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Google Kills Wave

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Re: Google Kills Wave

#231

Post by motters »

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 was also a lone waver for a long time. I think the same happened to many users, so the way in which it was launched should have been different. However, I don't think that the failure can be blamed entirely upon the launch strategy. Performance of wave was really poor, and as the conversations became longer the refresh rate really dragged.

I think a lesson here for Google is that when they initially launch a product to a small number of users, they should really try to encourage the early adopters and make sure that they don't end up stranded with no other users to talk to, because those early adopters will become evangelists if they're well treated. Perhaps they should have just kept Wave quiet and then launched it a year later to everyone.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#232

Post by motters »

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.

Probably one of their mistakes was not to have interoperability between Wave and Gmail at an early stage. I think they ruled out doing that early on.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#234

Post by abraham »

axod wrote: post #137
abraham wrote: post #65

If Wave was launched with the Gmail integration of Buzz I think we would be discussing a completely different outcome.

Is buzz doing any better?

I believe Buzz has double digit millions of active users. I can not find the source currently though.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#235

Post by twopoint718 »

agentultra wrote: post #83

I liked it, just didn't like the interface. I was an early adopter and very excited about the protocol. When I was looking at it, there wasn't enough client specification to bother working on an alternative client (ie: emacs). Hopefully that has changed (or will change before Google drops support). I found it really useful for collaborating with multiple parties. It allowed us to work on a document and keep the conve…

This is what I thought. I wasn't going to pay attention until they specified the client protocol (Wave needs an Emacs mode). Most of the complaints I've heard about Wave stemmed from its AJAX-heavy user interface. How many people had new enough browsers to even use Wave?

Re: Google Kills Wave

#237

Post by derekr »

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…

Could you please rephrase your comment.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#238

Post by jyothi »

Building community needs evangelizing it, building brand ambassadors out of your users and most important "listening to your users closely". One needs to set up a mode of direct conversation. This comes naturally when you start small like twitter or youtube.

When you have few million user base ready to consume whatever you advertise on gmail or search - you are trying to buy out of old rewards. Worse users are non-forgiving and expectations are much high.

So it sounds like a big company problem. But it really isn't. Yahoo does it really well with yahoo answers. There is even today a high response rate from yahoo team through "Ask Mike"

Google should probably consider small teams within. Provide all the support through tech and hardware but let the teams launch these products on their own and grow the userbase naturally focusing on service too along with the product.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#239

Post by js4all »

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

I agree and more sadly Wave in the form of Etherpad would have succeeded. A more de-centralized architecture with many Etherpad servers would have been perfect. Company related traffic wouldn't have left the LAN and of-site traffic would have been routed via federation protocol to other servers.

Re: Google Kills Wave

#240

Post by shoesfullofdust »

jpablo wrote: post #113
wmf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad you could never run it inside the firewall AFAIK.

Novell is working in something you could like: http://www.novell.com/products/pulse/

One wonders how the folks on the Novell Pulse team are feeling about this announcement. And how many hours they may have spent on "interoperability with Google Wave through the federation protocol".

http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-unveils-real-time-co...

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