Comment by Goosey
16 years ago
I, for one, am very dissapointed by this. Even worse I feel somehow partially responsible. I have been a huge proponent of Wave in theory, but even after getting into the early beta I just never found myself /using/ it. I blame this mainly on it lacking the social graph I cared about.. But I thought I could just bide my time and in 5 years it would have taken over.
I am starting to feel like I will have to deal with "MY REPLY IN RED" company chain email threads from hell forever now.
I blame it on never understanding the UI, the way it did things, or its usefulness. It's like a chat you can't delete things from, and everyone sees what you type and all your mistakes? And you can post pictures?
I just don't get it.
As with an unfortunately large number of Google things, Wave was an absolutely stunning work of engineering art with a merely passable UI. The engineers obviously drove the development process, with the designers not being invited in until it was too late.
But this is where there exists, not to mince words, a monumentally huge opportunity. As Google begins to open-source more of Wave, there's room for a more UX-focused team to really bring out the tech's potential.
I'm not talking a new skin or even a new home layout; I'm talking a new software product that uses the real-time collaboration system in an ingenious new way. Google solved the engineering problem; now someone needs to solve the interaction design problem.
There's an option on every blip in every wave that says "Delete This".
You can even delete other people's blips!
People can only see your mistakes if they're in the wave and looking while you type (ie, "Chat Mode"). If it's used like email (that is, checking it a few times per day), they see only the snapshots of what happened when the "Done" button was pressed.
You can add pictures. You can embed YouTube videos. You can have links.
Honestly, yeah, it takes some getting used to, but once you're used to it, it's no more complicated than Outlook. Personally, I think using Outlook to set up a meeting notice is harder than using Wave.
The incredibly powerful, federated, open protocol/platform was what excited us geeks.
The client always sucked and was, at the most generous, a tech demo of things the protocol/platform was capable of.
And the problem is that the client is what Google marketed.
The client should have been nothing but a tech demo. The potential power of Wave was in that it could move totally arbitrary data between independently federated servers, and had support for robots that could manipulate that data in arbitrary ways.
It could have been a Facebook/Twitter/Flicker/Whatever killer, but Google got tied down with working on the bloated UI rather than building out the platform and letting others handle the frontend of it.
Not to mention its crazy amount of javascript usage-Wave brought most of the browsers I tried it on to a crawl on my laptop. I really like the concept, but for many reasons never liked the execution.