

Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google Wave caught on? - 3rd3


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27182818284
I was an early adopter and I actually saw quite a few non-techies in my
circles want invites right away, because it was seen as the next Gmail.

Except it delivered none of the "wow!" that Gmail did. It was slow, didn't
really seem to have an immediate purpose (where as when Gmail came out, most
people I knew had hit some sorta inbox-size limit before and knew that pain
point)

and so on.

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BruceIV
I played with it some, and besides the fact that only a few geeks were using
it, the UI was terribly frustrating: it was slow, and had just enough "desktop
app" functionality to put you in that mindset, but not enough to actually
behave like you expected (kind of an uncanny valley sort of thing)

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carlosdp
Well besides the fact it was closed down, Google was trying to "replace
email". That was just too big of a step to attempt in one go with drastic
changes in interaction.

That coupled with the fact you could only communicate with other Wave users
made wide-spread adoption impossible.

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VikingCoder
Your argument is flawed.

Facebook users can only communicate with other Facebook users, but wide-spread
adoption happened.

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mrmondo
I don't even know what it is, I think that's probably at least part of the
problem for people.

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projectramo
This. i signed up for it too. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with it
(between Chat and Email, what was it?)

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_august
It kind of did, but in another form. Google took their tech and what they
learned and implemented live, multi-person documents in Google docs.

Maybe the idea for wave to replace email was flawed, but it works well for
specific documents and folders like in Google drive.

~~~
curiousphil
I am pretty sure shared docs with Google came quite a while before Wave, no?

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nicolasd
I used and liked it, but imo it was more an experiment for google and they had
no real use-case/focus.

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VikingCoder
Searching for Public Waves on various topics was amazing, and it was a feature
that not even hardcore Google fans knew about.

It was like Tweeting hashtags combined with Google Docs. It was very
immediate, and you'd see people showing up to discuss in realtime.

