Google Wave Now Open to Everyone | Hacker News Reader

Google Wave Now Open to Everyone

techcrunch.com

38 pointslukeqsee21 comments

At the dayjob we have 2 geographically separate teams of about 4 people each working together. We tried to use Wave last year and it was a cluster.

Even if it's improved 10x, you're going to be hard pressed to get anyone from my company to try it again anytime soon.

If you're going to launch early and iterate you've got to try harder to keep the buzz respectable.

Harder for a company like Google, obviously, but with the state Wave was in last year they could have done without the advanced PR push and conference launch.

Sure, but they said it was a developer preview. They never suggested you use it for general or work purposes yet.

I am a member of a small startup. We use it for all of our brainstorming. So far, it has only improved. We don't even think about using something else.

Maybe we are the exception. But it has helped us an incredible amount.

As an initial cut, I'm thinking shared to-do list (with multimedia, wiki, and real-time features) is kick-ass enough to use it.

The invite only thing was a really bad idea. If it was meant to be a developer preview it definitely wasn't widely percieved that way. If it was an attempt to build up a following in the way gmail did then it was a total flop. People are bored of invites now.

I think it's just a classic network effect problem. Invites worked for gmail because you could still continue to interact with everyone who had an email address.

With Wave, you not only had to be invited, but you could only communicate with the small set of other people who had been invited. I used it exactly once and gave up on it.

I still think that Wave was nice as an idea, but that the implementation of it was poor. Unfortunately many people have completely dismissed it due to the slow and buggy user experience, but with more effort put into making a fast and ergonomic UI design it could stage a comeback.

Hmm. I'm an Apps Premier customer and I don't see it in the control panel yet...

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-lab...

Probably hasn't gotten rolled to your particular server yet.

You need to add it as a service from the list of labs products (add more services from Google Apps dashboard for premier account admins). Took a couple minutes after the announcement to start showing up here.

There's already a frontpage news regarding this... Why the dupes?

I'm the founder of Braintrust, I wonder what I need to do now to differentiate from Wave...

Did wave just not have critical mass or was it just not well received by the users?

Totally unrelated... Where can I sell the domain name wave.io .... Thoughts?

I think the basic failing of wave was that it only solved the easy problems and largely ducked the big problems. No amount of technological wizardry and demo-friendly glitz and glam can make up for failing to meet a need.

The problems that Google Wave tackled were immediacy of communication and inclusiveness. But these are not problems worth solving, between email, IM, wikis, even twitter, nobody has much of a problem with immediacy or inclusiveness. It takes a click of a button to forward an email thread. The problem is information overload, increasing the signal to noise ratio of communication, providing proper contextualization and summarization of information, wave didn't tackle that problem.

Blog spam: http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-available...

The TechCrunch post provides more information than that link. If you just wanted to help people find the source so they could judge for themselves, say something like "source" instead of "blog spam".

I am very interested in Wave as a freeform tool for distributed team collaboration.

But I am very cautious about trying one little thing, seeing if it works, then adapting. Hell if I would come up with some big Wave solution for the team to use and expect it to work correctly.

More worryingly is putting internal team data on Google servers. Can't we have a local sever copy to play around with? (I asked the Google Product Owner for this in an email and got the typical bupkis response) I thought we were all just one big open family around here. If I could play around keeping the data local, I could develop and evolve systems that I could then share with the rest of the world. If not -- that's going to hamper adoption, at least in this area.

I am very optimistic about Wave long-term. Short-term is another matter completely.

My guess is that Wave is tied to Google's production infrastructure. So nobody can give you a local copy of wave without also giving you a local copy of everything from our storage technologies to our job scheduling infrastructure.

That ain't going to happen.

LOL I hope not! It's probably a little too much for my quad-core.

I was thinking I read somewhere that there was a reference implementation of the XMPP server spec in Java somewhere at Google. I'm not sure if that's the version that the production team is using. Like I said, nobody ever got back to me. A simple explanation would have been great.

As it is, I'm conflicted because of this. The spec is complex enough to make a server implementation extremely non-trivial. In addition, plug-ins on Google may not work on other servers.

The cookies aren't ready yet.

In theory, somebody else can produce a wave server you can use, and it'll connect to other wave servers...a bit like SMTP servers.

However, nobody's produced a working server yet.

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