Comment by runT1ME
16 years ago
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.