Google Wave: why we didn’t use it

With Google pulling the plug on the development of Wave, its meant-to-be-revolutionary communications protocol, Ars staffers pondered Wave’s collapse. The ideas in Wave were undeniably cool, the vision was ambitious, and Google backed it. So why did no one use it?

We looked to our own experiences of using Wave for clues as to what went wrong, and we found plenty.

Jon Stokes, Deputy Editor

When Google Wave was first announced, I was instantly struck by a use for it: role-playing games. After procuring an invite, I dove right in and was immediately hit by how slow and wonky the interface was. I expected both issues to be addressed in due time, so I set about looking for suitable RPGs to join.

I wrote an article on the results of my Wave RPG quest, then I quit using Wave while I waited for Google to improve it. Months later, I checked back in. Sure enough, Wave’s performance had been improved. Its interface, sadly, had not.

Wave’s primary interface sin was that it crammed a multiple-window-based desktop metaphor into a single browser window. In other words, Wave was a return to the bad old days of Windows 3.11-style MDI, and that made it ugly and initially confusing for even the savviest of users.

Still, Wave held promise, and I kept coming back. I had fantasies of using it like an IRC channel to keep in touch with old friends. I’d periodically try to rope different people into “waving” with me, and if I was able to get a response, I’d try unsuccessfully to keep the conversation going. 

My last and most successful attempt at this was a Wave that I started called “The BH6 Club,” the idea being that old-school hardware site editors would hang out and talk hardware. A lively hardware chat got underway among myself, Tech Report’s Scott Wasson, and Real World Tech’s David Kanter, but as the chat stretched on it became clear just how terribly unsuited Wave’s interface was for extended, IM-style back-and-forth.

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 the 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.

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.

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.

In the final accounting, I’m still on board with the general idea of Wave, if not the actual implementation. E-mail does indeed need to be reinvented, but not quite so radically. Wave was just way too complex and ambitious a departure from normal e-mail, IM, and chat, and its terrible interface only served to exacerbate the complexity, instead of hiding it.

Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer

Wave had a very ambitious goal: it wanted to change how we communicate online and in real-time. It tried to combine the “paper trail” of e-mail, the immediacy of IM and IRC, and the collaborative text editing of a wiki. While the idea was a good one—having to use multiple protocols and applications to communicate with different people in different ways can be frustrating at times—Wave just didn’t offer a better experience than the tools we already use.

Part of the reason for this is that there were no killer apps that leveraged Wave technology (not even Google’s own Wave Web app, as Jon Stokes discussed previously). Google developed the Google Wave Federation Protocol to form the basis of Wave—it’s the underlying protocol similar in some respects to SMTP for e-mail or HTTP for hypertext. The protocol is an open standard, and Google offered open source tools for developers to create Wave servers and support the Wave protocol in their own apps.

When Twitter first launched, it used a Web interface or SMS. But by using a straightforward and simple API, apps such as Twitterrific, Spaz, and Tweetdeck quickly sprang up on the desktop. Apps later launched on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and other mobile platforms. The combination of a simple protocol and proliferation of clients helped propel Twitter’s popularity.

Though there are a few examples of software from SAP, Novell, and Salesforce.com that have added Wave support, no widespread consumer apps have emerged. That dearth of compatible clients left users with no choice but to use Google’s own (and in many cases, less than ideal) Web-based app. 

With only one confusing interface to choose from, Wave just couldn’t garner the mass appeal it needed to supplant more firmly entrenched forms of communication.

Ryan Paul, Open Source Editor

The developers who created Wave felt that they needed a clean break from the past in order to move messaging into the future. One consequence of that design philosophy is that Wave has no built-in support for the existing communication services that are ubiquitous today. Wave users can really only use Wave to communicate with other Wave users—it can’t serve as a bridge to conventional e-mail and instant messaging.

Although Wave’s sophisticated bot system would eventually have made it possible for third-party developers to produce the needed interoperability with “legacy” messaging technologies, the lack of such capabilities out of the box seriously undermined Wave’s potential to attract users. Coupled with the invite system—which put an artificial limit on the total number of people who were even capable of participating in the Wave ecosystem—early users had practically nobody to talk to.

Another downside is that the service’s lack of support for existing messaging protocols precluded the possibility of pulling it out of the browser and using it with existing messaging tools and workflows. If the developers had found practical ways to make it interoperate with Gmail and Google Talk, it would have been much more useful right away.

Ben Kuchera, Gaming Editor

Google Docs was something I was comfortable with and already using extensively. I remember being very excited about Google Wave; then I tried using it, and I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t very intuitive, and I didn’t feel like it had anything to offer over the collaborative online tools I was already using, like Google Docs. There didn’t seem to be any strong vision for the project, and although I tried to use it to organize other people for a few projects, I finally gave up.

If you work online extensively, you probably have your own favored suite of programs, apps, and extensions that do exactly what you want them to do, and you’re used to working with them. Google Wave seemed like it could do many of these things decently, but nothing incredibly well. That’s the kiss of death.

For any application, you have to tell me in plain terms what I’m going to use it for, what problems it’s going to solve, and how it’s better than its competitors. If you can’t do that—and I don’t think Google ever did—it’s more than likely going to end up in the bin.

Emil Protalinski, Contributing Writer

Google Wave tried to do too much from the get-go, and not a single thing truly appealed to users’ needs. As such, the users who tried it out didn’t see a use for it, and few bothered to come back. Google Wave was an experiment to see how powerful a Web app can be. That was its only success.

Jacqui Cheng, Senior Apple Editor

The reasons I didn’t use Wave were simple: I was happy with what I used for similar purposes (Google Docs), Wave was overly complex, and no one else I knew used it for any reason—work, pleasure, or otherwise. What’s the point if it’s going to be just me?

John Timmer, Science Editor

I got on Google Wave pretty early during its invite-only phase through a bit of luck. I had covered some academic research a while back, and Google eventually bought the startup that commercialized the research. So I got in touch again; the researcher was not only kind enough to give me some good quotes for a news story, but he threw in a Wave invite as well. Thus I found myself in what is, for me, a rare position: on the bleeding edge of tech.