[Google Wave] OPEN TO ALL: invites no longer necessary!

Cyvros · May 2010

All this time, I haven't used Wave for a 'normal' to-and-fro conversation. But now I have. It's pretty nifty.

elliotw2 · May 2010

Is it just me, or is the PA wave broken again?

MKR · May 2010

I think the PA wave has been dead for ages.

Dark Shroud · May 2010

I'm just not sold on Chrome OS for a few reasons.
1) I've used thin clients before and they're PIA.
2) I live in a heavy MS eco system.
3) It would have to support Live Mesh for me to even consider it.
4) No local storage of anything.

MKR · May 2010

Dark Shroud wrote: »

I'm just not sold on Chrome OS for a few reasons.
1) I've used thin clients before and they're PIA.
2) I live in a heavy MS eco system.
3) It would have to support Live Mesh for me to even consider it.
4) No local storage of anything.

I don't think it's meant for you.

Cyvros · May 2010

MKR wrote: »

Dark Shroud wrote: »

I'm just not sold on Chrome OS for a few reasons.
1) I've used thin clients before and they're PIA.
2) I live in a heavy MS eco system.
3) It would have to support Live Mesh for me to even consider it.
4) No local storage of anything.

I don't think it's meant for you.

Pretty much. 2 and 3 rule you out immediately.

Impersonator · May 2010

Chrome OS does allow you to store data locally, though. At least the version I tried supported it.

InkSplat · May 2010

I think that saying an OS won't work for you is a lot different than saying whether or not its a good OS. Chrome may not work for some people's business situations, but for "civilian" activities? It seems to be pretty fantastic.

Yes, you won't be playing Starcraft 2 on it, but I totally expect there to be RTS games built for Native Client or HTML5. So its not like gaming will be impossible.

Blake T · May 2010

Mr_Rose wrote: »

Blaket wrote: »

An on button would be nice then!

But I mean why would I go to wave and "wave" them when I can go to my already open email and send them an email.

Sending them an email takes less time and in the days of push notification is just as fast.

Wait, how does sending someone an e-mail take less time? With wave, as soon as you hit done it's in their inbox. Unless you've been disconnected somehow, but the same thing happens with e-mail. E-mail on the other hand has to go into your "outbox" then wait until the client finishes processing the send request etc.

Or take it from the other side; why would you even bother e-mailing someone when you could just IM them? Much faster and you're likely to get an instant response.

Or have you forgotten that your e-mail client takes time to start up from cold too?

Because in a work environment (and hell even at home) I always leave my email on.

Email is one click away.

Wave I need to start an application you can argue that I can just leave it on, but I'm leaving an application running that has maybe a tenth of the amount of people on it.

I think for wave to really catch on you are going to be able to send a wave to anyone, and if they don't have way downgrade it somehow to an email, and then they reply, and have it reintroduced back into the wave.

Lord Jezo · August 2010

Well, that's that.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/202602/google_axes_wave.html

Michael H · August 2010

Yeah, it's too bad. I know I'm in the minority by a long shot, but I loved Wave and my friends and I used it daily as a kind of perpetual chat.

What will be interesting is what they do with all the Waves people have. As far as I know there's no option for exporting/printing the information in a Wave, and lots of people have used it for business purposes. What's going to happen to all that data?

Jasconius · August 2010

bwa hahahahahaha

bwa hahahahahhahahaha

It was just tooo slow. I'm not sure why they didn't try to make a real desktop application. They were pretending to re-invent e-mail while forgetting that most people actually use e-mail with a desktop application, and for good reasons.

Nightslyr · August 2010

Jasconius wrote: »

bwa hahahahahaha

bwa hahahahahhahahaha

It was just tooo slow. I'm not sure why they didn't try to make a real desktop application. They were pretending to re-invent e-mail while forgetting that most people actually use e-mail with a desktop application, and for good reasons.

Eh, I can see why they did it. They envision people eventually using a thin client with Chrome OS to connect to Google apps, mail/wave, and Google cloud-based storage for most data. They want to remove the distinction between web app and desktop app.

Not that it's a good idea, but I can see their reasoning.

InkSplat · August 2010

Well that's depressing. It actually had quite a few nifty uses.

I'm sure some of the good stuff from it will probably make its way into gmail eventually, and since its open source, it'll continue on somewhere. But I was so hopeful for it.

Tomanta · August 2010

It had a lot of potential that it just didn't live up to. Mostly it was just plain slow.

Bullio · August 2010

It came out about a year too late to be of any use to me. I probably would have used it a ton in college, especially for group projects. Instead, I gave it a bit of a look when it came out, shrugged, and ignored it until I heard about it's death a couple days ago. Too bad. It kind of reminded me of PictoChat on the DS. It's fun to play with for a little while, but ultimately everyone winds up drawing penises.

I think it could have amazing been if it had an Android app, though.

Kalkino · August 2010

I liked it, but it was just too slow to be of use to me. If it hadn't kept crashing or freezing any browser I used I would have kept at it. Oh well

Alegis · August 2010

Too slow, too cumbersome and ugly when you try to figure out which posts are new in gargantuan threads that load so slow in tiny windows.

More a fan of google docs for collaboration. Wave wasn't good enough to replace IM, mail or fora. Those traditional tools work fine.

GrimReaper · August 2010

Now all Google needs to do is axe something that really, really deserves it. (Buzz)

CKyle · August 2010

I actually use Buzz everyday since it's an easy way to comment on my friends Reader shares/tweets/etc. Granted, the way they launched the thing was terrible.

Kalkino · August 2010

CKyle wrote: »

I actually use Buzz everyday since it's an easy way to comment on my friends Reader shares/tweets/etc. Granted, the way they launched the thing was terrible.

Yeah, I use it a few times a week. Not many people that I know do, but enough to make it useful.

The Buzz app for Android is pretty good too. I can see myself using that a lot in the future.

Lykouragh · August 2010

Jasconius wrote: »

... most people actually use e-mail with a desktop application, and for good reasons.

This is untrue, and growing increasingly untrue.

In 5 years, though, most people will be using email primarily on a mobile device, and admittedly Wave doesn't seem suited to a very small interface.

Frem · August 2010

Alegis wrote: »

Too slow, too cumbersome and ugly when you try to figure out which posts are new in gargantuan threads that load so slow in tiny windows.

More a fan of google docs for collaboration. Wave wasn't good enough to replace IM, mail or fora. Those traditional tools work fine.

However, if you needed to work with a group of people where the alternative was setting up an email list, Google Doc, and IRC channel? Wave was completely amazing. It was a bit slow (although it's much faster now than it used to be) and some parts of it were kinda clunky (reading new posts, mostly), but it was still awesome.

Darmak · August 2010

Lykouragh wrote: »

Jasconius wrote: »

... most people actually use e-mail with a desktop application, and for good reasons.

This is untrue, and growing increasingly untrue.

In 5 years, though, most people will be using email primarily on a mobile device, and admittedly Wave doesn't seem suited to a very small interface.

Yeah, nobody I know uses a desktop application to check their email.

GrimReaper · August 2010

Darmak wrote: »

Lykouragh wrote: »

Jasconius wrote: »

... most people actually use e-mail with a desktop application, and for good reasons.

This is untrue, and growing increasingly untrue.

In 5 years, though, most people will be using email primarily on a mobile device, and admittedly Wave doesn't seem suited to a very small interface.

Yeah, nobody I know uses a desktop application to check their email.

People in work places?

There's this silly idea that comes around every ten years or so where it's all "omfg! thin clients!" and then everybody goes back to applications running on their pc. That's not to say a lot of people don't use webmail, because they do. But people will continue to use email programs just as surely as the sun rises and sets everyday.*

* Except in the north pole and Antarctic.

Seeks · August 2010

Email clients are the only way to go for me. Mod+e, BOOM, email. No matter what I'm in the middle of.

Dark Shroud · August 2010

Yeah I'm a big outlook user and a majority of the people I know use a desktop application for their email.

Once you get screwed over because your ISP went down, power outages in the area, fiber line clipped by road construction crews you quickly start keeping things client side. I have experienced all of these so I now use Outlook to manage & back everything up.

The fact that Office 2007 & 2010 both can directly interface with my live account to save/open documents is also a big help. As well as the Offce cloud version that I can use for free.

LaCabra · August 2010

Why would any of those things screw you over? It's never happened to me.

agoaj · August 2010

You know why this was doomed? Because it was based on Firefly.

BobCesca · August 2010

If they'd integrated wave and gmail it would have been heaven for me.

My problem with wave was nothing to do with the interface, but the fact that I didn't really know anyone else who used it. I actually quite liked it, and preferred it to using IM stuff.

I'm kinda sad it's ending.

Dark Shroud · August 2010

LaCabra wrote: »

Why would any of those things screw you over? It's never happened to me.

The why part is simple, when I couldn't access my email or log in to school/work it caused me lots of problems.

What I described was various situations I've encountered over the years. I've been in buildings where the internet was down because a road crew severed their fiber optic cables. So anyone that didn't have their data on the local servers was out of luck.

I've had my various local ISP nodes go down for weather conditions and car accidents that either slammed in to the nod its self or took down the poll holding the data cables. In one situation power lines went down and while my house had power the ISP nod was one transformer over, which was down.

I've seen acts of God where the Local branch, the main State Office, & Corporate Head Quarters 2 states away all have their networks go down in the same 24 hour period from different snow storms in the Midwest.

So in short I keep local copies of my data ranging from plain email to all documents.

LaCabra · August 2010

Oh, right. I thought you meant you might actually lose data.

Frem · August 2010

Wave could have had desktop clients. There was a proof of concept Adobe Air app floating around. Not enough people cared, though.

MKR · August 2010

The PA forum wave was loads of fun. We just had to make a new one every day, so it got cumbersome.

A good, production quality desktop client would have resolved that.

peterdevore · August 2010

The javascript library you can use to make little javascript programs in wave is pretty nifty. You can register a variable to be 'shared' among all the people in the wave and get callbacks whenever it updated. I was hoping to get around making some turn based multiplayer game with it, well I still could I guess. I had figured out an easy way to upload your scripts and get an url for them, just pop them onto pastebin and use the 'RAW' link.

Rhesus Positive · August 2010

Wow. I'm glad that my boss didn't follow up on my suggestion to implement Wave for in-office collaboration.

I used Wave for a few things, and then I ran out of reasons to prefer it over email and Facebook.

templewulf · August 2010

I'm still using it for project collaboration. For instance, when setting up a repository, I document my set up process so that others can see if I make mistakes. I also post links to research, and because you can edit it, I cross out the links when we decide they aren't useful.

I'm actually pretty unhappy that this is going out. Back to google docs, I guess?

Frem · August 2010

MKR wrote: »

The PA forum wave was loads of fun. We just had to make a new one every day, so it got cumbersome.

A good, production quality desktop client would have resolved that.

So would a good production quality web client.

templewulf wrote: »

I'm still using it for project collaboration. For instance, when setting up a repository, I document my set up process so that others can see if I make mistakes. I also post links to research, and because you can edit it, I cross out the links when we decide they aren't useful.

I'm actually pretty unhappy that this is going out. Back to google docs, I guess?

Novell is continuing with their (probably closed source and expensive?) implementation of the Wave protocol; Novell Pulse. Which makes sense, I can see it being pretty useful as a company-hosted app in specific business settings. If they feel really nice, we might get a free version of Pulse, too.

If enough people feel like building a decent client, we've also got the open source reference implementation of the backend.

BobCesca wrote: »

My problem with wave was nothing to do with the interface, but the fact that I didn't really know anyone else who used it. I actually quite liked it, and preferred it to using IM stuff.

Really, Wave isn't great as an IM/IRC substitute, and that's what most people seemed to use it for. The realtime aspect of things didn't help much with this perception, although the threaded structure hinted that it was probably intended for more lengthy posts. Analogue might fill the void for some people; think an open source Campfire-like thing.

DeathPrawn · August 2010

templewulf wrote: »

I'm still using it for project collaboration. For instance, when setting up a repository, I document my set up process so that others can see if I make mistakes. I also post links to research, and because you can edit it, I cross out the links when we decide they aren't useful.

I'm actually pretty unhappy that this is going out. Back to google docs, I guess?

A wiki?

templewulf · August 2010

DeathPrawn wrote: »

templewulf wrote: »

I'm still using it for project collaboration. For instance, when setting up a repository, I document my set up process so that others can see if I make mistakes. I also post links to research, and because you can edit it, I cross out the links when we decide they aren't useful.

I'm actually pretty unhappy that this is going out. Back to google docs, I guess?

A wiki?

I'd considered that, but I like the email contact style approach with Wave. I don't want to set up a separate wiki for each contact list. Though our team is small enough that it probably wouldn't matter.

Penny Arcade

[Google Wave] OPEN TO ALL: invites no longer necessary!

Posts