Google Wave: why we didn't use it

Why didn't people flock to Google Wave? Ars staffers recount their own experiences using the new protocol, which were largely bafflement, disappointment, and... isolation.

<a href='http://meincmagazine.com/software/news/2010/08/post-7.ars'>Read the whole story</a>

 

[dnom]

I'm just posting to say I love the headline pic. Great job.

 

[David Bradbury]

For the most part, from everything I've read, most people fell into the same boat as me: I have no idea what Google Wave is. Even though I've read about it and heard others speak about it, I am lost as to what it actually is or does.

 

[Joel_B]

"Why Wave failed? The very genesis of this article holds a clue: conceived over IRC, sent out via mass e-mail, and collaboratively composed, edited, and compiled in a locally hosted Etherpad. This speaks volumes about how traditional tools are working a lot better for people than Google ever imagined, despite their problems."

So how is Etherpad a traditional tool...?

Anyone I know would run a mile if you tried to get them to discuss anything on IRC.

 

[geoken]

I agree with the comment about Wave's inability to bridge the gap between itself and the technologies it hoped to displace. If Google made it possible for me to aggregate my email into the Wave client I may have spent some time with it and tried to encourage others to use it.

It's similar to how Gmail, being the only free webmail service that could aggregate mail from POP accounts, made it easy for me to transition over to it since I could instantly ditch my existing email client. Gmail made it so I was never in a situation where I had to go to 2 sources to do the same thing (ie. my desktop mail client pulling in my POP mail and the gmail client).

 

[sigma8]

I was pretty psyched about Wave myself. I got a semi-early invite (not the first batch, but within two months of its beta release). I also grabbed myself a copy of WaveBoard (OS X version) early on, which ameliorated some of the browser-based performance issues.

I fully agree with Stokes that its windowed UI was horrible. I don't think it's right to call it Windows 3.x style MDI though, as Win3.x was notorious for ridiculous overlap and overlap-clutter. Wave's problem is that more than 66% of the screen was NEVER being used 99% of the time.

I never had a problem with the live typing, because I am an awesome typist. It just made me look even more awesome.

Ultimately, the fatal flaw was that nobody used it. That's perhaps more of a result than a cause, but despite its UI weaknesses, I think I would have used it if people I knew used it more than once.

I think the whole closed beta and invite process was a mistake. When everyone was excited about it, virtually nobody could check it out. They squandered their peak moment of customer enthusiasm. If Wave had used this opportunity to establish some momentum, it might have carried it through.

It should have interoperated flawlessly with google chat. I know a lot of people who use google chat, and if I could have chatted with them using Wave, I might have done that. But as I said above (and as Jacqui said in her bit), nobody else used it. You would sign into Wave, and it's just you and the tumbleweed.

Finally, each time I logged into Wave, after weeks or even months, I didn't see any discernible improvement. I think when people saw it demo'ed, they were impressed but also left wondering how it was going to improve. People were expecting its featureset and/or functionality to grow, and not stagnate as some three-paned UI where you only use the third pane...receiving only performance updates. If Google wanted to keep it the same as it looked in beta, they were contributing to its doom.

Finally, and this isn't really anything Google could do much about, but I endeavored on a couple occasions to use it for work, but since info is being stored on a Google server somewhere, I found it too limiting what I could use it for. Some data I work is actually illegal to store offsite, so I couldn't paste that into a Wave.

I would love to see them try again....although now that they're going into cahoots with Verizon about privatizing the internet, maybe I'd rather see someone other than Google do it.

 

[Seraphiel]

I never even heard when they opened it up for everyone to join. I was curious to check it out but it was always closed when I went to look. Then I forgot about it.

Plus: I have tried to think of a reason (even a bad reason or a stupid reason) to be able to watch someone typing a message in real-time. There isn't one. The standard "Soandso is typing a message..." is fine, useful, conveys all the information I would need in real-time. I have no need to see someone fixing typos and rethinking words and phrases as they go. Why they would insist in keeping that "feature" turned on globally, I cannot imagine.

 

[rmcrowley2000]

I also fell in the same boat as a lot of people: not knowing what Google Wave is. Furthermore, when I was invited to it, most of the people I would have tried using it as a collaboration tool with didn't have access, and didn't care to try it out. As such, it fell by the wayside. Given how Google Docs is becoming more popular, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the features of Google Wave ported to Google Docs.

 

[dfiler]

"The next big thing" will need to have functionality that everyone raves about and actually uses. Throwing everything in the mix and seeing what falls out... not so "next big thingyish".

 

[Joel_B]

I fully agree with Stokes that its windowed UI was horrible. I don't think it's right to call it Windows 3.x style MDI though, as Win3.x was notorious for ridiculous overlap and overlap-clutter. Wave's problem is that more than 66% of the screen was NEVER being used 99% of the time.

All of the Windows had controls to minimise them. If you minimise the Inbox window there's a fair amount of space to work with and have multiple Waves open.

The main problem with Wave were:

1) Shut down too fast. Every communication technology has taken forever to get going. Email taken a good two decades for it to become common.

2) People saw the beta and assumed that's what it was. Now-a-days Wave is much faster and has more features. Problem is, everyone expected a finished product.

3) Open-source the server faster. Most of the complaints (apart from "it's new") were that it was outside the firewall.

Personally I think Google Wave is great. As a Real-time Collaboration platform it's un-equalled. And I would challenge anyone to find one that's better. Etherpad is ok, but it's just another shared document.

 

[lecti]

It failed in our workplace because it was too complex to offer any obvious use to new users, and too unreliable to be truly useful. It did not give very clear indication of how much data we can store and share, nor did it provide good access to the uploaded data. The former problem is not a problem in itself, as people will find a way to use it sooner or later, but the latter was fatal.

 

[.劉煒]

Maybe they'll open source more of the infrastructure of Wave, and .. it might just crest again

 

[arcadium]

The problem with Wave was that its "one tool for all" nature meant that it wasn't really good at any one form of communication.

It didn't make one-one or one-many communication easier. IM is much better at that.
It didn't make one-one or one-many communication leaving a "paper trail" easier. Email is still better at that.
It didn't make collaborative editing easier. Google Docs is still much better at that.

So, what should anyone have been using Wave for in the first place?

 

[erikb]

I never drank the kool-aid that was google wave. I never saw a clear, buzzword-free explanation of what it was trying to replace, and why. Wave touted itself as the successor to email, among other things, because email is somehow broken? No one ever told me what part of email doesn't work. I spend half of every working day reading and writing dozens of emails. Email works plenty well enough for everyone I work with. What's the problem you're trying to solve?

I did play on wave with a few friends, and once I was able to use it myself, I could get past the buzzword rhetoric and see what it actually was. My assessment was that google wave was a wiki, just organized to look like email. Pretty twisted, IMO. The persistent, group editable waves were akin to wiki pages, and the email-like organization just didn't make sense to me. When do conversations die and go away? Was I always going to have to wade through a sea of waves, and then look at all the messages on a wave to find something? What a PITA idea.

In the end I'd say google wave was a new, worse way to organize and browse wikis. Google thought it was revolutionary and would be superior to email, IM, twitter, IRC, etc, etc, but it failed to recognize that all of those exist because they do what they do well. E.g., seeing people type is not a big deal and possibly useful on IM, but not really so on email. I'm actually kind of glad that google is putting this out to pasture. I sorta thought they were beating a dead horse from the get-go, and apparently I wasn't the only one.

 

[LauRoman]

It would be nice if Ars did some sort of comparison between these open source collaboration platforms, like Wave, Open Wonderland and whatever else is out there.

 

[dfiler]

So, what should anyone have been using Wave for in the first place?

That's what I was getting at as well.

Perhaps the question should have been "Why should anyone have used it?" Failure seems like the default outcome for most replacement communication systems, so looking for reasons for failure could get laborious. In my opinion, it was merely an impressive technology demonstration. It was never actually useful, not even close, not even if more people used it.

That's not me hating Google Wave. Rather, that's me not finding any reason to like it.

 

[EmeraldArcana]

Wave possibly would have been around still if it started simple, then grew. As it seems now, Wave actually launched with so many features that it was confusing.

If it was limited to, let's say, the persistent IM model, it might have grown from there.

 

[eddieMachete]

I use Google Wave extensively at work for requirements gathering and it has worked like nothing else. I do interaction design. I started using wave to publish wire frames and mock ups and to get feedback from our many stake holders. I has been a great took. We previously used e-mail but the conversations would break into many threads and it would be really hard to make sure on every reply that all required addresses were present. Sometimes people would e-mail requirements to outside parties and there was no way to control this. Sharepoint is another tool we use but most people in the team don't ever bother to check what is new. Wave gave me control on the people who should be viewing and working on a wave. There are no excuses for anyone to miss anything thanks to its notifications system. You can always view the whole progression of the conversation. I'm really sad I'll have to be working through e-mails again.

 

[godzillaWax]

Google's problem is what may have previously been its strength: it's a company filled with computer scientists, in desperate need of engineers. In other words, they have lots of idea people and algorithm people, but not nearly enough people that know how to build a good product.

 

[tu824]

I think Google Wave was killed by not living up to its hype of replacing Mail and IM, even though it was actually very useful for some forms of communications.

Mainly, I found it useful as a project management and collaboration tool: collecting information, commenting on it, etc. Mail, IM, and Google Docs don't do that very well. A second big feature of Wave was its integration with robots and the ease with which new functionality could be added. There is nothing comparable in Mail, IM, or Google Docs. We had started developing some new collaborative tools based on Google Docs, work that's pretty much wasted now since there is no comparable service. We'll try to piece something together out of Google's open sourced stuff, but we may simply have to go back and write our own server from scratch.

The UI was bad and the lack of integration with GMail was bad too, but not worse than many other Google products that haven't gotten killed.

I think Google set unrealistically high expectations for Wave and marketed it badly. Wave was innovative and useful enough to have grabbed a significant share of communications in areas like project management and education. It could also function as Google's version of drop.io, with better permissions. Any one of those would have been a success even if it had never replaced E-mail or chat. And it had the potential to unify a lot of other Google services. But by killing it so quickly, it never had a chance to grow up.

With Wave, Google killed a project that had great potential. And, perhaps more importantly, Google also further damaged their relationship with developers As a developer, it's unlikely that I will invest a lot of time anymore in developing for Google platforms in the coming years. There are competitors that will offer hosted services and have a better record of sticking with their products.

 

[Deleted member 129457]

I had a use planned for it. Something which seemed to suit Google Wave. But, since it's shutting down, it seems unlikely that I'll use it.

GW seemed like a great tool for something like a cross-country trip, both for recording the trip and for planning meet-ups with folks when there's not a set schedule. Which was what I thought it would work well for - people who were interested or wanted to follow could do so. People who wanted to contribute and provide feedback could do so. GW seemed great for something like that, without setting up a dedicated blog/website.

But it seemed geared more toward casual use (like RPG or travel) than any real broadbased platform (e.g., corporate usage).

The points about Google's rollout of it are on point, too. Too much dramatic build up. After finally receiving an invite, people would go in spend a few days playing around with the slow, kludgy interface, and then leave. Yes, things have been improved (although the look is still too Romper Roomish).

Additionally, Google just seemed to release it without any real idea of what it should be. Other things like email, news, photos are self-directing and serve a specific purpose. If you want to mash them all up, you need to package it - provide a focus or intent with which people can identify. Then, if it gets used in other different ways, that's just how things progress.

 

[cryptonym]

I never had a problem with the live typing, because I am an awesome typist. It just made me look even more awesome.

LOL!!

 

[joes_pizza]

I'm going to go against the general consensus here and say that I found it immediately useful.

As a university student, Wave was the perfect tool to coordinate team projects. The old method of someone starting a Word document, emailing it to someone else, having them add their content, etc., was frankly terrible. Even Google Docs was only marginally better in that it wasn't fast enough for brainstorming or scrum editing. Enter Google Wave with its instantaneous updates (of course, the caveat was that it was slower than it should have been), and we had the perfect tool to quickly put together a project outline. All 6 of our team members could log on at an agreed time, and go wild putting together a decent looking document. Combined with Skype, it worked almost flawlessly...

Sigh.

 

[EmeraldArcana]

Does anyone know if Google Wave will continue to be maintained? The earlier story said that they aren't adding new features to it, which to me suggests that they are cutting new development but will keep the current system online.

 

[Quantumplation]

I just wanted to correct a few inaccuracies with the Jon Stokes part of the article (Haven't read the rest yet, just wanted to get this out of the way):

"First, it was really not obvious how to spot the newest messages, because they could be nested somewhere deep in the middle (or, the "trough") of a long wave. To get to bottom of a wave, where the new messages typically were, you had to do a lot of very painful scrolling. In the end, scrolling around in Wave's sluggish MDI interface was just not fun."

Space bar, or the next button at the top of the wave, brought you to the next unedited blip. Agreed, scrolling was unpleasant, but that wasn't the only way to get to them.

"The other problem—and this was a huge issue and a common complaint—was that everyone could watch you type. The live typing was a core part of the Wave protocol, and the developers considered it a critical Wave feature that everyone should just either get over or learn to love. So there was never going to be any way to turn it off and enable a kind of "draft preview" that would let you send complete, IM-style messages. This was a major buzzkill; few people are comfortable in an informal chat where others can watch them type."

Google had a check box for draft mode (don't see it now) and has repeatedly said they plan on implementing it (I never saw anything that said to the contrary, so to say "there was never going to be any way to turn it off" is a bit misleading).

"I also tried to use Wave for collaborative text editing on a church-related project, because I had read that it was becoming an increasingly popular tool for real-time, collaborative document creation. But again, Wave frustrated the other users' expectations about how the program should work, and the result was a bit of a mess. A combination of Etherpad (which Google had bought and used as the basis for Wave's real-time editing engine) and e-mail was a far superior way to carry out this same task."

Google bought Etherpad WELL after the release of Google Wave (I used both products concurrently, and even allowing for 6 months of negotiations before the purchase, would have put the very beginnings of negotiations about the time of Wave's announcement), so to say they used it as the basis for the real-time editing engine is misinformed. Google acquired the company to further enhance it's product with the team behind Etherpad, not to acquire the Etherpad technology itself.


That said, I agree with the general principles of your statement, and I think a Desktop client, or a far more streamlined interface would have done wonders to the popularity.

 

[adminfoo]

I haven't been agreeing with Jon Stokes very much lately, but this really hit home for me:

In the final accounting, I'm still on board with the general idea of Wave, if not the actual implementation.

I wanted it to feel more performant. I wanted it to have a more cohesive set of navigation controls, and an interface with a lot less 'WTF, over?' built in (deleting or moving Waves often didn't work, for example). I was expecting the protocol openness to allow others to enter the space and build precisely that (Chrome aside, I don't think Google are very good at interfaces).

But I had a couple of really good (not-realtime) collaboration experiences with it; I and those I was collaborating with really were looking forward to the more polished future versions. I guess we'll stop that now, because even though Google promise the tech will show up in other products, I know what that really means. It means so long, sucker!

I'm very sad that Google threw this product out there half baked, gave it next to no support or promotion, and then just announced it dead a year later. This weakens my confidence in Google with respect to any truly new thing. Are they gonna do this to Google Voice? /me shudders.

 

[Tyler X. Durden]

I tried Wave for the reason Jon Stokes did. Only I'll add I loath RPGs in play-by-post bulletin board format. Real time is where it is at.

I found that Wave was a slightly souped up, everyone can edit everyone's post, messageboard. They had a few little widgets you could embed that were neat in concept but when you inserted them you went straight to la-a-a-ag hell. Use for gaming in real time (only thing I'm interested in) just wasn't feasible because of the lag and tough time knowing where everyone else was entering data into the Wave.

For offline, planning campaigns/characters, it wasn't entirely horrible but *meh* didn't really bring anything new (except the widgets that lagged you to hell and back) above slightly lower setup overhead compared to a freebie BB.

 

[betona]

I remember when I got my Wave account. I logged in, fiddled for 5 or 10 minutes and had no idea what it was or what it could do. So I moved on and never came back.

Google does that sometimes. They're not exactly gifted in the UI department. They could benefit so greatly from usability testing.

 

[Fotek]

I remember when I got my Wave account. I logged in, fiddled for 5 or 10 minutes and had no idea what it was or what it could do. So I moved on and never came back.

Google does that sometimes. They're not exactly gifted in the UI department. They could benefit so greatly from usability testing.

++

I'll add that they're not gifted at marketing either. I know it's a dirty word these days but when no one can explain what your company's product does, it's not a good start!

 

[b-ape]

We used it for one of our agile teams for an entire release. It does some things pretty well, collaboration-wise (better than 100 quadrillion e-mails between the team that branch and split into many e-mails).

I think it failed because it did not focus well enough on providing a superior group collaboration experience, especially for "real" work. Attaching graphics, documents, etc. was a huge pain in the ass. You couldn't link to network resources (such as documents via UNC path): it was embed or go home. If you tried to communicate about a document you were creating in mid-document, *you couldn't get rid of the fucking conversation* after it was done and you'd made the edits. The blob of conversation just sat there in the middle of the fucking document. The best you could do is remove everyone but yourself (you can't actually "delete" the embedded waves, or "archive" them from the current wave).

It should have taken some serious time to figure out exactly what people do when they collaborate -- how they communicate, what they communication, what resources they share, what level of organization they need, etc., and then design first-in-class software around that. Once that is done, *then* build out the ability to have this thing replace e-mail and IM, and do so in a way that makes it at the very least nearly equal to those separate clients.

Instead, it focused on replacing the various communication tools, while mainly ignoring *how* and *why* people use them. Its "IM" capabilities were basically non-existent. Yeah, sure, you could create a "popup" wave between two people, but it functioned just like any other wave, which is waaaay too heavyweight for IM. It couldn't communicate with any old e-mail address. The "document creation" capabilities were *complete garbage* -- it was like using a shitty version of GoogleDocs, which is pretty shitty to begin with, but at least it focuses on what it needs to do, and also protects your documents from things like network hiccoughs, etc., unlike Wave.

 

[dallasmay]

Google Wave left out one single feature that killed it. Backward compatibility with e-mail. It should have been GMail 2.0. The interface was fine. The speed was fine. Everything was fine. People knew what it was for. The only problem was that there was no one to use it with. This could have been revolutionary, but instead it was useless. No one can use something if there is no one to use it with. And offering a few invites doesn't cut it. Imagine if GMail didn't work with any other email service.

Think about it this way. What was the original killer app for the iPhone? It wasn't the App store. It wasn't some new game. It wasn't even the media player, which was pretty cool. It was Safari and the first real mobile internet. In effect, it was backwards compatibility with what mattered to people. Wave didn't have backwards compatibility with what mattered to people. If Google had added that one feature alone, Wave would have exploded.

I suspect that this may suggest an internal conflict within Google. There is no reason why this couldn't have been used with e-mail except the GMail guys must have protested.

 

[foresmac108]

Plus: I have tried to think of a reason (even a bad reason or a stupid reason) to be able to watch someone typing a message in real-time. There isn't one. The standard "Soandso is typing a message..." is fine, useful, conveys all the information I would need in real-time. I have no need to see someone fixing typos and rethinking words and phrases as they go. Why they would insist in keeping that "feature" turned on globally, I cannot imagine.

The reason it was "turned on globally" by default, despite being what pretty much no one wanted, is that the live typing is baked right in to the protocol.

 

[v8media]

I'm constantly amazed at how most people, apparently including those at Google, don't get what they were making. I saw Wave as the potential glue to hold together the current disparate Internet. It was a set of intermingling protocols far more than what everyone saw, which was a single web tool that didn't work so well yet.

Every site implementing Wave on their servers in various ways would get us many things: single login to multiple sites and servers, which gives you the ability to instantly comment on a site you're on or play back a multitrack file on a site and record your own track on the fly with no setup.  We would get the ability to change from an email type experience to photos to word processing to video, back to chat, all without having to call or text your friend to tell them to open Skype or Google Docs or whatever.

Google messed up by actually having a sort of completed-looking interface up. What they should have had first was a demo which not only showed cool things you could do, but demoed integration with Twitter, Skype and/or any other interesting tech out there, and an sdk for everyone to hook Wave up to their servers.

I'm aghast that Google is dropping the push for this tech without doing anything highly visible to get other companies and individuals implementing this on their end. Crazy wasted potential.

Edit: I'd like to add that all of this talk about using EtherPad "instead" of Wave is blindingly shortsighted. EtherPad could have incorporated Wave tech and been a limited client. Likewise, Twitter clients could be integrated with Wave, but just look like a normal Twitter client. Apple's Mail.app on either iPhones or Mac OS X could use Wave tech. This would have allowed a better interface for doing any of the particular things we're used to doing, while allowing the whole stream to go into and out of various types of media without breaking a sweat. The most this would require is having each client app have some sort of twitter-like feed to let you know when there is new content in the Wave with a type of content that you either need to go back to the main Wave site or open up a different client in order to view and/or edit that content.

Ian

 

[openaperture]

It was stupid.

 

[dreemernj]

This is a very different set of perspectives from Florian Wardell's claim that: "There are two types of people, the ones that love Wave, and the ones that don’t know what it is."

 

[gerbal]

Wave makes alot of sense when you look at the team that produced it. Google Australia is almost never awake at the same time as Google HQ so they probably spend alot of time sending out emails no one is going to reply to until the next work day. Wave works perfectly (the core idea, not the fugly UI) in scenarios where teams in disparate locations with vastly different schedules need to communicate and collaborate on a project.

The crux of the failure of Wave rests, as several have said, on the total absense of integration of previous technologies and on the horrible UI. Had Wave been backwards compatible with email and IM I and many other people would have used it. That is if the horrible UI hadn't reduced my netbook to spasming unresponsiveness.

I fully expect in the next five years some one will roll out a tool with the same principals and many fewer of the same problems.

 

[Wudan Master]

Non of the cool stuff from the video was in the beta, there was no saying when it would be out and the closed beta was a really bad idea as who could you talk to?

They should have waited a year got all the video demo features in and made it an open beta and allowed email integration.

 

[unwesen]

The problem with Wave was that its "one tool for all" nature meant that it wasn't really good at any one form of communication.

It didn't make one-one or one-many communication easier. IM is much better at that.
It didn't make one-one or one-many communication leaving a "paper trail" easier. Email is still better at that.
It didn't make collaborative editing easier. Google Docs is still much better at that.

So, what should anyone have been using Wave for in the first place?

Exactly the point I've been raising since the early invite-only phase.

 

[adminfoo]

Ah, the invite-only phase.

That was another way Google screwed this up: I get my invite. But the guy who sent it to me is already bored with Wave, because when he was interested in it, none of his friends had it yet (and my invite took a week to arrive). I send some invites. By the time my friends receive their invites and sign in, I'm not checking Wave anymore, because ... no one I know to Wave with.

Oopsie!

 

[alansky]

Just what we need—another way to play games! The world is going to Hell in a handbasket and everybody just wants to stick their head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening.