
Apache Wave on Sandstorm.io - srpeck
https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-20-apache-wave.html
======
ChikkaChiChi
Wave was a great idea that was completely misunderstood. Unfortunately, it
also seemed to have been misunderstood by the people who designed it.

Wave was supposed to be a collaborative replacement for email built on the
then-exciting XMPP protocol. It was marketed poorly, misunderstood, and
eventually shitcanned because Google had no idea what to do with it.

~~~
astrange
What was exciting about the XMPP protocol itself? Were people back then just
excited to be in the presence of vast amounts of XML?

I mean, that'd explain a lot.

I felt like Wave very closely approached something useful in this space, but
almost anything in communications is interesting when you have another person
to talk to, and very little is interesting without one. That makes it very
hard to judge if the platform is helping or not.

~~~
ianstallings
There was no IM standard at the time. Every provider had their own standard
and most of the IM software was not open sourced. Jabber changed the playing
field.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Changed it how? Google has since tossed XMPP integration for their whole
closed platform Hangouts thing, MSN's old halfway-API-able thing has been
integrated into Skype, which is entirely closed, I believe. AIM and YIM are
all but dead, at this point.

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brainburn
I think where Google messed up was requiring invites for Wave.

Pretty hard to get people on board when they first have to scrounge to get an
invite to something they do not quite understand. Network effect--;

It could have been so big and awesome. I'm sure after a while the speed issues
would have been ironed out.

~~~
takeda
Second issue they had was scalability of the service and I suspect the invite
system was probably implemented to give them time to scale it.

On some large subjects with many people contributing the service was
practically unusable.

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mark_l_watson
I liked Wave as a Google product, and I like Apache Wave self hosted. I have
tried getting friends and family interested in using a self hosted instance,
but not much interest. They like Facebook, go figure :-)

That said, a self hosted Apache Wave to small teams seems like a good tool for
collaboration.

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yalogin
I did not understand it then and am still confused.

What is this supposed to be - a new workflow? a new UI? a new paradigm to do
something? Every discussion or webpage I see about this talks about mail. Is
it applicable to any other application?

~~~
vanderZwan
From what I recall, a few of my friends actively used it back in the day at
work, and they claimed it was fantastic for remote collaborations.

~~~
viraptor
I used it for 2 projects at uni and enjoyed it a lot. Then it slowed down so
much it was unbearable and we couldn't really discover how far the
improvements go. Maybe it would get a better response from general public if
the modern browsers / js engines were available then.

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avdempsey
Wave wasn't just laggy, it was frequently down. All sorts of apps with scaling
issues can work better with the Sandstorm model. The whole Sandstorm idea
really started clicking for me when I read one of their earlier posts on
motivations: [https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-
ap...](https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-
federated-hosting.html)

That made me a backer.

~~~
ende42
Good read, thanks. Is it possible to run an own, modified version of an open
source app on sandstorm.io? As a non-techie user? Like - say - a small
modification of Wordpress?

~~~
dwrensha
Yep. You could fork our WordPress port[1], repackage it as your own app, and
run it on any Sandstorm server.

[1] [https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-
sandstorm](https://github.com/dwrensha/wordpress-sandstorm)

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wiradikusuma
People keep mentioning how Wave would start lagging as you use it more. Is
this still a known issue or has it been fixed?

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blueskin_
Wave still seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.

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hexagonsun
neat animated logo

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swah
I think you guys are going too fast :)

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applecore
Wave was a promising idea, but it looks like Slack[1] has become the de facto
platform for team communication.

[1]: [https://slack.com](https://slack.com)

~~~
spankalee
Never head of Slack. Their site doesn't even describe what it is.

~~~
tapoxi
It's a HipChat clone.

~~~
__P
Except it's 10x better than hipchat in almost every way. Price,
funcationality, interop, apis, permissions, etc...

