

Google Wave Now Open to Everyone - lukeqsee
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/google-wave-open/

======
adamhowell
At the dayjob we have 2 geographically separate teams of about 4 people each
working together. We tried to use Wave last year and it was a cluster.

Even if it's improved 10x, you're going to be hard pressed to get anyone from
my company to try it again anytime soon.

If you're going to launch early and iterate you've got to try harder to keep
the buzz respectable.

Harder for a company like Google, obviously, but with the state Wave was in
last year they could have done without the advanced PR push and conference
launch.

~~~
Bossman
Sure, but they said it was a developer preview. They never suggested you use
it for general or work purposes yet.

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lukeqsee
I am a member of a small startup. We use it for all of our brainstorming. So
far, it has only improved. We don't even think about using something else.

Maybe we are the exception. But it has helped us an incredible amount.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
As an initial cut, I'm thinking shared to-do list (with multimedia, wiki, and
real-time features) is kick-ass enough to use it.

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ElliotH
The invite only thing was a really bad idea. If it was meant to be a developer
preview it definitely wasn't widely percieved that way. If it was an attempt
to build up a following in the way gmail did then it was a total flop. People
are bored of invites now.

~~~
MartinCron
I think it's just a classic network effect problem. Invites worked for gmail
because you could still continue to interact with everyone who had an email
address.

With Wave, you not only had to be invited, but you could only communicate with
the small set of other people who had been invited. I used it exactly once and
gave up on it.

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motters
I still think that Wave was nice as an idea, but that the implementation of it
was poor. Unfortunately many people have completely dismissed it due to the
slow and buggy user experience, but with more effort put into making a fast
and ergonomic UI design it could stage a comeback.

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ryandvm
Hmm. I'm an Apps Premier customer and I don't see it in the control panel
yet...

[http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-
lab...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-labs-
available-today-to.html)

~~~
lukeqsee
Probably hasn't gotten rolled to your particular server yet.

~~~
Adaptive
You need to add it as a service from the list of labs products (add more
services from Google Apps dashboard for premier account admins). Took a couple
minutes after the announcement to start showing up here.

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awa
There's already a frontpage news regarding this... Why the dupes?

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Tawheed
I'm the founder of Braintrust, I wonder what I need to do now to differentiate
from Wave...

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adamilardi
Did wave just not have critical mass or was it just not well received by the
users?

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danfitch
Totally unrelated... Where can I sell the domain name wave.io .... Thoughts?

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InclinedPlane
I think the basic failing of wave was that it only solved the easy problems
and largely ducked the big problems. No amount of technological wizardry and
demo-friendly glitz and glam can make up for failing to meet a need.

The problems that Google Wave tackled were immediacy of communication and
inclusiveness. But these are not problems worth solving, between email, IM,
wikis, even twitter, nobody has much of a problem with immediacy or
inclusiveness. It takes a click of a button to forward an email thread. _The_
problem is information overload, increasing the signal to noise ratio of
communication, providing proper contextualization and summarization of
information, wave didn't tackle that problem.

------
snewe
Blog spam: [http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-
available...](http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-available-
for-everyone.html)

~~~
natrius
The TechCrunch post provides more information than that link. If you just
wanted to help people find the source so they could judge for themselves, say
something like "source" instead of "blog spam".

------
DanielBMarkham
I am very interested in Wave as a freeform tool for distributed team
collaboration.

But I am very cautious about trying one little thing, seeing if it works, then
adapting. Hell if I would come up with some big Wave solution for the team to
use and expect it to work correctly.

More worryingly is putting internal team data on Google servers. Can't we have
a local sever copy to play around with? (I asked the Google Product Owner for
this in an email and got the typical bupkis response) I thought we were all
just one big open family around here. If I could play around keeping the data
local, I could develop and evolve systems that I could then share with the
rest of the world. If not -- that's going to hamper adoption, at least in this
area.

I am very optimistic about Wave long-term. Short-term is another matter
completely.

~~~
btilly
My guess is that Wave is tied to Google's production infrastructure. So nobody
can give you a local copy of wave without also giving you a local copy of
everything from our storage technologies to our job scheduling infrastructure.

That ain't going to happen.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
LOL I hope not! It's probably a little too much for my quad-core.

I was thinking I read somewhere that there was a reference implementation of
the XMPP server spec in Java somewhere at Google. I'm not sure if that's the
version that the production team is using. Like I said, nobody ever got back
to me. A simple explanation would have been great.

As it is, I'm conflicted because of this. The spec is complex enough to make a
server implementation extremely non-trivial. In addition, plug-ins on Google
may not work on other servers.

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