[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?