{"id":287,"date":"2012-03-21T15:19:16","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T22:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=287"},"modified":"2019-04-26T16:11:24","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T23:11:24","slug":"web-rip-google-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/web-rip-google-wave\/","title":{"rendered":"web: RIP Google Wave"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Google<\/a>Google is shutting down wave.google.com. Back in 2009 it was the most exciting piece of software to come along in years. A real-time<\/span> multi-user<\/span> rich document<\/span> editor<\/span>!!<\/em> So it can be a chat window, a collaborative Word document, a scrapbook, a planning area, an e-mail thread, a live news update… Google boiled it down to “A wave can be both a document and a conversation.”<\/p>\n

Its demise was almost preordained when Gmail didn’t show new and updated waves. Perhaps another SPage’s law: If it has its own inbox, then it’s probably going to fail. After dealing with my regular Gmail inbox, the last thing I want to do is go to another inbox and fuss with that. And Gmail isn’t even my main e-mail account, so I rarely get to Gmail, let alone other Google inboxes! Which reminds me, maybe I’ve got new messages in my Google Voice inbox<\/a>…<\/p>\n

The ideas\/ideals of Google Wave live on in other Google products. Several people can work on the same Google Docs document at the same time<\/a> and it has a separate chat window. And Google documented the underlying Wave federation protocol<\/a> and released an open source implementation. Building on that codebase, Etherpad<\/a> lets multiple people go to a URL and simultaneously edit its text; then Mozilla turned this into htmlpad<\/a> which lets multiple people author the same HTML document.<\/p>\n

So instead of Google Wave taking over everything thanks to its fundamental do-everything capabilities, existing web software and new web niches have adopted its features. I think free-form amorphous collaboration is just too uncertain for us humans, even with revision history and rollback. The idea that your chat could be turned into a presentation, or your e-mail can be rewritten by someone else, is disquieting, even though in a digital fungible<\/a> world that’s always the case. Google Wave too explicitly showed our 1s and 0s are just an amorphous lump of clay, most people need an organizing framework such as: my sent e-mail – your reply,\u00a0 my chat – your response, or my version of the Word doc – everyone else’s ^%$#@! e-mail attachment; though the success of wikis suggest many of us can give up authorship in the right context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google is shutting down wave.google.com. Back in 2009 it was the most exciting piece of software to come along in years. A real-time multi-user rich document editor!! So it can be a chat window, a collaborative Word document, a scrapbook, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,18,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-source","category-software","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":858,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions\/858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}