
Open Sourced Google Wave demo site.  Run from a single server - progga
http://waveinabox.net
======
splitrocket
Kill the live typing. No one wants anyone else to see their edits in real
time. Except perhaps in pair programming. Maybe. Its an antipattern for social
communication. It is also the number two reason my team never used wave. The
number one reason being it was totally divorced from the tools they allready
used to communicate: gtalk, Gmail, irc, etcetera.

I just checked my wave account on the news it was sunsetting. I had four new
unread waves from friends that were at least four months old. How was I
supposed to know they were there? mean, I used Google products daily!

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RobAtticus
1) I like the live typing, though it does sometimes lead to people ignoring
the rest of somebody's message after reading the first sentence. It's good for
collaborating on documents like class notes, to-do lists, and other things.
Maybe it would be nice if you could adjust the level of syncing: every
character, every word, every blip, etc.

2) You could turn on email notifications. I suspect this wasn't done by
default because for people like me who had waves constantly being updated and
changed, the notifications would have flooded my inbox. The integration
definitely could have used some work, but there were ways for you to be
notified.

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adhipg
I thought the email notifications weren't turned on by default was because
Wave was being marketed as the new alternative to email - a system to use to
get rid of emails.

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maaku
One of the big reasons Wave failed at Google was that everyone thought it was
supposed to be a replacement for email and it wasn't--it wasn't meant to be
and it doesn't serve as one.

Wave was meant to replace _a certain way in which we use email_ , which is a
subtle but important difference. It was supposed to replace the emailing of
versions of documents around, or the long email threads to organize simple
things like getting lunch or dinner. These are things where email still to
this day falls flat, and Wave solves completely.

There is ample room for startups to be disruptive using nothing more than the
open source Apache Wave software.

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ak217
I have always been dumbfounded by the fact that Google didn't try integrating
wave into gmail. If they managed to make a back-end to support turning any
email exchange (between people with Google accounts) into a wave at the click
of a button (and without leaving the shell of the gmail interface), I have a
feeling this product would have been a resounding success - the same way gchat
became an instant success when integrated with gmail.

~~~
fraserharris
Whats stopping someone from making a GMail add-on?

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jamesu
To me this is a rather neat solution and in a way how wave should have been
distributed originally.

However i still find it hard to place wave. It feels too rigid to be used as a
chat solution, and too confusing to be used as a messageboard. If anything it
feels like an overly elaborate version of etherpad.

~~~
neilk
I used to work at Google and I recognize it as an attempt to solve problems
that Googlers have.

Imagine you were in a globally distributed organization of over 10,000 geeks.
And all of these geeks are producing documents at warp speed. Based on need it
could be text formats in SVN, Google Docs, or graphics. Everybody gets
hundreds, even thousands of emails a day, and uses IM obsessively.

And there's a strong need for extreme openness with other teams, but also an
occasional need for extreme secrecy.

All these things are archived, but in different places. How do you know what
the latest design is? Well, you can check recent email threads, or your chat
logs, or the wiki, or your product documents, or...

So the theory here is to end the madness of all these competing formats by
making one format that has (potentially) all of their attributes. Your one
format can handle any media type you can represent in HTML. All commentary is
inline, and you can even develop the comments into full blown documents. You
get IM that has history like a wiki, or, wiki collaboration as instant as IM.
And all of this could be subject to access control.

Unfortunately that makes it all very amorphous to the average person.

~~~
AndrewDucker
So did it catch on internally at Google?

I assume not, if they're canning it. But I'd love to know why not, if it
didn't.

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josephg
It was hit and miss at google. Some teams loved it, and some teams hated it.

It was cancelled because the number of external users didn't meet google's
expectations, not because of how it was used internally.

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andybak
It doesn't seem to look or behave much like the Wave I remember. I'll play a
bit more but there seems to quite a lot of functionality missing not to
mention the rather drab appearance.

~~~
smosher
That is mostly because it's a different webclient. I have a server running in
the office. No one is using it because the webclient isn't good enough.

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bane
1) It's Wave

2) It looks different (similar, but a cut down GUI)

3) It's far more performant than the old Wave GUI

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RobAtticus
1) Yep

2) Not a huge fan of this

3) Disagree. It's far more performant than Wave when it launched, but this new
GUI is on par or worse than the current Wave experience. At least for me, I
guess your mileage may vary.

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ChrisArchitect
big fan of wave as a simple collaborative editing system. Live editing is
intense, but works great when hashing out ideas on a document. Have used for
over a year in a small team working on document writing. Have yet to find a
good replacement, so this is interesting. Actually, it's not so much there
isn't a good replacement -- EtherPad is quite good, especially some of the
newer incarnations of it with slicker UI -- but Wave's 'inbox' feature being
able to manage and organize multiple waves under account is the thing keeping
me using it. I don't want to have to bookmark all my EtherPad docs and somehow
track them.

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STenyaK
Most overlooked feature is the ability to interconnect several Wave servers,
the same way you can interconnect several e-mail servers.

That can transform typically suggested alternatives into non-alternatives for
some.

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yaix
Cool, registering now.

What I most like is the old Google style on the login page. Even after
months(?) of using G's new layout, I still dislike it.

BTW: What is a "cancel" button doing on the signup form?

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yaix
Ugh! What did they do to the nice Wave UI? And what is this "Toolbar" doing
there besides cluttering up my small netbook screen? Not good :(

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rch
The old UI is what kept me from using Wave in the first place. I use Opera,
and would need some pretty dramatic incentives to switch (cash works - I'm
willing to use an e-mail client via Firefox at work). Of course, the current
design could be improved upon, but not by simply regressing to the old
version.

Incidentally, browser incompatibility with Opera also stopped me from using
Quora.

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dylangs1030
Great idea, but doesn't Stypi already implement this?

Granted, as a disclaimer, I didn't sign up. I'm making an analysis from what
the homepage says.

Question - in Stypi, live typing can be overwritten by anyone else who is in
the same room. Does this work the same way? Because that is a _huge_ flaw -
but then, I don't think there should be live typing at all.

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mark_l_watson
I run Wave in a Box - easy to build, configure, and admin. I can think of at
least two good use cases for WIAB: a private setup for family use, and a
private setup for a companies' work groups. I don't see much value in _global_
large-scale WIAB deployments. However, it seems well tailored for
collaboration in small groups.

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andrewflnr
My impression from the mailing list is that it doesn't have a working
persistence system. Is that still the case? I'd love to run WiaB for personal
use, but that's a fairly major block for me.

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yurize
No, WIAB has persistence system, even if the implementation is not finalized
and can change.

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andrewflnr
Ah, there it goes. It took me a while to figure out I had to set _all_ the
systems to go to disk.

Edit: I had to kill a unit test to get it to work, testWaveletNotification in
org.waveprotocol.box.server.waveserver.WaveServerTest.

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desigooner
It would be nice if the site listed some demo accounts for people to try the
service before signing up.

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albertsun
Sign-up is super easy. Doesn't require an email address.

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nuttendorfer
Who runs this site?

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STenyaK
A kind guy who is interested in Wave, and regularly contributes patches to
improve the original version open sourced by Google :-)

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true_religion
Where do we find the source code for WaveInABox?

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talbina
<http://incubator.apache.org/wave/source-code.html>

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3lit3H4ck3r
Poor Poor Google Wave...you could have been a contender... Epic Google Fail!
:(

