Re:Open sourcing the Firebase SDKs
by kybernetikos on Thursday May 18, 2017 @03:29AM
(#14365439)
We used it on my team at work and it was fantastic for design discussions and the like. Incidentally, while slack, dropbox paper etc all target this space somewhat successfully, I think there's still a lot that could be done here.
Getting a huge user base for wave would have been easy - simply incorporate its features gradually into gmail, and make it so that if you're in a threaded conversation with someone with a wave server you have all the extra features, otherwise it's just normal email.
This is in fact what I assumed google were up to, since they were huge on the email front and they described wave as the future of email.
I had Wave access (Gadgets were my primary interest in the platform) - With no disrespect to the team working on it, Wave was a muddled, slightly schizophrenic app that solved problems that didn't exist by trying to merge a whole bunch of stuff that already did.
Getting other people to use it was hampered by the problem of succinctly explaining to them what it did, and the (for a consumer product, at least) unintuitive UI.
That said, failed apps are the most interesting apps. As a dev it had a huge influence on my approach to problems and the merits doing one thing really well.