51–60 of 246 posts
So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers.
I would blame the launch for the failure of this one.
Wave may have been an idea whose time is yet to come. When I played around with the beta my brother and I agreed that it was too slow to be useful. That was the last time I touched it. This was mostly because I was working in a company where getting people to document was enough of a difficulty without introducing new software. If I'd worked somewhere with a bunch of early-adopters, it would have been a fantastic too…
Slow? I can only assume people who said this weren't using the latest FF or Chrome. I've never considered Wave slow at all.
It was a catch-22. You needed people to collaborate with for it to catch on, but you needed to wait a long time to invite people.
The problem with useradoption of wave largely came from their invite-only strategy. It's a social tool that requires my friends to have an account for it to be of any use. If they don't have invites and can't join it's useless. It's amazing that Google didn't see this.
Woot! I got an invite.
Dang, none of my friends did.
Well... when can I get them one.
Forget about this. Meh. Back to email, IM, IRC and Twitter.
There were some good things about it, and Hopefully we will now see some real contenders rise up to tackle the Future of Communication(tm).
Preferrably not from Google. Sorry.
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They blew it by making it confusing to understand what you'd use it for, making it confusing to know which of your friends had accounts (no integration with gmail!) and confusing to know when someone sent you a new "wave" (no integration with gmail!).
...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know. They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day, but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added. And this way works with all email, not just gmail! There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much integration do you want, exactly?
Hard to edit your preferences, hard to get other people into it, hard to get reminders set up. If they could relaunch and make all those things better, Wave would be stellar. I almost wish they'd break backwards compatibility for people who loved the interface because it just went in the wrong direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They blew it by making it confusing to understand what you'd use it for, making it confusing to know which of your friends had accounts (no integration with gmail!) and confusing to know when someone sent you a new "wave" (no integration with gmail!).
...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know. They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day, but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added. And this way works with all email, not just gmail! There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much integration do you want, exactly?
The technology might be great but the launch and execution were really, really weird.
Now I'll have to move all of that state somewhere else.
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I still miss etherpad. I use some of the alternatives, but it's not the same :( alternatives: http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html
Google docs is very similar to what etherpad used to be. All be it far less user friendly you can watch others edit and update in real time.
Sorry, but this is Google's fault. Right when all us geeks were HUNGRY to start trying out this system, only a handful of us received invites, and when I did, it took WEEKS or longer for anyone else I worked with to get an invite IF they ever did. So, Wave was useless to me to begin with and by the time it was available to everyone, I wasn't interested and neither were any of my co-workers. I would blame the launch f…