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John Duprey is a husband, father, and geek. He makes his living from the latter as a software architect for Thomson Reuters Research and Development. However, he lives for the former two - his wife Abby and their daughter Emma. -- Public Profile

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Filed under: wave

Wave Goodbye: Google Wave Sunsetting in 2012

Like many of Google's projects, Wave was ambitious and bold, but not grounded in reality.  People needed to be weened off "e-mail for everything".  Wave had to be pervasive or it would lack the utility.  (In this regard, Google Plus is *just* eking by..)  So we are stuck with the aged, but tried and "true", e-mail for some time to come.  In some regards, Google Plus is a continuation of Wave - group chats/huddles, discussions via circles, games, etc.

From: Google Wave <wave-noreply@google.com>
Subject: Google Wave Sunsetting in 2012
...
Google Wave Sunsetting in 2012

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team

© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Wave account.

Google Wave Available for Everyone - Google Wave Blog

Google Wave Available for Everyone

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 | 4:10 PM

Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave -- simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you are a Google Apps administrator at a business, school or organization, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost (more on our Enterprise blog).

via googlewave.blogspot.com

This one slipped by quietly.. I need to start paying more attention!

Second Wave - Google Wave Has E-Mail Notifications

Its been MONTHS since I visited google Wave. Its a huge resource hog so I don't leave it open like e-mail. I had about 20 unread messages to catch up on. I also discovered that google wave now supports e-mail notifications so you don't have keeping loading up the bloated thing just to see if there are new posts. Second, when using Google Chrome web browser, it doesn't take up nearly as much memory. Google Chrome (and its child procs) seem to take up about 200M. Safari, 665M. Chrome is also much faster and seems to render Wave better.

It also appears that you can remove people from Waves.. but what about your contacts?

The e-mail thing will definitely encourage me to use it more.

Google_wave_e-mail_notificatio

A Week with Google Wave

Google-wave-logo
I've had my Google wave account for several weeks now, but I've only used it regularly for the first week.


The google provided front end is a pretty ambitious web application that merges instant messaging, e-mail, and collaborative documentation (aka wiki) and discussion.  Extensions allow for all sorts of other forms of collaboration - video conferencing, voting/polls, turn-based games, etc.  Wave uses standard protocols on the backend (extensions to XMPP/Jabber) that will allow "federation" or organization-hosted wave servers that interconnect with others - similar to how organizations host e-mail and web servers today.  

To date, my experience is with the Google provided front-end and here are my impressions:

Real Time Editing Can Be Confusing

Imagine five... or thirty of your colleagues all sitting at the same desk attempting to author the same document at the same time.  No matter how talented the individual, the model eventaully breaks down and everyone starts stepping on each other's toes.  The realtime document editing concept needs to be managed better in part by software and in part by proper netiquette.  The software may be able to facilitate the netiquette using a moderator system found in other sytems.  This feature should be optionally enabled or disabled on a per-wave basis.

Which_is_easer_to_understand

Revisions Tracking (aka Playback) Needs Some Work

Playback/revision tracking needs some work both in its implementation and in its design.  Maybe its the developer in me, but a simple revision log with side-by-side diff is more obvious than finding the edits while "playing back".  Playback is the only mode that caused the wave ui to "crash" requiring a reload.  And was a times slow to respond.

Firefox

A New Dimension to Instant Messaging

Wave adds new dimensions to instant messaging.  No longer do you have to cut and paste part of what someone said to make it clear that you are replying to that bit.  You can click on an IM line and reply to that bit - kind of like a threaded discussion forum.  The only danger is that the recipient might miss the new message if it is off their screen.  Wave UI designers might want to consider a way to keep the conversation linear and still allow replying to past IMs - or perhaps some sort of visual cue to indicate new messages above/below the current visible portion of the screen.

Threaded_im_discussion

Got RAM?

The web front end is memory intensive taking anywhere from 100M on initial load to 500M on viewing a large wave.

Mail1

All of these measurements are taken from my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard.  Pictured above:  "Wave" a Fluid SSB, Waveboard a webkit-based applications, and Firefox with initial weighty overhead of 86M was the least resource intensive.  Safari, not shown, shows a similar foot print to the other webkit-based apps.

While RAM is cheap, I do enough RAM hungry work in a day to NOT want this bloated Wave app open all the time.

Helloooo... Is This Thing On

Pastedgraphic-1
Perhaps everyone feels the same about the RAM requirements because only once or twice did I ever catch someone on at the same time.  Further, because wave accounts are scarce, so is the collaboration.  

Google, Build Some Bridges

Google wave is NOT ubiquitous like e-mail and IM and its current UI is RAM heavy.  No one is going to be willing to keep the RAM eating wave client open all the time like they do for e-mail, the web, or IM.  Google needs to be able to push notifications of wave activity to users via e-mail and IM.  Likewise, wave should support sending plain-old-e-mail and IMs from the wave client.  With these hooks in place and as the UI gets better, people will spend more an more time in the wave UI.  In short, people need a migration path that is less disruptive than switching to a whole new tool and protocol.

Internets, Federate

"A Federation is multiple computing and/or network providers agreeing upon standards of operation in a collective fashion. ..." -- wikipedia

Organizations are likely the first to find real value in what wave offers - more so than the end "mom and pop" users who chat with their grandma via IM or shares photos via flickr.  Organizations and businesses, are in constant collaboration and as business becomes more and more global more of this collaboration is happening electronically.  For the same reasons business host their own e-mail servers, privacy, identity, etc. they will want to host their own wave servers.

If the wave client is still in preview, then the federation software is pre-preview.  As of this writing, reference/prototype modules exist for the OpenFire XMPP server software.  This is all free and open source.  A quick glance at the installation instructions and it looks pretty straightforward to install.  Unfortunately, there is no wave graphical wave client that will work with it.  (Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this point.)  All that exists is a simple, limited, command line client.

For more see: http://www.waveprotocol.org/

Hey, Its a Preview!

Some people love Google to a fault.  Some people hate Google because some people love Google to a fault.  I love technology.  Email, instant messaging, wiki's and other forms of online collaboration and discussion are a part of my daily life.  None of them are perfect and some of them are getting long in the tooth, or at the very least being abused.  I work in an environment where e-mail and IM is the medium by which almost all collaboration is carried.  I welcome a change from the overload of static discussion threads, MS Word attachments etc.  

While I welcome a re-imagining of e-mail, IM, and wiki's for the 21'st century it isn't clear that Google wave is it.  Based on the preview, It has a ways to go but lets not declare it an overhyped flop before it even makes it to beta.  I think it shows some promise simply for its use of existing and extended open protocols.  Further, if Google can't get the UI right, I'm sure someone else can.

You could be looking at the next big thing since the browser, but a lot of maturing and adoption needs to happen between now and then.

Want More?

My Google Wave Invite Arrived Today

I received my Google Wave invite today.  Woot!  This could easily be the next big thing since e-mail and the web browser if it gains enough traction so that everyone uses it - implies ISPs, corporations etc. are hosting wave servers like they host e-mail and web servers today.  

Its currently in beta and I'm looking for people to "wave" with.  I have invites which I'll reserve for colleagues and friends I interact with often.  Friends and colleagues, drop me a line if you would like an invite.
Google_wave

Some links about Wave: