Every Googler I spoke to (OK, both of them) about the now cancelled Google Wave, I asked when it was going to be incorporated into GMail.
There was some very interesting technology in Wave and some really compelling ideas on how to facilitate rich real-time online conversation. There were also some usability issues, but those are the sorts of things that can be, and were being sorted out. The big hurdle was always convincing people that using Wave was a better idea than sending an email, pinging someone on IM, writing a note on Facebook or any of the thousand other ways people communicate over the Internet these days.
As a writer of collaboration software, the “How do I get people to use it?” question comes up a lot. To get people to use your application you need to give them a compelling reason to visit the site: not just once to see what it’s like, but every day to check what's new. For social software you need to get over the Catch-22 hurdle: you need content to bring people to the site, and you need to bring people to the site to generate content.
You need a circuit-breaker: a path from the old way of doing things to the new.
Wave was supposed to be an email killer, but there was never any migration path. Google Talk and Buzz both benefit from a presence in the GMail UI: I wouldn't even know Buzz existed if it wasn't reminding me from my Inbox. Integrating Wave with GMail seemed to me like the logical next step, allowing GMail/Talk users to enhance conversations amongst themselves while somehow keeping non-Waved participants in the loop.
Sticking Wave in a quiet corner and not letting it play with the other children just seemed like a bit of a waste.
I never saw Wave as an email killer once using it. For me it was a wiki/document killer. It kinda sucked as a communications medium, but as a collaboration platform for editing documents, it seemed like it had huge potential.
For example, requirements docs could be brilliant when done in a Wave. Guess we'll never know now.
Hey Charles,
interesting indeed. Wave was/is very technology but not people centric. I remember in the beginning they gave out invites without the ability to invite friends yourself, so you could only wave with the google staff that invited you, which in my case was only one person i knew there. Got me into it but didn't keep me there. Apparently they were afraid to crack under the load after the Google I/O wave hype...
The second issue was you already pointed out - you have to sign up manually. Buzz got into trouble for opting in people automatically, wave diversifailed and missed out on reaching critical mass.
Classic "build it and they're going to come?" scenario, is it? Don't ignore your users.
Cheers,
Simon
I tried Wave out for about two seconds before wondering why I shouldn't just use Gmail and Google Talk instead. There was nothing I could see that was a new or more convenient way of communicating than stuff which Google has already done.
(As far as document killers go, Google Docs could kill the .pdf at any time in my opinion)
I was interested in Wave from day one, but stuck with the problem you describe.
Then, a mere month or so ago, Wave was added to Google Apps for Enterprise, which we use at my company. I created a couple of Waves and encouraged others to as well. It still didn't go very far, and took a lot of work to coax others on. I can't honestly say whether it would have taken off with us or just been Yet Another Document Store; not nearly enough activity in the time. It wasn't the realtime stuff that interested me, rather the mix of document and discussion uses; I've yet to see anything else do it well.
So, I suspect GAE would have been the kicker it needed, but just didn't get enough time.