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This was interesting: "When the Maps project was completed, Lars and Jens moved on to develop a product dubbed “Walkabout.” Their ultimate goal was to answer a

This was interesting: "When the Maps project was completed, Lars and Jens moved on to develop a product dubbed “Walkabout.” Their ultimate goal was to answer a number of questions about how people communicated online: Why are there divisions between email, chat, and document-based communication?" That very first question they asked, they didn't get a good answer? Maybe that's why it failed? I feel like there are very good reasons there are divisions between all those things. Those are all different things, and I use them all in very different situations, and those divisions are a good thing, and there's no reason I'd want one thing to do that. I remember when they launched this, the technology seemed amazing, but I couldn't think of any reason I'd use it.

pfortuny 7y ago
I think the PERCEPTION (not necessarily the fact) of the difference between sinchronicity and asynchronicity is key here. Chat: synchronous. Mail: asynchronous. And then: real-time collaboration and edition is kind of orthogonal and very different (and difficult) to understand (very few times do you do something really collaborative, even on a blackboard).
- downerending 7y ago
  Seconded. And there's a special ring of hell for people that want me to attend synchronously while they slooowly compose what amounts to a lengthy email...
sytelus 7y ago
Wave had a huge promise. Today we communicate through various broken, half backed and decades old unimproved systems. Emails have hardly got any new features, even the simple things like "upvoting" in discussion is not allowed. Chats give little control over archival and searching. Forums on various websites are managed by uninterested parties who have little interest to improve them and may dissapear at any time. Group discussions quickly gets out of hand and become unwieldy. Despite all the progress, its super hard to apply good filters, surface interesting discussions and contributing to them meaningfully as an universal capability. There is a dire need for good communication software that integrates these various channels while still providing common set of powerful features that we can keep improving beyond 1980s standards.

pfortuny 7y ago

I think the PERCEPTION (not necessarily the fact) of the difference between sinchronicity and asynchronicity is key here. Chat: synchronous. Mail: asynchronous. And then: real-time collaboration and edition is kind of orthogonal and very different (and difficult) to understand (very few times do you do something really collaborative, even on a blackboard).

downerending 7y ago
Seconded. And there's a special ring of hell for people that want me to attend synchronously while they slooowly compose what amounts to a lengthy email...

sytelus 7y ago

Wave had a huge promise. Today we communicate through various broken, half backed and decades old unimproved systems. Emails have hardly got any new features, even the simple things like "upvoting" in discussion is not allowed. Chats give little control over archival and searching. Forums on various websites are managed by uninterested parties who have little interest to improve them and may dissapear at any time. Group discussions quickly gets out of hand and become unwieldy. Despite all the progress, its super hard to apply good filters, surface interesting discussions and contributing to them meaningfully as an universal capability. There is a dire need for good communication software that integrates these various channels while still providing common set of powerful features that we can keep improving beyond 1980s standards.