[s_dev]

Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do.

Google Answers was destroyed by Yahoo Answers - you could see the approach they were going for though - a properly answered question can be shown again and again. SO seemed to strike a balance between the two.

[onion2k]

Google Wave was a collaborative editor. It was nothing like Slack or HipChat (unless I've managed to really misunderstand Slack despite building a few things on top of it). It's problem was that it didn't have a purpose - no one really knew what to do with it because a "Wave" was presented an amorphous blob of "knowledge" that people could contribute to at the same time. It was an online notepad, sketchbook, and spreadsheet all at the same time, yet it was also none of those things because you couldn't easily get the document out of Wave.

Wave was a textbook example of how you can fail if people don't understand why they should use your product. They gave up on it (by handing it to the Apache Foundation where it continues to be developed), rolled the clever collaboration technology into Google Docs, and told everyone they'd made it so you could edit a doc at the same time as someone else. Everyone continues to love it to this day.

[Slackwise]

Google Wave was an XMPP-based protocol¹. It allowed communication and collaboration with revisioning. It could have been embedded into applications such as office suites, giving you collaboration and communication right inside the app.

Wave.google.com was an example product using said protocol. Since the protocol was barely spoken of, even by developers, everyone assumed the website was the (only) product. Since the website did a lot of things, and none of it well, often being compared to email, it flopped and the entire project folded..

Now the project lives on in obscurity under Apache: http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html

¹ Technically, the "Wave Federation Protocol", but anyone that really looked into Wave would know that the protocol was the most important element of the project.

[maaku]

> It could have been embedded into applications such as office suites, giving you collaboration and communication right inside the app.

You mean like google docs?

[s_dev]

It was certainly very like Slack in that it's like a IRC/Forum/IM combo that can integrate with third parties and display almost any content pics, images, vids etc with channels and private messaging for disseminating content by topic. You could describe Slack as a "collaborative" tool as well.

The purpose of Google Wave was basically to be a fancy do all messaging service. Many critics have compared Slack to Google Wave including Hunter Walk an ex YTer and Googler. You can see that Google Wave was probably even more powerful - so powerful that it looked daunting and confusing and people didn't know how to use it.

[adamkochanowicz]

Wave was a replacement to email, not exactly an online "notepad." It wasn't about documents at all, no more so than email today is.

So you're right that it's not like Slack or Hipchat, but I think you may also misunderstand its purpose.

[onion2k]

Google pitched it as a replacement for email (another reason for people being confused about it's purpose) but the reality was that it was absolutely nothing like email. A wave was a document that you could edit with other people.

The 'about' page: https://web.archive.org/web/20100427183005/http://wave.googl...

Actually, looking at the screenshot on that page, I can see why s_dev sees it as something like Slack. It has a much more 'chat'-based interface than I remember. Sorry s_dev.

[hobs]

Yeah I always saw it as a mix between an instant message, a wiki page, and an email with real time collab. I really loved Wave because for interactions that were not well defined (such as building a knowledge base) I believe you could start waves from parts of a wave, and playback how each component of the information came together in a form of primitive version control.

Simplifying the interface, inviting more people to the beta when it was originally out, and increasing the ability to federate easily were three big things that were missing from wave for more people to adopt it imo.

[wehadfun]

You can do collaborative editing in Google Docs. What was the difference between Google Docs and Google Wave?

[joezydeco]

As a Google Answers verified researcher (gee, am I breaking my NDA by stating this?), and this is speaking from my perspective, the project closed/failed for reasons other than Yahoo!'s rise in the area.

GA worked quite well at first. There were some very active users that did excellent work and got paid quite nicely for their efforts. But a vague set of rule changes started to migrate in.

For example, a non-verified observer could comment on a question and pretty much give the entire answer. An official GA Researcher would answer the the question above the line, and the response from Google would be "Well, you didn't add any information to this topic than what was already on the page, so no payment for you". Riiiiight.

There were other little quirks and then eventually Google announced one day it was over. That's just how it rolled with them. I'm chalking it up to shiny things elsewhere that took attention away from GA. I did get a nice fleecy blanket as a Christmas gift one year. Not sure why.

[lmm]

The funny part is how for years we pretended Jabber was good and we couldn't understand why no-one was using it. There are a few critical pieces of functionality that you seemingly can't get with that protocol - being able to sign in from multiple devices and have messages sent to all of them, groupchats as a first-class thing (highlighting when you're mentioned but not otherwise), mobile support.

[acdha]

> Google Wave was simply too ahead of it's time. It's funny to see how Slack and HipChat are so similar to it. I recall it's performance being poor and people being a little confused by how much it could do.

That's somewhat true for certain technical aspects but it's too quick to ignore the mistakes Google made and minimize the value of work which more successful products put into the user experience.

Google never made the case for why using Wave would benefit you; as with Buzz, Plus, etc. Googlers reported liking it because they had both critical mass and pressure to use it long enough to see the benefits but few people outside did.

Instead, what we did hear about a lot was the technology which was going to change the world right up until it failed. This is a common failure mode for Google where the strong engineering culture crowds out UX, forgetting that for almost any product that's an implementation detail which most people shouldn't need to care about.

[thrillgore]

Wave tried to be a lot of things -- a social network, a collaborative editor, and a chat client at once. It did none of these things easily as a result of the mishmashed use cases. It's good technology searching for a problem that doesn't exist.

Wave has been collecting dust as an Apache project ever since.

[jimktrains2]

Google Wave was a collaborative editor and communication tool that didn't let you collaborate with the people you wanted (invite needed); IMHO that's what killed it.