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Comment by zandorg | Hacker News Reader

They blew it big time by hyping it for RPGs, which never went anywhere.

Get the RPGers on board, perhaps, and you can succeed.

They blew it by making it confusing to understand what you'd use it for, making it confusing to know which of your friends had accounts (no integration with gmail!) and confusing to know when someone sent you a new "wave" (no integration with gmail!).

...there is an "email me when a wave gets updated" option, you know.

They even let you decide how often you want to get emailed. I chose once/day, but you could go all the way up to one email for every blip updated/added.

And this way works with all email, not just gmail!

There's a link in that email to send you straight to what's updated. How much integration do you want, exactly?

While you're correct, that option was added far too late. By the time that option was added, everyone in my organization had tried Wave and then given up on it. I revived its use in the last week, successfully, with that option, only to see that it's now going to die anyway.

Really, all of Wave can be summarized by the fact that, at its launch, Wave deliberately refused to participate in any existing communications medium other than Wave. This meant that everyone you cared about had to get on Wave. Since that couldn't possibly happen, Wave was doomed from the start. Nothing about today's announcement is remotely a surprise to me.

It also sucked. You would get an email that something changed, and the context given was the first message/blip/whatever in the wave instead of the message added at the end. It was a huge let down to log into wave just to read 'yeah' as the entirety of the update. Leaving me to ignore wave update emails even more.

That feature was so confusing I had to explain to my computer-literate-but-confused-by-Wave friends.

Hard to edit your preferences, hard to get other people into it, hard to get reminders set up. If they could relaunch and make all those things better, Wave would be stellar. I almost wish they'd break backwards compatibility for people who loved the interface because it just went in the wrong direction.

Did they launch with these features? I distinctly recall thinking "how do I know who's on this thing?" and repeatedly going back to the site in hope that someone else I knew finally used the site and sent me a message.

The technology might be great but the launch and execution were really, really weird.

They did not.

Well, they did originally have "who's online" functionality, but they had to yank it when someone found an exploit, and it took them forever to get it working again.

The "email me" option was much later - around the time they went from "Preview" to "Beta", I think. And as thorax said in his reply to me, Google flubbed the UI/usability of the preferences.

As far as "who has a Wave account", it's the same scheme as email. You get a Wave address; you're responsible for letting all your friends know what your address is (e.g., mine's in my HN profile). Probably could've been improved by hooking into Facebook/Twitter/etc. and spamming out your Wave address to all your friends...

My little group of friends is using it for a DnD RPG. It's orders of magnitude better than the IRC chatroom we were using before.

It's going to be annoying having to go back to IRC.

http://pygowave.net/

They discontinued development themselves.

It's a widely accepted rule of thumb that no technology can succeed without RPGs being involved. ?:o

Kingdom of Loathing players were using it back in March, though they seem to be a more intellectual playerbase compared to most RPGs.

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