This is why Wave failed. Nobody knew quite what it was. They still don't know.
Moreover: nobody cares. People do not care how the tools work. They care about their problems. Having an online conversation in the right mode - not too high-latency, yet not too synchronous, and not too disorganized - is a problem. Users understand that IRC and Wave and Convore are all billed as attempts to solve that problem. Therefore, they are all kind of alike.
If people actually use these tools for a while even non-engineers will eventually come to understand the substantial differences between them, but another way that Wave and Convore and IRC are all alike is that right now most customers have never heard of them, let alone tried them, let alone figured them out.
It's a shame, really. Even in my job nobody seemed to "get it" when i tried to explain benefits and the "real" nature of wave (that it's a protocol). And i'm working in a heavily messaging (mail, etc.) oriented company.
I got everyone beta accounts and yet nobody got it. It was all about the sandbox/webclient. I think Google did a lot wrong with the promotion of wave.
Anyway, i'm eagerly waiting for the completion of the incubator process on apache[1] and will take another look at the state of wave afterwards. I still think the project is one of the most underrated projects of the last years.
I very much hope that the project won't just die.
First of all, i'd say designing a _good_ protocol is pretty much the hardest and smartest work to do. Of course everyone can design a protocol to send a messange from A to B. But you really think it is something _that_ easy to design a complete protocol for messaging between a wide variety of clients and servers? Take as much as possible usecases and edge cases into account and make it really good? If it would that easy SMTP wouldn't have a big pile of extension RFCs.
Everyone can write a website that let's people chat in groups, right? I mean.. really... THAT is easy. ;)
I am right there with you. I now exactly what you are talking about. Every time I hear someone dismiss it, they dismiss out of ignorance. I've never heard otherwise, even from some otherwise smart people.
Yep. Marketing. People thought they had built a chat client. In reality, they were providing a protocol, and to show off this protocol, they built a UI to demo it. People assumed the UI was Wave, and stopped there. =( Such potential.
As for people not caring: that's a result of not understanding the real product and the real potential. Assuming Wave is just about real time communication is really doing it a great disservice.
I don't disagree. Which is why I feel the problem lies with the marketing of Wave. They marketed the UI. Oh, I think technical people should have known better. But even then, so much emphasis was put on the UI, I can see it being a problem.
Basically, I just feel Google didn't do Wave justice by only providing that one client.
I should point out that they did tell people this. They were fairly clear how this was going to be open, that anyone could have a wave server, and how this could be employed.
A good example would be hosting a wave server like people host email servers. So, my domain could have it's own wave server. This would mean my comment here could easily be included on my blog. This would let me blog all my comments. Keep in mind, HN would have to support wave, but then commenting would still work the same way. Anyways, my comment would appear on my blog, and I could see your reply. I wouldn't have to remember to visit HN.
The interface to wave was essentially anything you already used. There are a lot of other really cool things you could do with this. And they told people you could do all this with it.
Unfortunately, they pushed the Wave UI as well, closing it up in a beta with special invites and suddenly people treated it like Gmail++.
So when you see people commenting how they really hope wave survives and eventually takes off, it's because what if does take off, things will get really interesting really fast.
Moreover: nobody cares. People do not care how the tools work. They care about their problems. Having an online conversation in the right mode - not too high-latency, yet not too synchronous, and not too disorganized - is a problem. Users understand that IRC and Wave and Convore are all billed as attempts to solve that problem. Therefore, they are all kind of alike.
If people actually use these tools for a while even non-engineers will eventually come to understand the substantial differences between them, but another way that Wave and Convore and IRC are all alike is that right now most customers have never heard of them, let alone tried them, let alone figured them out.