Comment by thorax
16 years ago
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 better success for it.
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.
Not to mention that for the first few months, none of my friends had an account. So even though I wanted to Wave, I couldn't really do it.
Once a few of my friends joined in, we thought we could plan our road-trips etc. on it easily and share photos later. Even then, there were always a few who said "What's a Wave?".
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.
The main reason I didn't like it is a very simple one, and it has to do with automatic sign-in to Google properties based on whether you're logged into Analytics or Gmail or the like.
Since we use a corporate email for Analytics but personal ones for Wave it meant having to switch logins all the time. Might sound trivial but actually put me off using the product at all.
If you had an apps account, you could have requested Google Wave. We got it a while ago.
Ironically, Google just enabled multiple sign-ons, but I'm not sure it would have helped.
There's too much tied to my GMail account already.
I agree. We use Wave for all kinds of communication in our startup, and it's just an amazing tool for small workgroup communications and document drafting.
I'm actually rather peeved it's going away, because (1) I don't want to waste a bunch of time trying to migrate data out of Wave, and (2) there really isn't much out there that can replace Wave in our workflow. We use Wave as a GUI-editable wiki where documents gracefully age out of view, and it's just great for that. I'm really going to miss it.
http://www.zenbe.com/shareflow I remember this resembles Wave, minus the wiki thing. It's not free, however.
Yea I just recently got into using it heavily with my remote devs and it has rocked my world.
Really bummed out about this. But then again when Google "kills" something they rarely pull the plug completely.. it either stays in limbo indefinitely or evolves into something else
The announcement leaves open the possibility that the live collaboration and/or wiki functionality could end up in Gmail soon enough anyway: “We … will … extend [Wave] technology for use in other Google projects.”