Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. However, Google today announced some significant updates to its social network, Google+, among them that Google Apps users can now sign up for G+ — the integration is finally live.
And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called “Playback”. Or at least one might claim this as its genesis, with the feature having its roots in-house, as opposed to some sort of reaction to Facebook’s much bally-hooed timeline that launched this September. → Read More
As we first reported late last week, Lars Rasmussen, the father of both Google Maps and Google Wave, has left Google is heading to Facebook. As we suspected, part of the reason is that Google pulled the plug on Wave barely a year into its existence. “It takes a while for something new and different to find its footing and I think Google was just not patient,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend. And that brings up another question. Google’s other big social experiment this past year, Buzz, also hasn’t taken off yet. What happens next?
Like Wave, Buzz launched with much fanfare in February of this year. But unlike Wave, Buzz was available to many users right of the box, and instead it was security issues and misunderstandings that led to its initial stumbles. The Buzz team worked quickly to smooth those out, but now the service has a much more serious issue: indifference. → Read More
When Google put their faith in Wave, an ambitious new project last year, they knew it was a gamble. But a big part of it was the team behind the project. A team led by Lars Rasmussen, the engineer best known as the co-creator of the hugely successful Google Maps. And now he’s left the company. And from what we hear, he’s heading to Facebook.
Rasmussen confirmed his departure on his Facebook page. Yesterday was his last day of work at Google. He didn’t give any indication where he’ll be heading next, other than he’d be “a whole big ocean closer” (he was living in Australia where the Wave team was based). But the fact that he put all this info on Facebook is telling. From what we’re hearing, he will be joining Facebook. → Read More
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the new Facebook Groups. It seems well-thought-out (yes, despite the sometimes annoying opt-out aspect) and well-implemented, but I’m just not sure what my use case for it is going to be. I want to use it, but I can’t figure out a reason to just yet.
Oh my god, it’s Google Wave all over again!
Okay, it’s really not. Instead, it almost seems like what Wave should have been when Google launched it as a consumer-facing product. Groups may lack some of the snazzy HTML5 bells and whistles and realtime technology of Wave, but it more than makes up for those in user experience and user interface elements that make this thing downright usable by human standards — something, sadly, Wave never quite achieved. → Read More
Yes, Google Wave is dead — but it won’t fully flatline until some time in 2011, Google confirmed in a post today. Well actually, their words were that wave.google.com (the front-end product) “will be available at least through the end of the year.” But yes, you can probably expect them to shut it down sometime in 2011.
But before that happens, Google is also promising that “there will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year.” So if you have been one of the seemingly few users who has been using Wave a lot, there will be a way to get the data you created out of it. It’s not yet clear what format this will be in, but we’re going to assume some sort of standard export file type. → Read More
When I first heard the news that Google Wave was dead last week, I was surprised. I wasn’t surprised because it was a thriving, successful product (obviously, it wasn’t). I was surprised because of the gushing I heard about it from within Google leading up to and immediately following its introduction. To hear them tell it, this was the future. So I was obviously surprised that they only gave the “future” one year to prove itself. And that’s being generous.
Obviously, I knew part of that gushing was the same bullshit hype and marketing that any company applies to any new product. But it really did seem as if some key executives — everyone from Vic Gundotra to Sergey Brin — were genuinely excited about Wave. And rightfully so. As I wrote at the time, it was ambitious as hell. → Read More
As you may have heard, Google Wave is dead. But why is it dead? Google CEO Eric Schmidt took some time today after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA to answer that.
When BBC reporter Maggie Shiels asked about the reasons behind the product’s demise, Schmidt noted that Google liked the UI and a lot of the technology behind the product, but it simply to take off. “We try things,” he said. “Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,” he continued. → Read More
Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.
Wave, a real time messaging platform, was unveiled in May 2009 to an enthusiastic crowd of developers at the Google I/O event in San Francisco. It would “set a new benchmark for interactivity,” said Sergey Brin.
The product is part email, part Twitter and part instant messaging. Users can drag files from the desktop to a discussion. Wave even showed character-by-character live typing. It fully launched this last May. → Read More
It was one year ago at Google I/O that company unveiled one of its most ambitious projects to date: Google Wave. Sadly, ambition doesn’t always equal success. In fact, you might say Google Wave was too ambitious. It was promising to be too many things — it needed focus. And it needed polish. Now, all this time later, Google believes it finally has both.
Today, Google is announcing that Wave will be open to everyone. This includes not only consumers with Google accounts, but also Google Apps customers. The project is now a part of Google Labs, where it will remain as work continues on it. But much work has already been done — if you haven’t tried it in the past few months, now is probably a good time to revisit it, as is it much more stable and faster than it was in the past. And it’s full of some new features that should make it more obvious what it can be useful for. → Read More
Remember Google Wave? No, not Google Buzz — Wave, that other social information pump that Google launched last year. It’s hard to blame you if you don’t. While Google’s goals are ambitious with Wave, many users couldn’t figure out what to do with it, or why they needed it in their lives. Perhaps more importantly, it was basically impossible to know if someone was talking to you in Wave unless you had it open all the time. Not anymore.
Wave is finally turning on email notifications to alert you about new and updated waves. From the Inbox menu, simply select the new “Notifications” option to set how often (if at all) you’d like to receive them. The Wave team recommends that if you’re not a heavy user of Wave, you should get notified “immediately” upon a change. For more active users, the team seems to have a smart approach: → Read More
During the Q&A session today following the Google Buzz event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed something both humorous and interesting. When asked a question about practical uses for Google Buzz, Brin noted that he actually used the service to help him write his op-ed about Google Books that ran in the New York Times last year.
Brin noted that he was having difficulty with the article because it’s just his one point of view. So he put out his draft on Google Buzz (which Google was testing out internally within the company at the time), and quickly got dozens of comments. Brin then used this feedback to edit his article. → Read More
See our live notes from today’s Google Buzz event here.
Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.
Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present. → Read More
Love it or hate it, Google Wave is proving to be a great way for people to express themselves creatively in the form of videos. We’ve seen it with Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. We’ve seen it with the Declaration of Independance. And now we have a 2009 year-in-review Google Wave video.
There’s not much to say other than this is really well done. It was created by Whirled Interactive, the same group that made the movie Waves. These guys are good. → Read More
The first time you go surfing, it’s a pretty significant achievement to just stand up on the board and ride a wave. Most people never leave their stomachs, or when they do, they fly face first into the wave. Google Wave, it seems, is not entirely dissimilar.
On its Google Wave Blog today, the company announced a very significant milestone for the young service: A million invites have been sent out. The single biggest complaint about Google Wave so far has been the lack of access to it as everyone who wants to see what all the fuss is about. So Google has opened up the floodgates today and apparently let in everyone who previously requested an invite (though they are still requiring the invite request here). But a million invites is hardly a million users, and certainly not a million happy riders. → Read More
Apparently, like everyone else, the Seattle Times is very interested in trying to figure out what to actually use Google Wave for. But while most are trying to use it for either fun, realtime chats, movie reenactments, or inner-business workings, the Seattle Times have tasked Wave with a larger goal: Catching a killer.
This public Google Wave has been set up to involve the community by offering realtime information that anyone may know about the location of a man suspected of killing four Seattle police officers. A search of a Seattle-area home this morning turned up nothing, but various reports of sightings are coming in, and the Times is opening a Wave to help with the flow of information. → Read More
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.
What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?
So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. That, of course, means Facebook has to go along with it. Playing ball with Twitter command and control doesn’t make sense unless Facebook likes the idea of doing the same thing with “their” own stream. Well, maybe so. That leaves two obvious alternatives. → Read More
This guest post was written by Martin Seibert, a German Internet media consultant.
Google Wave is a hot topic at the moment. The ambitious group collaboration and micro-messaging platform started rolling out in beta via an initial batch of 100,000 invitations two months ago. Many people still want invitations. Among those who’ve tried it, some criticize it, some praise it. For now it has a lot of usability problems that are described below. Yes, you should look at Google Wave. But there is no need to desperately long for an invitation yet.
Nevertheless, this post outlines how you’ll probably use Google Wave in the future and also gives you advice on how to implement it in your company or your team of coworkers. It also reveals some big usability problems in the current version. Those issues aside, I would like to show you the advantages of the “wave” once again and describe some cool use cases that might make you love it at some point in the future. → Read More
Now this is cool. Some of the hype over Google Wave has died down over the last few weeks, in no small part because most people have absolutely no idea how to use it (no, the 80 minute long video demo doesn’t help). Now it looks like the Wave team has another idea up their sleeves to show people the power of Wave: they’re using it to recreate famous documents.
This time they’ve reconstructed the Declaration of Independence, complete with edits and comments from the founding fathers. My US History is a bit fuzzy, but there are plenty of obvious jokes nestled in here, and I’m sure the Googlers have included a few more subtle ones as well. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Wave account if you want to witness the creation of one of the United States’ most important documents. But we’ve tried to grab a few of the key moments in the screenshots below. → Read More
Do a search for Google Wave on the App Store from your iPhone or desktop client, and you’ll see an application called just that pop up, ready to be installed as soon as you fork over $0.99 (or €0.79 in my case). One caveat: it’s not built, authorized or in any way endorsed by Google.
Spotted by Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment, the unofficial Google Wave iPhone app seemingly slipped past Apple’s usually and notoriously rigorous quality assurance and trademark compliance team and made its way to the App Store (iTunes link – up to you to decide if this is something you want to pay for). → Read More
“Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” – Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, co-founder of FriendFeed, currently doing vague infrastructure things at Facebook.
Today, at our RealTime CrunchUp event in San Francisco, Buchheit and Threadsy founder Rob Goldman sat down for a chat with our own Steve Gillmor and Erick Schonfeld. The topic was: Can We Kill Email Already? All Aboard The Micro-Message Bus.
So can we kill email? → Read More
San Francisco, CA
