication frictionless, but it felt like a drag to check. New communic

It was a great product, but it became 'another inbox' to me. It was designed to make communication frictionless, but it felt like a drag to check. New communication services need to provide big, obvious benefits over existing services, then communicate those benefits with early adopters in a way that trickles downstream. If we can learn one thing from Wave, it's how deeply embedded existing communication methods are in our way of living and working; it's hard to pry business users away from email and social users away from Facebook even if you're Google. In this sense, Wave wasn't a bad idea; it was a great idea ahead of its time. I suspect that communication methods that are natural evolutions of existing popular systems (e.g. fax machines, Skype) are likely to have higher adoption rates than methods that take brilliant leaps too far too soon.

adrianwaj 16y ago
Not much changed since Wave launched, they could've iterated more. Just creating a platform and API isn't enough.
- modernerd 16y ago
  I'm not sure that iterating more would have helped Wave. The basic concept of a live chat/document editing platform was too far removed from what people are familiar with, so finding a clear use for it was hard. I don't think Google could have changed anything in the product to fix that, although they could have iterated the marketing process to pitch it to whatever audience were using it most and spur uptake in that community, perhaps. It would be interesting to see if a Wave-like collaboration platform would be widely adopted if it grew organically over time out of an existing Google product -- like Gmail.
  - adrianwaj 16y ago
    Wave from what I read was developed for use internally at Google when Gmail was insufficient. I'd be curious to see what's being used within Google right now in the collaboration space. People who were once using wave, what are they now using?
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      It shouldn't have been marketed as a competitor to email. It should've been marketed as something like Basecamp or Sharepoint.
    - pamelafox 16y ago
      Up until the day I left Google (last Friday), my team was still using Wave. We were a bunch of ex-Wavers though, so we were more likely than others to still be holding on. I should point out that our internal version of Wave was different from the external version in at least one very important way: when a wave was shared with a group that you were a member of, the wave was sent to your inbox. Externally, you would have to set up a search to find that wave, so basically nobody ever read group waves. The idea behind the decision was to reduce inbox noise (particularly important in beginning few months), but that also meant reducing utility for group collaboration. We were close to releasing proper groups support in the external version, so you could easily choose which groups to follow/unfollow inside your Wave inbox, but were discontinued before that made it out. So, Wave was awesome for group collaboration, but unfortunately, we never gave the external world much of a real opportunity to witness that. (And yes, there were other issues with Wave. Just thought I'd point out that one.)
      - jamesgeck0 16y ago
        That makes a lot of sense. My campus ACM group used Wave an enormous amount when the beta invites started going out, and we kept two organizational waves which mimicked the system you describe. One was a list of the screen names of every member, and the other was a list of waves.

adrianwaj 16y ago

Not much changed since Wave launched, they could've iterated more. Just creating a platform and API isn't enough.

modernerd 16y ago
I'm not sure that iterating more would have helped Wave. The basic concept of a live chat/document editing platform was too far removed from what people are familiar with, so finding a clear use for it was hard. I don't think Google could have changed anything in the product to fix that, although they could have iterated the marketing process to pitch it to whatever audience were using it most and spur uptake in that community, perhaps. It would be interesting to see if a Wave-like collaboration platform would be widely adopted if it grew organically over time out of an existing Google product -- like Gmail.
- adrianwaj 16y ago
  Wave from what I read was developed for use internally at Google when Gmail was insufficient. I'd be curious to see what's being used within Google right now in the collaboration space. People who were once using wave, what are they now using?
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    It shouldn't have been marketed as a competitor to email. It should've been marketed as something like Basecamp or Sharepoint.
  - pamelafox 16y ago
    Up until the day I left Google (last Friday), my team was still using Wave. We were a bunch of ex-Wavers though, so we were more likely than others to still be holding on. I should point out that our internal version of Wave was different from the external version in at least one very important way: when a wave was shared with a group that you were a member of, the wave was sent to your inbox. Externally, you would have to set up a search to find that wave, so basically nobody ever read group waves. The idea behind the decision was to reduce inbox noise (particularly important in beginning few months), but that also meant reducing utility for group collaboration. We were close to releasing proper groups support in the external version, so you could easily choose which groups to follow/unfollow inside your Wave inbox, but were discontinued before that made it out. So, Wave was awesome for group collaboration, but unfortunately, we never gave the external world much of a real opportunity to witness that. (And yes, there were other issues with Wave. Just thought I'd point out that one.)
    - jamesgeck0 16y ago
      That makes a lot of sense. My campus ACM group used Wave an enormous amount when the beta invites started going out, and we kept two organizational waves which mimicked the system you describe. One was a list of the screen names of every member, and the other was a list of waves.