I used it for a couple of theatre projects, and thought it was great. The multi-media sharing was like nothing else at the time, and the threaded discussions worked well. I don't remember the details, but I think we had to stop because everyone I was working with had collectively run out of invites and Google wouldn't give us any more. (And by "wouldn't" I mean "completely ignored emails to their 'user feedback' address", which seemed to be the only way to contact support for the project.) I was, and still slightly am, disappointed that it went away.
A few years ago I was invited to a (pre-release, I think) focus group at Dropbox headquarters on their Dropbox Paper project. We went around the room, speed-dating like, to different tables, where PMs and/or engineers showed us particular UIs or use-cases and asked for feedback. At every table I told them that "this looks a lot like Google Wave", and was met with blank looks.
There are downsides to the tech industry's extreme youthfulness.
I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard to believe.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
Oh, geeze. Probably 2018? I'm sure I'm getting the titles, and possibly seniority, of the Dropbox folks there wrong. They might have just been low-level flacks. All I can tell you - hand on heart - is that I mentioned Wave at least twice in different groups, as a point of (favorable) comparison, and they disclaimed knowledge. Either they were genuinely ignorant, or had been instructed for some reason to play dumb.
I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr.
It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.
I thought it was the predecessor of Slack/Teams, since you can send messages/files and do all those stuff on the same page. Too bad they didn't pitch it as an enterprise product. They aimed it at consumers but couldn't find a use case, and then shut it down.
It had multiple angles it could succeed on really.
It had two major issues.
The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though.
The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at.
You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on.
You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function.
You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days.
And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.
It was dead on arrival because of the “artificial” scarcity of accounts, you needed to be invited to create your account. Google assumed they can recreate the Gmail invites craze.
Google Wave was too far ahead of its time. Even now, products are just starting to pivot away from the paper-centric view of documents and take baby steps toward living document collaboration (intersection of multi-player documents and chat/comments).
I was doing a IT student job in high school and our team used it for a while, it felt like a mixture of instant messing and posting on web forums. My impression was, that it looked cool, but did not add much in comparison (iirc it also had collaborative editing? That was definitely cool).
I used it for a couple of theatre projects, and thought it was great. The multi-media sharing was like nothing else at the time, and the threaded discussions worked well. I don't remember the details, but I think we had to stop because everyone I was working with had collectively run out of invites and Google wouldn't give us any more. (And by "wouldn't" I mean "completely ignored emails to their 'user feedback' address", which seemed to be the only way to contact support for the project.) I was, and still slightly am, disappointed that it went away.
A few years ago I was invited to a (pre-release, I think) focus group at Dropbox headquarters on their Dropbox Paper project. We went around the room, speed-dating like, to different tables, where PMs and/or engineers showed us particular UIs or use-cases and asked for feedback. At every table I told them that "this looks a lot like Google Wave", and was met with blank looks.
There are downsides to the tech industry's extreme youthfulness.
I worked on Dropbox Paper and I find the last anecdote hard to believe.
Every engineer and PM (there was only one) I knew on the team was aware of the origins of the Paper codebase and the connections to Wave, since it was a fork of Hackpad (acquired by Dropbox) which in turn was a fork of Etherpad (acquired by Google).
What year was this focus group?
Oh, geeze. Probably 2018? I'm sure I'm getting the titles, and possibly seniority, of the Dropbox folks there wrong. They might have just been low-level flacks. All I can tell you - hand on heart - is that I mentioned Wave at least twice in different groups, as a point of (favorable) comparison, and they disclaimed knowledge. Either they were genuinely ignorant, or had been instructed for some reason to play dumb.
I liked Dropbox Paper, and tried to get several projects I "owned" at my company going on it. No one, and I mean no one, else could grok it. We defaulted quickly back to laborious email chains. Grrrr.
It's odd how some tools seem intuitively useful to some kinds of minds / work, and not to others. The Wave / Wave-like interface has an appeal to techies, and was responded to positively by the the theatre professionals with whom I used it in ~2010. Paper was utterly rejected by the biz-dev sorts with whom I work now. I suspect that has something to do with creating something new vs uncritically applying known algorithms. But I don't really know, and that may be an uncharitable analysis.
FWIW, they donated the project to the Apache Foundation, so it is open source (albeit unmaintained).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave
https://github.com/apache/incubator-retired-wave
I thought it was the predecessor of Slack/Teams, since you can send messages/files and do all those stuff on the same page. Too bad they didn't pitch it as an enterprise product. They aimed it at consumers but couldn't find a use case, and then shut it down.
(...If my memory serves me right)
It had multiple angles it could succeed on really.
It had two major issues.
The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though.
The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at.
You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on.
You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function.
You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days.
And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.
> note taking ... spreadsheet ... slack replacement
Sounds like Teams, but without anyone complaining about having to use it.
My classmates and I tried to find something useful to do with it. It was very fun but we didn't really find a great reason to use it.
It was dead on arrival because of the “artificial” scarcity of accounts, you needed to be invited to create your account. Google assumed they can recreate the Gmail invites craze.
Google Wave was too far ahead of its time. Even now, products are just starting to pivot away from the paper-centric view of documents and take baby steps toward living document collaboration (intersection of multi-player documents and chat/comments).
Yes. Back then during forum era we tried to use Google Wave to discuss our project (music collaboration). it had a really nice way to do collab.
I was doing a IT student job in high school and our team used it for a while, it felt like a mixture of instant messing and posting on web forums. My impression was, that it looked cool, but did not add much in comparison (iirc it also had collaborative editing? That was definitely cool).
Google Docs is where that technology ended up.
My coworkers and I played with it for a day or two. We never really figured out what you would use it for.
Yes, I miss its threaded structure and wish there was something like this for projects still.
It was quite an enjoyable product to use.