Re:Apache Wave
by StefanKarpinski on Friday April 04, 2014 @12:45PM
(#7532620)
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.
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Re:Apache Wave
by jaredmcateer on Friday April 04, 2014 @01:14PM
(#7532828)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is very true for a collaboration platform. I wanted to use this for school to collaborate with the groups there. If 1 person of the group did not have Wave, we couldn't use it.
Yup. My main experience with it was "Looks nice. No one here, though."
Sounds like G+
In my experience, Google+ is a great place to find passionate communities of small niches. Tabletop role-playing games, for example, have thoroughly adopted G+.
Google+ falls down for mainstream users, though, which is where the "no one here" perception comes from.
If memory serves, Google Wave was the same way: great for the people who used it, but the value wasn't perceived by the majority.
Re:Apache Wave
by jaredmcateer on Saturday April 05, 2014 @11:18AM
(#7537293)
It's also great if you treat it like an intelligent twitter and follow science and tech people. Also party mode on events is killer.
It was Googles first attempt to create their own social network. In the end, it crashed and burned just as hard as Google Buzz did.
Re:Apache Wave
by cromwellian on Friday April 04, 2014 @04:53PM
(#7534303)
Wave was not an attempt to create a social network, it was an attempt to create a next-gen replacement for Email.
Re:Apache Wave
by VikingCoder on Friday April 04, 2014 @01:31PM
(#7532947)
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.
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.
Re:Apache Wave
by VikingCoder on Friday April 04, 2014 @03:05PM
(#7533583)
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.
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
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).
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)...
Here's what the email-wave integration looks like:
Editing existing conversations: http://imgur.com/a/GtGY6 Inline replying: http://imgur.com/a/Dkefp
Re:Apache Wave
by StefanKarpinski on Friday April 04, 2014 @12:57PM
(#7532713)
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.
Re:Apache Wave
by waterlesscloud on Friday April 04, 2014 @03:10PM
(#7533625)
AI and VR say otherwise. :-)
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.
99% of people don't even remember Wave anymore, so I'd say they kind of have a blank slate.
I've read dozens of articles on Wave, and have never known what it is.
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).