
A Pissed-Off Tutorial for Google Wave (2010) [video] - DonHopkins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug
======
DonHopkins
I love the collaborative features of Google Docs and Google Sheets.

The thing that's missing from "Google Docs" is a decent collaborative outliner
called "Google Trees", that does to "NLS" and "Frontier" what "Google Sheets"
did to "VisiCalc" and "Excel".

And I don't mean "Google Wave", I mean a truly collaborative extensible
visually programmable spreadsheet-like outliner with expressions, constraints,
absolute and relative xpath-like addressing, and scripting like Google Sheets,
but with a tree instead of a grid. That eats drinks scripts and shits JSON and
XML or any other structured data.

Of course you should be able to link and embed outlines in spreadsheets, and
spreadsheets in outlines, but "Google Maps" should also be invited to the
party (along with its plus-one, "Google Mind Maps").

More on Douglass Engelbart's NLS and Dave Winer's Frontier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20425970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20425970)

~~~
mbreese
I guess one issue these tools have had historically (collaborative outliers,
and Wave along with it) -- was what are they actually for?

Google Docs is for writing documents, letters, school essays, etc... The
output is a document of some kind.

Sheets is for performing calculations, modeling numbers, etc... the output is
normally some calculated value (or values). The benefit of this over just
writing a single function/program is that you can potentially have more
insight into the way that calculation is performed, but in general, the output
is some calculation.

But outliners are different... what is the result? The NLS demo describes a
shopping list. Which is nice, and you can slice and dice the data around, but
fundamentally, it's a shopping list. And that function can be achieved with
Google Docs for 80% of the functionality. Sure, it doesn't make moving bananas
and carrots into a 'produce' category easy, but with copy and paste, it's a
pretty well solved problem.

But the basic outliner functionality you're describing -- what's it actually
used _for_? What's the payload that you're organizing?

Even Dave Winer's tools were used not for making lists, but for making
websites. There was a "payload" present. You were managing data for websites
(at least, as far as I can understand it, I didn't have a Mac at the time, so
never used most of the UserLand programs).

So, would you say the "point" for these tools is making other tools? For
example, using Frontier to manage websites? Or Wave to make a chatting tool?

In my mind, this was the problem that Wave came across... it wasn't easy to
describe what it did in a simple way. It wasn't email. It wasn't chat. It
wasn't collaborative writing. It was the backend that made that all work. It
was incredibly ambitious, and that made it difficult to get people to use.

If it was "just" chatting -- I think that would have made a huge difference.
Users don't care that you're using OT to write messages on the fly... they
just want to be able to chat with friends or colleagues.

So, what is the killer application for a collaborative outliner? Why would I
need one? I'm genuinely curious as to your thoughts, as you've clearly spent a
lot of time thinking about this.

~~~
DonHopkins
One thing an outliner lets you do that you can't do with something like Wave
or a tree structured discussion group is to arbitrarily rearrange the tree.

You're right, you can represent tree-structured outlines in Word or Docs (or
JSON in Excel or Sheets as I described here [1]), but it's clumsy and not well
supported by the user interface.

[1] Representing and Editing JSON with Spreadsheets:
[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/representing-and-editing-
json...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/representing-and-editing-json-with-
spreadsheets-8f8832db5239)

Where Frontier really shines is in its user interface and feature set, which
makes navigating and creating and editing outlines very easy and efficient.

Frontier's main use was (tree structured) content management and scripting,
and making websites is a popular application of that. It was extremely useful
for making tools, and like Emacs, its power came from its extensibility.

Its pre-web predecessors [2] were ThinkTank (which started on the Apple ][
with a keyboard based interface) and MORE (which added a mouse-based drag-and-
drop interface, that made it much easier to use without spoiling the ease of
use of the keyboard interface, and also formatted graphics for making charts
and slide shows).

[2] MORE (application):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_(application)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MORE_\(application\))

Beyond obvious stuff like content management, blogging, and scripting, I think
there are many other killer applications of programmable outliners (just as
emacs and spreadsheets have many applications), some old hat, and others
undiscovered!

I wrote some more [3] about Dave Winer's work on Frontier, and linked to some
screencasts he made that show how he uses it to organize his thoughts (about
the history of outliners, in this case, which is beautifully self-
referential).

I think the most important point that comes through in Dave's demos is that
the operating system and user interface shell should support generic outlining
and scripting at a very basic, built-in, ubiquitous level. But I believe
Windows, OS/X, iOS and Android have a hell of a long way to go!

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672970)

Dave Winer's second outliner screencast:

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

Dave Winer's the many lives of Frontier screencast:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlN-L88KScw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlN-L88KScw)

Dave Winer on The Open Web, Blogging, Podcasting and More:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLX415mHfX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLX415mHfX0)

>UserLand's first product release of April 1989 was UserLand IPC, a developer
tool for interprocess communication that was intended to evolve into a cross-
platform RPC tool. In January 1992 UserLand released version 1.0 of Frontier,
a scripting environment for the Macintosh which included an object database
and a scripting language named UserTalk. At the time of its original release,
Frontier was the only system-level scripting environment for the Macintosh,
but Apple was working on its own scripting language, AppleScript, and started
bundling it with the MacOS 7 system software. As a consequence, most Macintosh
scripting work came to be done in the less powerful, but free, scripting
language provided by Apple.

>UserLand responded to Applescript by re-positioning Frontier as a Web
development environment, distributing the software free of charge with the
"Aretha" release of May 1995. In late 1996, Frontier 4.1 had become "an
integrated development environment that lends itself to the creation and
maintenance of Web sites and management of Web pages sans much busywork," and
by the time Frontier 4.2 was released in January 1997, the software was firmly
established in the realms of website management and CGI scripting, allowing
users to "taste the power of large-scale database publishing with free
software."

------
fergie
To be fair, Google did a really bad job of explaining what Wave _actually was_
when it was launched, which was not helped by the naughties tech-tradition of
being "invitation only".

Had they simply said it was a cool chat application and given everybody access
then it may well have caught on.

~~~
abtinf
I got an invite to wave, but no one else I knew was on it, so it had no value
at all to me. It didn’t have that attribute that PG ascribed to reddit: the
ability to be valuable with a small number of users.

They also didn’t have explain how it was different, if at all, from similar
chat systems of the past, like PowWow or ICQ chat. Those were both see-typing-
in-real-time-systems that were, IMHO, not at all useful in business.

~~~
chetanbhasin
Perhaps you joined wave before I did, but IIRC by the time I got an invitation
each invited user had 5 inivitations to share among their friends/peers.

So forming a group wouldn't have been a problem because you could invite your
friends who could invite their friends.

~~~
abtinf
This sounds familiar. I don’t remember if my friends/colleagues didn’t want to
join or what. So it might have been my fault. Still, the system seemed useless
as single user.

------
paulgerhardt
Sure Wave gets a lot of hate but our team enjoyed it a lot.

After it was shutdown we migrated to Hipchat, then Slack, and finally Keybase.

It was positioned as an 'email killer' \- and as validated by Slack I think
that was pretty clever and spot on marketing.

------
abtinf
The last sentence of the video is “google wave, because... because... fuck you
_exasperated sigh_ ”.

I burst out laughing at that and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Laughter is an act of destruction, an emotional declaration that this thing is
not part of reality and wiping it out of existence.

A lot of what tech companies do feels like a fuck you. Killing Google Reader
without explanation, disabling the full capabilities of ad blockers, removing
headphone jacks, letting third parties exploit our social data, hiding the
full scope of data collection behind a vague “we will use your data to improve
the service”, and so much more.

The relationship between tech companies and customers wasn’t nearly so
adversarial 20-30 years ago. In the 1980s, it felt like Microsoft was really
on a mission to bring computers to everyone. Sony was creating tech to allow
us to listen to our existing music collections. By the late 90s, Apple’s big
idea was basically “candy color are pretty, they will make our users happy, so
let’s make good colorful cases”.

And up to the mid 00s, google really seemed like a champion and advocate for
internet users. It felt like (though in hindsight it was an illusion) that
when policy decisions were being made, we could trust Google to be our voice
when we weren’t in the room.

“Because fuck you” would not have been at all funny back then.

------
mark_l_watson
I loved Google Wave, was pissed when it was terminated, happy again when I
installed and played with the slightly derivative Apace Wave project, then was
unhappy again when Apache Wave was retired January 2018. In retrospect, I wish
I had volunteered some effort on Apache Wave - lesson is if you like something
contribute.

~~~
nwsm
>I wish I had volunteered some effort on Apache Wave

The point of the video is that products don't fail for lack of developers

------
dade_
I've worked on UC for most of my career and loved Google Wave. Conceptually
they were right, but it required imagination on the part of the user and there
was no bridge to the past. Instead of addressing this, Google killed off the
product, and then all of their collab products over and over again. I've lost
track and gave up on them now, and I think you really have to love Google to
even bother with their UC stuff now, but Wave was a joy while it lasted.

~~~
mbreese
Does UC stand for Unified Communications here?

~~~
dade_
yeah

------
UI_at_80x24
I had such high hopes for Wave. I thought it was an idealized union between
IRC and NewsGroups. Real-time interaction, plus threaded conversations, and
For The Real WIN: no more top-posting.

Web-forums could finally be re-invented.

I also saw it as a great platform for things like 'Remote D&D', and a "rich
media" that was hinted at in the 90's.

------
johnmarcus
I was in grad school when Wave hit. I was dumb founded when they cancelled it.
I've heard only a very few people whom tried it say they didn't think it was
awesome, which leads me to believe they didn't kill it because of a lack of
viability at all - they killed it because it competed with other strategic
initiatives, imho. This would have been the pre-slack killer easily. Looking
at it's features (in conversation threads, drag and drop photos, adding folks
to conversations, etc) one almost thinks it was the inspiration for slack
even.

Anyway, Wave wasn't killed because it wasn't viewed as viable, it was killed
for politics, which is probably why it's creators and engineers were so pissed
off. Shame.

~~~
rak00n
I think that video was made by a comedian, not actual engineers.

------
rabidrat
They didn't even give Wave 2 years??

~~~
Jtsummers
Nope, and it was invite only. By the time my friends were getting access, they
were shutting it down. We would've loved it for remote gaming, in particular.

~~~
mekane8
My D&D group used it for collaboration, mainly debating how bad 4th edition
was :-) We liked it, but it didn't break anyone's heart when it was shut down.

~~~
WorldMaker
I worked on a (non-D&D, quite niche/indie) RPG managing bot in Wave. The
ability to work gameplay into a document draft, with the GM and player
directly collaborating on revisions and bot-based rolls/mechanics directly
inline, had a potential to be fantastic for certain types of story-heavy,
written narrative-focused RPG playing.

I keep debating revisiting something like it for Discord/Slack today, but the
style would still be quite different from that "threaded, collaborative Word
document with revision tracking" feel of Wave.

------
sunseb
It's actually creepy that other contacts can watch you live typing!

~~~
forgotmypw
This is feature that is/was present in other applications, such as ICQ and
talkd.

~~~
cl0ckt0wer
And it's awful. Typing stuff makes me think about it, and I change it
constantly. Then you end up having people change thoughts mid sentence when
they see what another person has started typing in response to what they
haven't even finished yet. It's like having everyone talk at once.

~~~
josephg
Apparently it wasn’t everyone cup of tea but personally I loved it. It makes
for a different sort of conversation - more live than the asynchronous back
and forth messaging of most apps today. You can often reply to someone while
they’re typing their message - and if you guess right they can stop typing and
move on to read / reply to your response in turn.

I’m not sure how well it works in groups but 1-on-1 it feels more like a phone
call than a messaging app; except it’s over text, it seamlessly transitions to
offline asynchronous messaging if someone isn’t there and you can both “talk”
(type) at the same time.

~~~
Debugreality
Just make it an option duh!

~~~
elcomet
But it was an option wasn't it?

You could write in draft mode I think, and people couldn't see the result

------
DonHopkins
I've made a timeline with the video of the original world-shattering
announcement and demo of Wave at Google IO, and some of the Google Wave
related submissions to HN. How pretentious and audacious it seems in
retrospect! It’s hard to appreciate all the snarky jokes in the Pissed Off
Wave Tutorial, if you don’t remember how, um, over-confident they were when
they announced Wave.

Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009 (May 28, 2009)

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

Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.
(May 28, 2009)

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

[https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-
amb...](https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-
it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/)

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today (May 29,
2009)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630470)

[http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-wave-what-might-
emai...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-wave-what-might-email-l.html)

What problems does Google Wave solve? (Oct 15, 2009)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883116)

[https://danieltenner.com/2009/10/15/0012-google-wave-
html/](https://danieltenner.com/2009/10/15/0012-google-wave-html/)

Google Kills Wave (Aug 4, 2010)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575892)

[https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-
wav...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html)

What makes Slack so successful whereas Google Wave wasn't? (Oct 10, 2015)

[https://www.quora.com/What-makes-Slack-so-successful-
whereas...](https://www.quora.com/What-makes-Slack-so-successful-whereas-
Google-Wave-wasnt?share=1)

What in the Hell Was Google Wave Trying to Be Anyway? – Gizmodo UK (May 27,
2019)

[https://gizmodo.com/what-in-the-hell-was-google-wave-
trying-...](https://gizmodo.com/what-in-the-hell-was-google-wave-trying-to-be-
anyway-1835038967)

On a lighter note, the Game Helpin’ Squad (who made the Wave tutorial) also
has several spot-on parodies of various video game genres!

“Time Travel Understander” is a parody of Braid:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI)

“Severe Running” parodies those Flash running games:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrUWFo2D1Xs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrUWFo2D1Xs)

And “World Quester 2” is the ultimate D&D RPG parody:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns)

"Pretend Gas Station" is a SimCity parody:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMeWas4kXM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMeWas4kXM)

“Solitare Party” parodies all those card games:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBbMb3X2R8A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBbMb3X2R8A)

~~~
jdougan
I dunno, I liked Wave. I thought of it as NLS as implemented by a modern
software dev who had only heard a verbal description.

~~~
DonHopkins
I fell for the hype myself, got terribly excited about it, and wrote up a
bunch of ideas in a Wave discussion about how to use it for collaborating in
multi player SimCity. But it just got so slow and unresponsive the bigger a
wave grew, and it was like drinking from a tsunami, so that nobody could keep
up with what everybody else was typing.

~~~
jdougan
Part of the problem is that it had none of the filtering tools of NLS, and the
linking/sharing/addressing tools had a terrible UI. It could have used some
kind of changelog/journal as well.

I wish someone could have shown them The Mother of All Demos, if they could
make it do mostly that it could have been amazing, but they were probably
pretty heavy into drinking their own flavor-aid at that point.

------
apo
Wave was a perfect example of leading with technology rather than the problem
to be solved. Nothing I ever saw or read about it spoke to a specific user
problem. Sure, Google has problems in spades that can be solved by Wave
(engaging users, crushing upstart social media companies to name two). But in
terms of eliminating something costing large numbers of computer time or
money, Wave brought absolutely nothing to the table.

I remember seeing the hyperventilating response to Wave by tech people at the
time and wondering what they were actually experiencing. Because what I saw
was yet another Google initiative that would be shut down and forgotten fairly
quickly.

~~~
cromwellian
Neither Google Reader nor Talk had been shutdown until 2012, so the whole
storyline of Google constantly shutting down stuff hadn’t started yet, this
seems like a false recollection.

~~~
WorldMaker
Though Reader, Talk, Buzz, and Wave were all killed in quick succession and to
arguably the exact same forces (Google+), for very similar reasons (walling
the garden, "reducing redundancy"). That shutdown wave was brutal and nearly
simultaneous enough that of course it defines the narrative of Google
constantly shutting down stuff.

------
basicallydan
This reminds me of You Suck at Photoshop

------
iamzozo
It wasn't a very bad idea, the implementation was. I still miss a tool,
somewehere between email and chat. Basecamp has something like this, where you
have topics (threads), members (recepients) and a simple message sending like
a forum, without the downsides of a chat.

------
Quenz
I'm surprised no one has tried to revive the Wave idea in some way. Whether by
forking the original project, or attempting a remake.

~~~
dimator
For better or worse, I think Slack and its cohorts are what people accept as
the "next" email. They are wave's successors, spiritually at least.

~~~
Quenz
Is Slack really that much more feature-rich than IRC?

I'd really love to see something similar to Wave's "real-time" instant
messaging in one of these newer apps.

~~~
michaelt
Slack adds persistence, shared sessions across multiple PCs and phones,
search, accounts with logins, messages to offline users, image and file
hosting, and works even if you're heavily firewalled.

i.e. the stuff a veteran IRC user cobbles together from an always-on server
running irssi+screen, nickserv, saved identify and ghost commands, a chatbot
and some personal webspace.

Still, I agree Slack is far more the child of IRC than the child of Wave. IIRC
Wave had full rich text, a threading-like mechanic, and you could edit other
people's messages, and documents rather than channels.

------
crb002
So Google wave was Slack before Slack??

~~~
jjakque
I consider Google Wave closer to reddit for real time chat.

~~~
RobertDeNiro
That, sounds a lot like slack

~~~
WorldMaker
Less like IRC and more like using a Google Docs document or Office 365 Word
document collaboration for a live chat, using different paragraph formatting
for threading. (Some of the Wave collaboration tech wound up in Docs.)

------
coderheed
Can't wait for the Google alternative to Slack....

~~~
bronson
Hangouts was just killed. It'll be a few years before they try again.

~~~
emmanueloga_
[https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/](https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/)
?

~~~
s_dev
Not sure why you are being downvoted -- it's a fair suggestion but worth
pointing out it's for enterprise/business clients only.

~~~
lbenes
Hangouts Chat

* Can't communicate with anyone without GSuite

* Can't talk with our customers who use GSuite on another domain.

* Can't communicated with the "old" Hangouts, so it's utterly useless.

Another failure from Google. Whatever management structure incentivizes this
crap needs to be fixed, if they ever want to expand out of their current
domains.

Google had a winner with Hangouts. Instead they left it to die, while they
moved on to Duo, Allo, and now Hangouts Chat. Meanwhile slack stepped in and
took what should have bee their market.

------
burtonator
Google needs to own its failures. It can't ship anything new or innovative.
The only things that they've been good at is acquiring things that other
people have invented (Youtube, Android, etc).

Buzz? dead. Wave? dead. Plus? dead. Allo? dead.

It's so bad now that even features and innovation on their existing platforms
are dying.

Youtube? Everything they do with Youtube is a screwup. Android? Good luck
getting an app in the app store without Google accidentally killing your
company.

Google Cloud? Sorry... everyone's on AWS or Azure.

Search? Nope... Elasticsearch now dominates that space. Think about it.
Elasticsearch now beats Google at what Google should have dominated - search.

~~~
dcolkitt
Chrome, Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Golang, AngularJS, Prometheus, gRPC, Protocol
Buffers, Vitess, Spanner, Flutter, Bazel, GoogleTest, Istio, V8, AlphaZero

Seems like Google innovates and builds a ton. It's the whole dealing with
customers part that they don't like.

~~~
aesthethiccs
Angularjs + Angular doesn't belong in that list.

how they handled that transition gave react a huge footing, splintered the
framework community, also have made it very hard to search for their own
framework.

~~~
andrewstuart
Wasn't the bigger problem that it was hard and heavyweight and felt like you
needed to be a Java developing software engineer to make anything substantial
with AngularJS?

