Comment by alextgordon
16 years ago
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 communication tool is that? It's like they're selling a phone that can't ring.
The other UI and social issues were important but weren't fatal. If Google had actually notified users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer.
Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.
You're right: completely invisible. Wave would have been so cool if Google had plopped it right on top of Gmail, like Gchat and Buzz. Our Wave-enabled contacts would have gotten their messages as waves, seamlessly, and non-Wave contacts would have continued to receive regular emails. Wave collaboration could have been supported with notification emails to non-Wave contacts, like "we're editing this on Wave, so click here {...} to join in." Best of all, every Gmail user would have been upgraded to Wave... I thought that was supposed to be the plan! What a waste.
I'd like to ask one of the top Googlers just what they were thinking by positioning Wave as a replacement to email, chat, and online collaboration and NOT integrating those services into Wave itself. IPv4 to IPv6, hello! No migration plan means no migration. Email support means being able to use Wave and email at the same time; not having to choose.
Still trying to wrap my head around this, but at this point I'm not sure what's worse: a) Planning, developing, implementing, marketing, and supporting Wave as communications platform without regards to Gmail, Gchat, and Buzz or b) Axing Wave before trying to add Gmail, Gchat, and Buzz support
I think there wouldn't have been a negative response to dropping Wave into GMail either. Wave was this cool new thing, and arguably an extension of mail, it would have made sense. COmpare that to Buzz where it was obvious they were just trying to compete against Twitter and leverage their existing user base.
Similarly, there should have been a push to build more Wave clients. The google default one kinda sucked. I personally would have just like a Wave client built into Thunderbird that would keep me up-to-date on my half dozen mailboxes AND my Wave accounts at the same time.
The sad thing here is that Google did the polite thing, and turned off email notifications by default. It actually took some searching to figure out how to turn it on.
Contrast this with Buzz, where they dropped it right in the middle of your inbox. Quite the opposite strategy.
I suppose the solution I favor is to ask the user if they want notifications when they sign up. Or at the very least making it very obvious how to turn on notifications if you want them.
The notification messages were also not very well thought out, it was often confusing what had changed, requiring you to log in to Wave just to read a new message that could have easily been read via email.
The polite thing to me is keeping it all in one place so I don't have to go multiple places looking for updates.
The polite thing usually doesn't make good business sense. Ask Bill Gates.
They should have added a small but visible "new blip" icon to Gmail. That would have gone a long way, and nobody would have complained about spamming.
I bet the Wave and GMail teams have some animosity between them, and neither wants to help the other, even though officially they're "playing for the same team".
From what I gather, Google deliberately uses silo management (or whatever it is called). An engineer's performance reviews are based almost entirely on tangible work (lines of code) on his assigned product. Work on intangibles (mentoring, marketing strategy), or on tangibles outside the project (cross-product integration, future proofing) count against him.
Ex-Googler Piaw Na has an interesting post about this: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers....
You pose an interesting problem. It was (eventually) supposed to replace email, so I'm assuming it was envisioned everyone would check wave every day, or have it constantly open, etc.
Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..
The point is that Wave is never going to replace email over the night, so in the beginning it's very useful to get an email whenever something interesting happens. As you receive more and more emails, you realize that it's a lot easier to just keep Wave constantly open and you'll turn off email notification.
But before that point Wave does not deserve its own tab, and because of the lack of email notifications it's very easy to simply forget about checking Wave.
Except it hadn't replaced email, so would the better alternative been to have Wave spam your email with updates? Seems kind of hypocritical..
The better answer would have had settings available (defaulted to notifying) so users could choose when and how to be notified.
It was (eventually) supposed to replace email
While it may have been able to do this if handled correctly, nobody was going to check waves recently when invites where superexclusive and you could only communicate with random strangers you found on the ars-wave, which you also found entirely by random trying to see if it could be used for anything.
Really. It was solid technology and very neat engineering, but there was no social incentive to use it.
"If Google had actually notified users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer. Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had."
Google does, I always receive an email notifying me of new wave messages. I think google tried to sell a productivity tool as a mainstream product, working with Wave as a CSCW ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_supported_cooperative_... ) tool has been a dream so far. Too bad , they will stop working on it.
Edit: Quotation
Google should have run Wave as a startup, instead of just an experiment with a new real-time collaborative communication tool. If Wave were done by a startup team, probably it'd have been a different story. The team would be fighting and keep making noises, hustling their butts, and in the end, the product would probably have a higher chance to survive.
My favorite bit is the useless wave notification extension that asks me to login every 2 days because it looses my account information. If I have to login all the time to keep the notification tool alive, I may as well not have the notification tool.
agreed. if this had been integrated as a new type of message in gmail that had some interoperability with regular email, I think the results here would've been completely different. google never gave wave a fighting chance.
Just an FYI, sometime in the past few months they implemented email notifications.
Could you please rephrase your comment.
it's not like twitter ever sends/sent an email when someone you follow tweets.
Twitter is ephemeral. You can quite easily leave it for a month and miss nothing important. Nobody will care, nobody will miss you. Twitter will continue to function as long as people have egos, which is to say forever. (not trying to bash twitter here even though it sounds like it.)
Wave is quite different. It's designed for conversations and collaboration. In order for it to function, users need to be able to know when the other has responded quite quickly. Wave itself does nothing to ensure this.
I feel the same way about Twitter, but still it seems like Twitter bashing. You're not proving a point in your first paragraph, merely your opinion. This is especially true with the "leave it for a month and miss nothing important". I'm sure some people (not me) would feel quite differently.
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.