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To me this is a rather neat solution and in a way how wave should have been distributed originally. However i still find it hard to place wave. It feels too ri

by jamesu 15y ago

To me this is a rather neat solution and in a way how wave should have been distributed originally. However i still find it hard to place wave. It feels too rigid to be used as a chat solution, and too confusing to be used as a messageboard. If anything it feels like an overly elaborate version of etherpad.

neilk 15y ago
I used to work at Google and I recognize it as an attempt to solve problems that Googlers have. Imagine you were in a globally distributed organization of over 10,000 geeks. And all of these geeks are producing documents at warp speed. Based on need it could be text formats in SVN, Google Docs, or graphics. Everybody gets hundreds, even thousands of emails a day, and uses IM obsessively. And there's a strong need for extreme openness with other teams, but also an occasional need for extreme secrecy. All these things are archived, but in different places. How do you know what the latest design is? Well, you can check recent email threads, or your chat logs, or the wiki, or your product documents, or... So the theory here is to end the madness of all these competing formats by making one format that has (potentially) all of their attributes. Your one format can handle any media type you can represent in HTML. All commentary is inline, and you can even develop the comments into full blown documents. You get IM that has history like a wiki, or, wiki collaboration as instant as IM. And all of this could be subject to access control. Unfortunately that makes it all very amorphous to the average person.
- AndrewDucker 15y ago
  So did it catch on internally at Google? I assume not, if they're canning it. But I'd love to know why not, if it didn't.
  - josephg 15y ago
    It was hit and miss at google. Some teams loved it, and some teams hated it. It was cancelled because the number of external users didn't meet google's expectations, not because of how it was used internally.

by jamesu 15y ago

neilk 15y ago

I used to work at Google and I recognize it as an attempt to solve problems that Googlers have. Imagine you were in a globally distributed organization of over 10,000 geeks. And all of these geeks are producing documents at warp speed. Based on need it could be text formats in SVN, Google Docs, or graphics. Everybody gets hundreds, even thousands of emails a day, and uses IM obsessively. And there's a strong need for extreme openness with other teams, but also an occasional need for extreme secrecy. All these things are archived, but in different places. How do you know what the latest design is? Well, you can check recent email threads, or your chat logs, or the wiki, or your product documents, or... So the theory here is to end the madness of all these competing formats by making one format that has (potentially) all of their attributes. Your one format can handle any media type you can represent in HTML. All commentary is inline, and you can even develop the comments into full blown documents. You get IM that has history like a wiki, or, wiki collaboration as instant as IM. And all of this could be subject to access control. Unfortunately that makes it all very amorphous to the average person.

AndrewDucker 15y ago
So did it catch on internally at Google? I assume not, if they're canning it. But I'd love to know why not, if it didn't.
- josephg 15y ago
  It was hit and miss at google. Some teams loved it, and some teams hated it. It was cancelled because the number of external users didn't meet google's expectations, not because of how it was used internally.