Show HN: I decided to re-create a mini Google Wave

[user239]

Even though Wave was killed more than 10 years ago, I didn't fully appreciate its value until recently, when I had to spend a fair amount of time in some group email threads discussing complex subjects.

Would using chat instead solve the problem? Not really. In my opinion, chats are great for exchanging quick single-line replies. But to have a real discussion and arrive at a meaningful conclusion, we actually need more structure, not less structure. Which made me realize I wanted a product that worked exactly like Wave, but without some of its annoying features.

In my opinion, the real-time typing feature was one of the main things that killed Wave. It's a very helpful feature for document editing, but maybe not so desirable when exchanging regular messages. Taking this feature out of the equation, it amazes me that no one (that I'm aware of) has built a product with basic Wave features to support intuitive threaded discussions with granular access control that can be used in both social and workplace settings.

Reading some of the threads here on HN with people saying they wouldn't mind giving this idea a second chance if some product implemented it properly (with clean user-friendly design etc.), made me realize I might not be alone in this thinking. So after building and using it myself for taking notes and communicating with a couple of friends, I'm now ready to start sharing it with the rest of the world hoping to get some feedback on whether this implementation can be of any interest for others.

Thank you for reading this long introduction! Please let me know what you think of this idea.

My goal with this project is to small steps, iterate, and based on any feedback I can get, hopefully, eventually produce something that can provide a non-zero value :)

[solresol]

> the real-time typing feature was one of the main things that killed Wave

Nah. I was there. One thing killed Wave, and nothing else: not-invented-here syndrome from Mountain View executive team. It wouldn't have mattered whether Wave was perfect and bringing in a billion dollars a year; Lars wasn't in California, so whatever he was doing was going to get killed because he wasn't part of the in-crowd.

[user239]

oh really, well that's quite sad. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. I'm glad at least they let him start it, although I'm curious what their thinking was at that moment (like "it's gonna "fail" anyway, just let him play with it").

I would so love for this discussion to be in a Wave-like tool. With inline comments instead of adding quotes by hand, in real time and with all the other cool features. Actually, maybe I can try to integrate my tool with HN API. Although looks like the API is read only, but at least it can be useful to track new comments. Wave was so great at features like showing new comments and playback as well!

[wokstym]

Looks pretty useful, but I would love more modern design, but I get it, it's a first version

[user239]

thank you for checking it out! Yes, current version just uses standard bootstrap elements. Wanted to at least make it look not super ugly :)

Hopefully I can invest more time in design soon if there is enough interest in this idea overall.

Also if anything can be improved in terms of functionality (there is not a lot of it yet, but maybe something obvious can be added/changed), I'm very interested in learning that as well!

[wokstym]

As of feedback I would consider having collapsed all the threads on the first read of messages and the after reading the whole message user can dig down (like on confluence a little bit)

[user239]

Thanks! This is a totally valid feedback. I agree it can get very messy when showing everything by default. Since we have a button to go to next unread message in a discussion that also expands whatever needs to expanded to show the unread message automatically (but doesn’t make the expansion permanent, so on next page load it will still be collapsed), I think it makes sense to collapse by default

[llagerlof]

Which database are you using to store the messages?

[user239]

I’m using Azure Cosmos DB, nothing fancy there, simple structure where each message references its parent message id

[easrng]

Wave was only fully killed in 2018.

[user239]

Oh the Apache foundation project? Technically yes, but I guess I never bothered to try using it in its open source form. Given the code complexity, I feel like only Google knew how to build, run and host it successfully :)