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Strangely, every one of the links in the downloads page has 404'd for me. I was quite disappointed to see Wave die, since I think it was both incredibly forwar

by jo_ 13y ago

Strangely, every one of the links in the downloads page has 404'd for me. I was quite disappointed to see Wave die, since I think it was both incredibly forward looking on Google's part and, all things considered, immensely useful. I wish it could have become the email replacement it wanted to be. It suffered greatly, though, from higher latency, intermittent bugs, and lack of (very) widespread adoption.

dmayle 13y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Google, though did not at the announcement, nor cancellation, and my views are my own, etc. etc. I managed to get into the beta, and was so excited about the prospect. I think one of the most serious problems at the time was scaling... A conversation with more than about 5 participants was just plain unusable due to how slow it was to update and display. It has been five years, however, and computers have gotten much faster. I tried the test server, and while it has some display issues (flashing boxes during updates, etc.), it is very fast, and quite comfortable to use. I think the only problem at this point is a social one... I can really only imagine two scenarios where this takes off. 1) The non-federation case gets incredibly compelling (e.g. if for internal company collaborated editing) and eventually there's so much use, people start setting up federation. 2) Niche (meaning targeted, not meaning inconsequential) federated use becomes common (e.g. if open source communities were to switch to this en masse in place of listserv), and people get so accustomed to using it that outside organizations start picking it up. I'd love to see that happen, but at this point, I'm not holding my breath.
- odinho 13y ago
  I would not be surprised to find out that many open source communities would love to switch to a better list software than Mailman. It would need to work well for the main list use case of course - so that switching would cost nothing and people could connect to the waves in their own time.
alilown 13y ago
I am one of the committers for Wave. Sorry about the downloads page, you saw the page as prepared for an actual release - I have rolled it back to showing the last release candidate presented on the mailing list. Feel free to ask me any other questions...

by jo_ 13y ago

dmayle 13y ago

Disclaimer: I work for Google, though did not at the announcement, nor cancellation, and my views are my own, etc. etc. I managed to get into the beta, and was so excited about the prospect. I think one of the most serious problems at the time was scaling... A conversation with more than about 5 participants was just plain unusable due to how slow it was to update and display. It has been five years, however, and computers have gotten much faster. I tried the test server, and while it has some display issues (flashing boxes during updates, etc.), it is very fast, and quite comfortable to use. I think the only problem at this point is a social one... I can really only imagine two scenarios where this takes off. 1) The non-federation case gets incredibly compelling (e.g. if for internal company collaborated editing) and eventually there's so much use, people start setting up federation. 2) Niche (meaning targeted, not meaning inconsequential) federated use becomes common (e.g. if open source communities were to switch to this en masse in place of listserv), and people get so accustomed to using it that outside organizations start picking it up. I'd love to see that happen, but at this point, I'm not holding my breath.

odinho 13y ago
I would not be surprised to find out that many open source communities would love to switch to a better list software than Mailman. It would need to work well for the main list use case of course - so that switching would cost nothing and people could connect to the waves in their own time.

alilown 13y ago

I am one of the committers for Wave. Sorry about the downloads page, you saw the page as prepared for an actual release - I have rolled it back to showing the last release candidate presented on the mailing list. Feel free to ask me any other questions...