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Google Kills Wave

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Re: Google Kills Wave

#101

Post by spydez »

brown9-2 wrote: post #57
spydez wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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?

Did they launch with these features? I distinctly recall thinking "how do I know who's on this thing?" and repeatedly going back to the site in hope that someone else I knew finally used the site and sent me a message. The technology might be great but the launch and execution were really, really weird.

They did not.

Well, they did originally have "who's online" functionality, but they had to yank it when someone found an exploit, and it took them forever to get it working again.

The "email me" option was much later - around the time they went from "Preview" to "Beta", I think. And as thorax said in his reply to me, Google flubbed the UI/usability of the preferences.

As far as "who has a Wave account", it's the same scheme as email. You get a Wave address; you're responsible for letting all your friends know what your address is (e.g., mine's in my HN profile). Probably could've been improved by hooking into Facebook/Twitter/etc. and spamming out your Wave address to all your friends...

Re: Google Kills Wave

#102

Post by drusenko »

tc wrote: post #12

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook? Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email. Maybe Google just hoped W…

We were unable to use Wave because it never worked for hosted Google accounts. That sucks.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#103

Post by amackera »

Zak wrote: post #60
dpcan wrote: post #51

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…

I think that Google saw that artificial scarcity worked well with gmail and thought the same would be true for Wave. The problem, of course is that a Gmail account didn't depend on anyone else having one to be useful. Wave, in theory was an open standard as well, but in practice, Google was and is the only provider.

I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver.

It's pure conjecture of course!

Re: Google Kills Wave

#104

Post by amackera »

Zak wrote: post #60
dpcan wrote: post #51

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…

I think that Google saw that artificial scarcity worked well with gmail and thought the same would be true for Wave. The problem, of course is that a Gmail account didn't depend on anyone else having one to be useful. Wave, in theory was an open standard as well, but in practice, Google was and is the only provider.

I think more a more likely explanation is that they lacked the infrastructure to roll it out effectively. If that's the case then they should have just waited until they could deliver.

It's pure conjecture of course!

Re: Google Kills Wave

#105

Post by akshayubhat »

alextgordon wrote: post #42

It failed because it was completely invisible. Facebook spams your inbox. They make sure you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc). With wave, it's silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I'm only just finding out now . What kind of a commun…

Google Wave was completely invsible after you signed up, I Completely agree with your post. Another important point is that there was no way to share your wave address like your email address. Which always felt a bit odd.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#106

Post by callahad »

pgbovine wrote: post #74
BobbyH wrote: post #4

I feel bad for the Etherpad guys, who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977015

who as I understand it, sold AppJet to Google to work on Google Wave somehow i don't think they need your sympathies ... they probably got a decent amount of money from their acquisition, so they're probably not crying right now ;)

Can money replace seeing your vision for realtime collaboration die twice? I'm sure they're not hurting, but if they were building the technology because they believed it could transform the way we interact with each other for the better... Well, that still has to sting.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#107

Post by sabj »

orangecat wrote: post #92
thorax wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use it exclusively for our meeting status reports, etc. It's just a wicked solid tool for meetings and out-of-band document collaboration. I'd love to see it continue. I'm sad it didn't get the adoption they wanted, but I also wonder what they expected when they didn't even really try to integrate it with GMail. If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave, I think they'd have bette…

If they could go back and time, exclude Buzz from Gmail but instead add Wave, I think they'd have better success for it. No question. Wave should have been an alternate view of your Gmail account. Instead it was a completely distinct environment that you had to manage separately, which most people aren't going to be bothered to do.

Definitely. I would invite friends, they'd be excited, but no one would check it and thus no one would use it, since there was no way to integrate it with anything non-wave.

I'm fairly confused about what 'success' is supposed to have meant here.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#108

Post by edanm »

zavulon wrote: post #29

Kudos to Google for understanding this and cutting their losses (relatively) early. I remember reading about their effort to cut down on useless products and focusing on the core search/AdWords/Gmail/etc, this is the effect of that. I really hope Buzz is next.

Disagree entirely. Mainly cause I'm a very happy Wave user, and I think it absolutely has a place. It's just not the place Google envisioned at first (it's also not the same product they pitched at first).

This is, imo, a failure to Pivot. They have a working tool that, by their own admission, has many users. Why not capitalize on this fact, and start selling the product to the people it is useful for? I'm guessing it's just because Google likes huge, spectacular products over smaller, but still quite successful alternatives.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#110

Post by nzjames »

drusenko wrote: post #102
tc wrote: post #12

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. Did Google believe that this was going to succeed as a consumer product, à la Facebook? Wave, as it exists today, is a great tool for corporate communications. With the right interfaces, integration, and extensions it could definitely displace Exchange and Lotus Notes. Eventually, as a protocol, it had the potential to transcend email. Maybe Google just hoped W…

We were unable to use Wave because it never worked for hosted Google accounts. That sucks.

Do you mean Google Apps for your domain? It does work. Quite well in fact.
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