Google Wave

Pete · Wed 02 Dec, 2009 14.42

I have 14. So there.

However I suspect many will come to the same conclusion I did and give up on it after a day.

Pete · Thu 05 Aug, 2010 00.46

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/04 ... wave_dead/

Google is closing down development of its new-age communications platform Wave due to lack of interest.

The Chocolate Factory said Wednesday that it's stopping development of Wave as a stand-alone product because of a lack of user adoption.

The Wave site is being put on life support until the end of the year, with the technology extended for use in "other" Google projects. Google has promised to deliver tools that let early adopters extract their data and content from Wave implementations.

So clearly everyone else thought it was a crock of shit too

cdd · Thu 05 Aug, 2010 02.15

In other words, rip off Etherpad, add lots of registration and subscription and convergence nonsense, and then act all surprised when nobody is interested...

Well not reallly since google docs is the same proposition but the central point is valid

Sput · Thu 05 Aug, 2010 08.44

You're wrong, cdd: They bought the company that makes Etherpad

lukey · Thu 05 Aug, 2010 18.30

I think Wave was just really badly positioned. It's another case of the individual technologies being not particularly exciting, but collectively there might have been a compelling platform there. It's analogous to Twitter - the power is not in what happens on Twitter.com - but as a (sort of) open platform to build a variety of apps on. The problem, is by most accounts the Wave APIs were pretty grim to work with. I remember at the time Google were trying to compare it to SMTP, except all their 'marketing' efforts ended up going on the (frankly irrelevant) frontend of the Wave site itself. *That* would have been fine if that site was made remotely compelling. Instead, Google forgot to come up with any use cases that made it at all clear how anyone was meant to use it (in anything more than a vague COLLABORATE, YOU SHITS sense). I come back to Twitter. It'd be as if Twitter was rolling along for 3 years without being given the room for its culture and memes to develop, where every tweet is still along the lines of 'going for a poo brb lol'.

The mention of the backend stuff living on in some form strikes me as a realisation from Google that they may well have had a good platform that they can probably repurpose in a stealthy way very soon.