
Retiring Wave - sprt
https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-wave.git;a=commit;h=e4cb87ffce3b7c65832ffefae22835c64724adbd
======
dvt
Google Wave was really the spark that inspired me to "build a startup." With
that said, it was a mess. It was a schizophrenic product that couldn't decide
whether it was a developer platform or replacement for email. It had
"everything" in the worst of ways.

It really was a Frankenstein; I distinctly remember threaded conversations
that wouldn't collapse, weird and inconsistent results when contributing to
the same "wave," and an interface that was honestly pretty awful (not to
mention cramped on the screens of yesteryear). There's more: Google wanted to
create a _protocol_ but the tech was invite-only (???), it wanted to replace
_email_ but no one else adopted it. The whole thing made no sense.

But after watching the Google I/O talk, I was enthralled. I thought to myself
"I bet I could build that!" And really, even if Google Wave failed horribly,
it did contribute to the "real-time" web we all enjoy today.

~~~
Spooky23
Google Wave could have been a killer product, but for a key mistake that is a
bat light for failure — it was positioned as a replacement for email.

Email is the ultimate killer app and ultimate whipping boy.

~~~
jacobolus
The “key mistake” was that all of the technical parts were poorly architected
and horribly buggy, and then they tried to scale up the user base using a
massive amount of marketing hype before their product or infrastructure could
handle the load. As a result all the hyped-up customers were confronted by a
terrible user experience, felt burned, and left. Without a completely
different technical implementation from top to bottom it was bound to fail
irrespective of how their marketing team “positioned” it.

The UI was a GWT app written in Java and compiled to JavaScript which suffered
from inexplicable UI hangs and all kinds of weird bugs in every corner case
(it would e.g. get stuck in states requiring a page reload to fix).

The “communication protocol” was opaque binary blobs of GWT stuff wrapped up
in Jabber/XMPP (XML) but without really using most Jabber features. Basically
not a designed protocol at all, just the most ad-hoc thing slapped together
overnight, with XMPP used as marketing (because that’s “open”).

The server was some closed source thing only hosted by Google.

The original marketing claim was that this was all “open” and “federated” but
it was not possible to run a third-party server, and it was not possible to
implement a different front-end since the whole thing was coupled tightly to
the GWT front end they had.

The big innovation was supposed to be that some fancy “operational
transformation” magic would merge different users’ diffs so that everything
could be edited collaboratively in real time without conflicts and with
minimal bandwidth, but in practice what that meant was they just sent the full
content of every message on every keystroke (where “full content” here
includes a massive amount of protocol overhead wrapping the messages) – maybe
the fancy diff research stuff was intended for some future update that never
made it.

The front end really started falling apart horribly (slowing down to the point
of being unusable) under any kind of larger group, because it hadn’t been
architected to keep up with the load. From what I remember it mostly worked
with about 2–10 people communicating in a group, and became entirely unusable
with 50+ in a group.

Disclaimer: I was never a Wave expert, just some guy who tried to read their
docs and play with their technology and ended up laughing and sadly shaking my
head all the way through, and it’s been a decade now. Some of my recollection
could be slightly off.

~~~
bambax
Maybe the tech was bad, but the marketing was worse. I never even tried Wave,
so didn’t experience the bugs and bad UI, because I could never understand
what it was or what family of problems it was trying to address.

~~~
speedplane
Agreed. In the modern app world, it's not enough to have great or useful tech,
it has to be branded and communicated properly, not exactly Google's strong
points.

------
pedalpete
Being based in Sydney, I occasionally meet people who worked on Wave.

They should be commended for ushering in a new vision for what the web could
do. So much tech in there that is now considered standard.

As a product, it didn't fit a real purpose and was trying to do to much, but
it should be remembered for opening our eyes to what was possible.

Tonight I'll raise a drink to all those who committed time to Wave and showed
us the way (and I'm in Bondi, if anyone is around and wants to meet-up).

------
grzm
For the curious, I think this might be the first submission related to Wave on
HN (May 28, 2009; 169 points, 99 comments):

"Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630427)

Top comment starts out

> _" This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of
> communication."_

------
tux3
While the Apache Foundation hosts a lot of great projects, it also looks to me
like a place where big projects go to die.

I'm thinking of the whole Apache Open-Office fiasco, among other things.
Looking at their list of projects sorted by number of committers[0], event at
the top I don't get the idea that most of those have a lot of momentum.

Do I just have a completely wrong impression? I'm curious if there's something
to learn from this.

[0]:
[https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number](https://projects.apache.org/projects.html?number)

~~~
scrollaway
Yeah, no, your impression is correct. Apache is and always has been a bit of
an open source graveyard.

There's counter-examples but even they have me worried. Airflow, originating
from AirBNB, is now Apache Airflow: [https://github.com/apache/incubator-
airflow](https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow) \-- And I've been super
hesitant to throw weight at it because of that, even though it looks actively
maintained.

~~~
tedmiston
Airflow is extremely active — check the mailing list, Gitter chat, or even
GitHub contributions. My company, Astronomer, also provides a hosted version
of Airflow [1] if SaaS is more you're thing.

[1]: [https://www.astronomer.io/airflow](https://www.astronomer.io/airflow)

~~~
tedmiston
%s/you're/your

/me _shudders_

------
lsiebert
People who aren't aware, this was the continuation of Google Wave, the real
time collaboration tool that was, for a while, built into gmail, and then
taken over by apache.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave)

~~~
deefour
> tool that was, for a while, built into gmail

Do you have a source for this? I don't remember it ever being part of Gmail.

~~~
V-eHGsd_
it wasn't.

when it was release, it was actually introduced (internally) as something
like, "what would email look like if were invented today?"

~~~
taeric
Not just internally. I remember the massive hype around this being the "next
email." I excitedly got as many of my friends onto there as I could.

I can't really pinpoint any one thing. There really was a mass of mistakes
that all lead to this imploding heavily. I seem to recall that the fate of GWT
was intertwined heavily with it. Very heavyweight widgets to support the
general idea of massive collaboration in real time.

I suspect the killer is that "real time" portion. People love to talk about
that. Few actually want it. (Fewer still need it.)

~~~
TheSmiddy
Pretty sure the biggest mistake was the same as Google Plus': the invite
system that artificially hampers growth.

Since these platforms need to capture an entire network of people at the same
time if there is something preventing someone from bringing all their
friends/collegues in at the same time then it is doomed to fail.

~~~
wlesieutre
Yeah, this worked fine for Gmail's early years because you can talk to people
on other email systems. But Google tried to apply the same system to both Wave
and Plus where the exclusivity made them comparatively useless.

I think they've learned the lesson by now at least, since their latest
communication systems (Duo and Allo) had open signups. If those two fail it'll
be because they were pointless (from a user perspective) entries into a
crowded market of established players who already had network effect lock-in
working them.

------
Analemma_
I've said this before, but while I know for a lot of people Reader is the axed
Google product they miss most, for me it will always be Wave. I know a lot of
people didn't get it, and I can't blame them, but I was part of a six-person
software team using Wave for a brief project and, despite its faults, it was
the greatest communication tool any of us had ever used, and remains so to
this day. Slack/Discord/Teams/Trello/whatever still don't come close.

(Which makes it all the more appropriately ironic that it had a bunch of
Firefly references and easter eggs inside. It's like they knew.)

Anyway, I'm pouring one out for Wave tonight.

~~~
edo
What made Google wave so great to you? (Even better than
slack/Discord/Trello)?

~~~
Analemma_
It was the complete package, encompassing all of:

\- That communication could be both synchronous (like chat) and asynchronous
(like email) and you could use whichever worked best for you at the time. You
could even switch in the middle of a thread- maybe it stared out asynchronous,
but then both people were online and decided to have a conversation.

\- Threads were a better way of breaking up topics than channels

\- The ability to post a document and then have people comment on it let you
basically incorporate Google Docs-style document revision into your chat
application, but like the other comment says, the comments were a first-class
citizen of the interface, rather than bubbles that are totally out of context

\- I like real-time chats, where you could see the individual characters the
other person was typing. This, admittedly, is an aesthetic preference I know
not everyone shares.

------
stablemap
I learned about this from the recent popular article, “How not to replace
email”:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452)

------
fosco
I used Wave along with a group of friends when it first came out often. I also
setup WIAB which was almost usable but never was as 'smooth' as the google
hosted Wave.

what was smooth you ask? I never had issues, I even played people in some of
the games they had to great enjoyment (was never able to get this on my WIAB)

I joined Apache Wave with great excitement when it first was accepted and yet
disappointed in my inability to contribute. I am not a software engineer but I
tried multiple times with different IDs and the response was (paraphrasing) go
check this site and pick something to work on.

as the years went on multiple attempts were made to retire Apache Wave with
last minute efforts by multiple people trying to keep it going. I knew this
day would come and it is still sad to see.

I am not sure if there was a better 'onboarding' for noobs available if I
would have done much but I think many open source projects may fair better if
their barrier to entry for them were clearer

------
urda

      This is the way Wave ends,
      Not with a bang but a whimper.
    

I remember seeing how incredible Wave was at the time, such a shame to see it
end like this.

But that's how the world goes sometimes.

------
sitkack

        git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-android.git
        git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave-docs.git
        git clone http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator-wave.git
    

Does it even build?

Wave is one of those things that everyone raves about but has never used.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBzuuWZPaXc)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ)

------
dreamfactored
Wave was highly ambitious, but under resourced with a horribly botched
rollout. It could have killed Twitter, Facebook, and preempted Slack, or
better shifted them to a common open source framework which would have allowed
a thousand twitters and fbs to bloom and interact. Real shame that OStatus
couldn't get traction.

------
rlglwx
I wonder if Wave and Reader are hanging out in heaven somewhere.

~~~
martin-adams
If heaven is in the clouds, then I don't think they are hanging out in the
cloud anymore.

~~~
heroprotagonist
Since they came from there originally, I doubt they'd end up back at Google
Cloud. Maybe AWS? I just hope they don't get sent to, well, the bad place..
Azure..

------
agentultra
Wave was absolutely the best way to play play-by-post RPGs online.

It was really cool stuff.

------
gwbas1c
I remember doing a deep dive on Wave, specifically because I was interested in
trying to figure out what I could build on top of the protocol.

Fundamentally, there was no way to persist the data. The open-source version
was little more than a demo.

At that point I realized it was mostly hot air, said so at the wave meet up I
was going to, and then stopped paying attention.

------
neals
I've got different kind of annecdote that I need to share now that the thing
got retired.

I missed the entire wave thing. Don't know how or why. But I just missed it.
And I never ever miss these kind of things. My job at the time was consulting
and advising startups and I just looked silly when "wave" came up in a meeting
and I had no idea what it was.

I remember the CEO saying "You didn't see the video of the developers cheering
with their laptops above their head?" ... which I did not.

It's one of those things that comes back to haunt me when I can't sleep. You
know, one of those awkward social interactions that nobody but yourself
remembers.

So good bye Wave. Bane of my existence.

------
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16404452)

------
ramon
I remember the headlines about Google reinventing email with Wave, the world
without emails.. I guess it will never die, long live the emails :p.

~~~
jaakl
For the below-25 crowd email is quite dead : they only read it when asked via
proper chat or “social” channels, and send one as last resort. For the older
gen email is near dead due to spam. In few years it will be new telefax.

~~~
stonogo
People have been claiming that email is dying since the mid-90s. And here we
are, with the only messaging protocol that's available to everyone on the
internet: email.

~~~
ramon
I believe you can take space from email like these messenger apps for the
mobile phone but to say that's dead or going to die I think it's a mistake to
make this type of statement. Try to enroll in these social media networks
without an email, they require you to have an email, try to enrol anywhere
they ask you for an email confirmation. Email is not dying it's just changing
the purpose.

------
upbeatlinux
A single and solemn wave goodbye.

------
toddmorey
Will never forget the launch event:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ)

~~~
gmueckl
I remember it for the amount of demos that went wrong. It takes courage or
desperation to demonstrate a project in that state.

Also, somewhere in there is a quote by the project lead that I still remember
today, something like this: "There aren't many companies that can afford to
mess up a demo. [pause] We're not one of them." The last part sounded like a
panicked attempt to backpedal on what he just said.

------
onion-soup
Why don't apache update web interface. It's just not fun anymore, I get all
retrograde feel to it, but in 2018 it's plain annoyingly ugly and hard to
understand what's going on on the page.

------
sidcool
Google Wave didn't fall, it inspired me and many more for ambitious thinking.
Its tech was adopted by other products. It changed something intangible and
inherent to tech.

------
dcuthbertson
Didn't this start out as EtherPad? I remember that being an eye-catching demo
of a way to collaborate on documents over the web. How/where did that go
wrong?

------
a_imho
Probably I was not the target audience but I never got the hype with Wave.

------
wbillingsley
They made the mistake of thinking the cool demo was the finished product.

------
frakturfreund
Can't stop the signal, Mal.

------
tambourine_man
Interesting tech that no one wanted

~~~
askvictor
Interesting tech where the roll-out was botched.

My organisation desperately wanted to use this, but since invites were limited
and rolled out slowly, we couldn't, since you can't have half of the org using
a collaboration tool like this. So the initial buzz about this was killed
quickly when no-one could use it for any serious work, then once it was
generally available, people had lost interest. Google has a habit of botching
roll-outs like this.

Google Docs in its current form has a lot of features that were in Wave, and
people seem to like and use that.

