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The crucial tactical error the Wave project made was not integrating with existing systems like email and chat. This forced people to either jump fully onboard

The crucial tactical error the Wave project made was not integrating with existing systems like email and chat. This forced people to either jump fully onboard with Wave or ignore it. Predictably, when faced with an ultimatum like that, everyone just kept using email (and IRC and wikis). If the Wave team had instead spent a fraction of their development efforts on seamless integration with email, IRC, and other relevant protocols, even at the cost of some simplification of Wave itself, the project might very well have been a success and more advanced features could have been added later once adoption picked up.

otoburb 13y ago
This is specific, believable and (most importantly) falsifiable advice. Hopefully Apache Wave developers will consider this seriously and, after implementing email & chat integration, review post-implementation adoption rates
- StefanKarpinski 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the Wave project already spent all its credibility. When something is hyped that hard and fails that spectacularly, it doesn't tend to get a second chance.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    AI and VR say otherwise. :-)
    - vxNsr 13y ago
      AI and VR will always be cool (at least until they're done right, then they'll be just as boring as an iphone); email replacement? not so much.
  - woah 13y ago
    99% of people don't even remember Wave anymore, so I'd say they kind of have a blank slate.
    - wisty 13y ago
      I've read dozens of articles on Wave, and have never known what it is.
- alilown 13y ago
  There has been some work on integrating Wave with email (initially as a way of using Wave as some mailing-list replacement tool). See WAVE-70 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WAVE-70 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WAVE-70). Chat integration is arguably simpler - and Wave already understands XMPP (for federation), so it would be possibly to map Jabber -> Wave (say). How you would want to map from Wave -> Jabber is more complicated (as any blip at any point in the tree, can be edited at any time, by anybody)...
  - skyneta 13y ago
    Here's what the email-wave integration looks like: Editing existing conversations: http://imgur.com/a/GtGY6 http://imgur.com/a/GtGY6 Inline replying: http://imgur.com/a/Dkefp http://imgur.com/a/Dkefp
jaredmcateer 13y ago
I think the invite only beta hurt it more. I got in from a random redditor, but no one else I knew was in it, so I played with it for 5 minutes and then forgot about it.
- simonh 13y ago
  Spot on. When GMail was still in Beta, and you didn't know anybody else on it, at least you could still send and receive email with the rest of the world.
  - rbrcurtis 13y ago
    also gmail gave you 5 or more invites so you could invite your friends. Wave should have done the same. It would have allowed small social networks of people to play with it together.
    - Jtsummers 13y ago
      As I recall, I had several invites when I got in. The problem was that those invites went into a queue, they were a lie. With gmail (at least when I got to it), my invites were sent out immediately and the recipient could start using gmail that day. With Wave, my invites were queued and when Google felt it was time they'd send it out. This could be days or, in at least one case for me, weeks later. By the time I got enough people in to give it a shot, only myself and the most recent were interested in trying it.
      - emn13 13y ago
        Well, even though many if not most of my friends ended up with an invite (and we made active use of Wave), that didn't make it a success: the client was just too slow and laggy. It basically only worked in chrome, and poorly there. Large threads were simply unusable. I don't think the closed beta-ness of wave really hurt it. If wave had actually worked well, then maybe there'd have been a point where it was worth opening up to many users - but wave never got there, so it's a moot point.
VikingCoder 13y ago
From my standpoint, I would have used Wave in a heartbeat in my work environment, but there was literally no way to prevent any user in a Wave from adding Public whenever they felt like it. That meant, we couldn't use it at work. And of discussion.
- e1ven 13y ago
  I'm curious if you'll be giving it a try now that it's self hosted ( and behind your firewall ) or if its window of opportunity has passed for you.
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    I'm still game. Now I get to fight the corporate demons for hardware to run it on. It'd help if its authentication tied in with our system too.
DannyBee 13y ago
This was not a crucial tactical error, it was a deliberate gamble. Disruptive communication is hard, and they lost this gamble. That does not make it an error :) (Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc, all are things int he "must fully jump onboard or ignore it", and they've done fine, because they are incremental improvements that are less disruptive).

otoburb 13y ago

This is specific, believable and (most importantly) falsifiable advice. Hopefully Apache Wave developers will consider this seriously and, after implementing email & chat integration, review post-implementation adoption rates

StefanKarpinski 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that the Wave project already spent all its credibility. When something is hyped that hard and fails that spectacularly, it doesn't tend to get a second chance.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  AI and VR say otherwise. :-)
  - vxNsr 13y ago
    AI and VR will always be cool (at least until they're done right, then they'll be just as boring as an iphone); email replacement? not so much.
- woah 13y ago
  99% of people don't even remember Wave anymore, so I'd say they kind of have a blank slate.
  - wisty 13y ago
    I've read dozens of articles on Wave, and have never known what it is.
alilown 13y ago
There has been some work on integrating Wave with email (initially as a way of using Wave as some mailing-list replacement tool). See WAVE-70 (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WAVE-70 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WAVE-70). Chat integration is arguably simpler - and Wave already understands XMPP (for federation), so it would be possibly to map Jabber -> Wave (say). How you would want to map from Wave -> Jabber is more complicated (as any blip at any point in the tree, can be edited at any time, by anybody)...
- skyneta 13y ago
  Here's what the email-wave integration looks like: Editing existing conversations: http://imgur.com/a/GtGY6 http://imgur.com/a/GtGY6 Inline replying: http://imgur.com/a/Dkefp http://imgur.com/a/Dkefp

jaredmcateer 13y ago

I think the invite only beta hurt it more. I got in from a random redditor, but no one else I knew was in it, so I played with it for 5 minutes and then forgot about it.

simonh 13y ago
Spot on. When GMail was still in Beta, and you didn't know anybody else on it, at least you could still send and receive email with the rest of the world.
- rbrcurtis 13y ago
  also gmail gave you 5 or more invites so you could invite your friends. Wave should have done the same. It would have allowed small social networks of people to play with it together.
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    As I recall, I had several invites when I got in. The problem was that those invites went into a queue, they were a lie. With gmail (at least when I got to it), my invites were sent out immediately and the recipient could start using gmail that day. With Wave, my invites were queued and when Google felt it was time they'd send it out. This could be days or, in at least one case for me, weeks later. By the time I got enough people in to give it a shot, only myself and the most recent were interested in trying it.
    - emn13 13y ago
      Well, even though many if not most of my friends ended up with an invite (and we made active use of Wave), that didn't make it a success: the client was just too slow and laggy. It basically only worked in chrome, and poorly there. Large threads were simply unusable. I don't think the closed beta-ness of wave really hurt it. If wave had actually worked well, then maybe there'd have been a point where it was worth opening up to many users - but wave never got there, so it's a moot point.

VikingCoder 13y ago

From my standpoint, I would have used Wave in a heartbeat in my work environment, but there was literally no way to prevent any user in a Wave from adding Public whenever they felt like it. That meant, we couldn't use it at work. And of discussion.

e1ven 13y ago
I'm curious if you'll be giving it a try now that it's self hosted ( and behind your firewall ) or if its window of opportunity has passed for you.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  I'm still game. Now I get to fight the corporate demons for hardware to run it on. It'd help if its authentication tied in with our system too.

DannyBee 13y ago

This was not a crucial tactical error, it was a deliberate gamble. Disruptive communication is hard, and they lost this gamble. That does not make it an error :) (Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc, all are things int he "must fully jump onboard or ignore it", and they've done fine, because they are incremental improvements that are less disruptive).