6 ms·

What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way

26 points by mshafrir 17y ago

tremendo 17y ago
I have a lot of respect for Anil, but I don't understand how he can conclude that Wave cannot be successful because it isn't easy enough for an average Web developer to comprehend, and copy and re-implement in competing ways. I am a Web developer, and much as I would like to take credit for driving the success, spread, adoption of technologies like RSS, or Ajax, the Web itself, well, I can't. Admittedly I don't really get Wave. As a user it doesn't make me "want it", and that should be more indicative of its potential for success than whether I can program around it. Or is he trying to push this Pushbutton Web, he keeps on keeping on, as if it would be easier to get excited about--as a user--than Wave? It would seem to me Wave can be every bit as profitable and influential as MS Exchange, even if most of us cannot program our way around it over a weekend. For Google, that should be good enough.
gsaines 17y ago
Interesting article, as a non-programmer I don't have a firm grasp of whether his weekend hacking test is legit or not, but I can say that our startup is already using wave, and when Google lets regular plebes like me on, I'm going in head first. The sheer amount of cruft in email conversions and the maddening quilt of chat clients will have me waving it up as soon as I'm able. That said, he does have a point that incrementalism has been the way technology has been developed and adopted in the last 50 years. The QWERTY keyboard is the most painfully obvious example of this and I can see why he would be arguing that Wave is equivalent to deploying Dvorak keyboards en masse and hoping people opt for the more efficient option. Sure, Dvorak is better, but only for people who start on it, and there's no momentum. I would love to see wave take over the way we communicate, if only to vindicate me and my rants to my family and friends about it.
- modeless 17y ago
  I thought that was a flaw in his article. It should be possible to make a bidirectional gateway between a Wave server and and SMTP, and then incremental adoption becomes easy.
JulianMorrison 17y ago
People aren't looking for a replacement for email... excuuuse me? Explain Twitter, then. Explain IM. Explain Wikis and CMSes and pervasive webmail. Explain Facebook. Collaboration as a space is hugely under-colonized and the existing colonies are small, sickly and vulnerable. They don't reinforce one another. Also: if people can learn to drive a mess like Facebook, they can learn Wave, and in the same way: by getting pulled in by their friends, and following the affordances.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- dan_the_welder 17y ago
  Email has been around since 1965. It may be augmented, but it is never going to be replaced.
Semiapies 17y ago
"There has to be value before everybody has upgraded" Because the web was so very useful to people who hadn't yet gotten browsers.
- evgen 17y ago
  This may be a bit before your time, but "back in the day" we used gopher for our online document (i.e. text file) browsing and distribution. The web/http existed, but the text-mode clients were a bit more difficult to use than the gopher clients (interesting factoid to consider: gopher was introduced _after_ the first http clients, but until Mosaic hit the scene it was the dominant tool for online text/document navigation.) The data, primitive though it may seem to most people now, was already online and in use but was not being accessed via http browsers. When the first GUI web browsers hit the scene they provided a significant improvement over the text-mode gopher/http clients everyone was using so the uptake was very rapid. If the GUI web browsers could not deal with existing gopher protocol and document-space I doubt they would have taken off as fast as they did.
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    It wasn't actually before my time, though that's not important. I'm not sure what your point is wrt Wave clients.
blasdel 17y ago
What happens when you take the one dumbest data format in existence, extend it (I won't even go into that), stuff it into a centralized server, and let people manipulate it concurrently, using a TECO-ish differential editing protocol? Answer: Google Wave. http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-i-dont-get-about-wave-part-1.html http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-i-dont-get-about-wave...

26 points by mshafrir 17y ago

I have a lot of respect for Anil, but I don't understand how he can conclude that Wave cannot be successful because it isn't easy enough for an average Web developer to comprehend, and copy and re-implement in competing ways. I am a Web developer, and much as I would like to take credit for driving the success, spread, adoption of technologies like RSS, or Ajax, the Web itself, well, I can't. Admittedly I don't really get Wave. As a user it doesn't make me "want it", and that should be more indicative of its potential for success than whether I can program around it. Or is he trying to push this Pushbutton Web, he keeps on keeping on, as if it would be easier to get excited about--as a user--than Wave? It would seem to me Wave can be every bit as profitable and influential as MS Exchange, even if most of us cannot program our way around it over a weekend. For Google, that should be good enough.

gsaines 17y ago

Interesting article, as a non-programmer I don't have a firm grasp of whether his weekend hacking test is legit or not, but I can say that our startup is already using wave, and when Google lets regular plebes like me on, I'm going in head first. The sheer amount of cruft in email conversions and the maddening quilt of chat clients will have me waving it up as soon as I'm able. That said, he does have a point that incrementalism has been the way technology has been developed and adopted in the last 50 years. The QWERTY keyboard is the most painfully obvious example of this and I can see why he would be arguing that Wave is equivalent to deploying Dvorak keyboards en masse and hoping people opt for the more efficient option. Sure, Dvorak is better, but only for people who start on it, and there's no momentum. I would love to see wave take over the way we communicate, if only to vindicate me and my rants to my family and friends about it.

modeless 17y ago
I thought that was a flaw in his article. It should be possible to make a bidirectional gateway between a Wave server and and SMTP, and then incremental adoption becomes easy.

JulianMorrison 17y ago

People aren't looking for a replacement for email... excuuuse me? Explain Twitter, then. Explain IM. Explain Wikis and CMSes and pervasive webmail. Explain Facebook. Collaboration as a space is hugely under-colonized and the existing colonies are small, sickly and vulnerable. They don't reinforce one another. Also: if people can learn to drive a mess like Facebook, they can learn Wave, and in the same way: by getting pulled in by their friends, and following the affordances.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
dan_the_welder 17y ago
Email has been around since 1965. It may be augmented, but it is never going to be replaced.

Semiapies 17y ago

"There has to be value before everybody has upgraded" Because the web was so very useful to people who hadn't yet gotten browsers.

evgen 17y ago
This may be a bit before your time, but "back in the day" we used gopher for our online document (i.e. text file) browsing and distribution. The web/http existed, but the text-mode clients were a bit more difficult to use than the gopher clients (interesting factoid to consider: gopher was introduced _after_ the first http clients, but until Mosaic hit the scene it was the dominant tool for online text/document navigation.) The data, primitive though it may seem to most people now, was already online and in use but was not being accessed via http browsers. When the first GUI web browsers hit the scene they provided a significant improvement over the text-mode gopher/http clients everyone was using so the uptake was very rapid. If the GUI web browsers could not deal with existing gopher protocol and document-space I doubt they would have taken off as fast as they did.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  It wasn't actually before my time, though that's not important. I'm not sure what your point is wrt Wave clients.

blasdel 17y ago

What happens when you take the one dumbest data format in existence, extend it (I won't even go into that), stuff it into a centralized server, and let people manipulate it concurrently, using a TECO-ish differential editing protocol? Answer: Google Wave. http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-i-dont-get-about-wave-part-1.html http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-i-dont-get-about-wave...