
Dear Lars, next time don’t stop doing that weird drug  - dwynings
http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/01/dear-lars-next-time-dont-stop-doing-that-weird-drug/
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lukifer
Google Wave is an excellent example of why it's so important to manage
expectations. If it was released as being a nifty tool for early adopters, and
given a few years to iterate based on user feedback, it could have lived up to
its charge of becoming the new standard for collaboration and communication.
Instead, it left people disappointed by promising everything before it was
done cooking.

I'm still hopeful that the codebase will be worked on by the OSS community,
and/or some enterprising hackers will come along and implement the core
concept more effectively.

~~~
samdk
It's interesting that you mention wanting someone to implement the "core
concept" more effectively, because I think that one of the biggest problems
with Wave was that it didn't have a well-defined core concept. It was billed
as the Next Big Thing, the replacement for email and instant messaging and
everything else, but it wasn't particularly good at doing any of them, and
nobody had any real idea of what it was supposed to be doing. "Do everything
well" is a pretty problematic core concept.

I do think that something can be a subset of Wave's functionality and still be
useful (I use Flowdock[0] every day, and wrote GitChat[1] for Rails Rumble,
and both are essentially web-based persistent chat applications). However, I'm
unsure if Wave's codebase is the best place to start. It's very hard to apply
a new (much narrower) focus on top of an existing project than it is to start
from scratch.

[0] <http://flowdock.com/> (Persistent chat with searchable tags, uploads, and
some other useful features.)

[1] <http://gitchat.com/> (Flowdock-inspired persistent chat for open-source
GitHub projects. Originally developed for Rails Rumble, and we haven't had a
chance to work on it since, so it's still very buggy. It will definitely be
stabilized/improved at some point though.)

~~~
noibl
The core concept is: a robust method for automatically merging concurrent
changes to a published resource by collaborating users in real-time (OT). It's
true that other key components of Wave were seen as essential to its success
(in particular the federation protocol and the bots API) but those were still
designed in support of the core use-case: real-time collaborative editing.

There was a ridiculous amount of hype about the project and all the things it
might replace but that doesn't change the fact that its development was and is
focused on solving an actual problem using real technological innovation.

~~~
samdk
This is actually exactly what I meant by a lack of focus. That may be the
focus of the underlying codebase (and that may be where the innovation is),
but the UI was just really a glorified chat room. It wasn't particularly
suited to actually _doing_ real-time editing.

~~~
noibl
The UI from Google was little more than proof-of-concept. The ability to sync
arbitrary data, not just chat text, on the fly is what will make Wave useful
if it ever sees wide adoption. That really _is_ the core concept and not chat,
as many seem to think. It's not accurate to say that there's no core concept.

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metra
_"On Facebook they don’t have spam. Why not? Because, unlike Google Wave, only
people who I’ve friended AND who friended me back can send me messages. That’s
how Wave should have worked."_

I guess that depends on your definition of spam. To me, reminders every minute
of what an acquaintance is doing certainly IS spam.

~~~
Devilboy
At least you can remove the annoying friends from your Facebook if you want.

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fraserharris
When I could get my business partners to use Wave, we found it to be a very
good brainstorming / organization tool. I still think there is an opportunity
for someone to build a product on its open-source foundations:
<http://code.google.com/p/wave-protocol/>

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reinhardt
"Everything we do needs to be shared. Everything."

Congrats, Zuckerberg would be proud of you. (pukes)

