Open Sourced Google Wave demo site. Run from a single server

by progga • 15 years ago

127 36 15 years ago

andybak• 15 years ago

It doesn't seem to look or behave much like the Wave I remember. I'll play a bit more but there seems to quite a lot of functionality missing not to mention the rather drab appearance.

smosher• 15 years ago

That is mostly because it's a different webclient. I have a server running in the office. No one is using it because the webclient isn't good enough.

jamesu• 15 years ago

To me this is a rather neat solution and in a way how wave should have been distributed originally.

However i still find it hard to place wave. It feels too rigid to be used as a chat solution, and too confusing to be used as a messageboard. If anything it feels like an overly elaborate version of etherpad.

neilk• 15 years ago

I used to work at Google and I recognize it as an attempt to solve problems that Googlers have.

Imagine you were in a globally distributed organization of over 10,000 geeks. And all of these geeks are producing documents at warp speed. Based on need it could be text formats in SVN, Google Docs, or graphics. Everybody gets hundreds, even thousands of emails a day, and uses IM obsessively.

And there's a strong need for extreme openness with other teams, but also an occasional need for extreme secrecy.

All these things are archived, but in different places. How do you know what the latest design is? Well, you can check recent email threads, or your chat logs, or the wiki, or your product documents, or...

So the theory here is to end the madness of all these competing formats by making one format that has (potentially) all of their attributes. Your one format can handle any media type you can represent in HTML. All commentary is inline, and you can even develop the comments into full blown documents. You get IM that has history like a wiki, or, wiki collaboration as instant as IM. And all of this could be subject to access control.

Unfortunately that makes it all very amorphous to the average person.

AndrewDucker• 15 years ago

So did it catch on internally at Google?

I assume not, if they're canning it. But I'd love to know why not, if it didn't.

yaix2• 15 years ago

Cool, registering now.

What I most like is the old Google style on the login page. Even after months(?) of using G's new layout, I still dislike it.

BTW: What is a "cancel" button doing on the signup form?

yaix2• 15 years ago

Ugh! What did they do to the nice Wave UI? And what is this "Toolbar" doing there besides cluttering up my small netbook screen? Not good :(

rch• 15 years ago

The old UI is what kept me from using Wave in the first place. I use Opera, and would need some pretty dramatic incentives to switch (cash works - I'm willing to use an e-mail client via Firefox at work). Of course, the current design could be improved upon, but not by simply regressing to the old version.

Incidentally, browser incompatibility with Opera also stopped me from using Quora.

nightpool• 15 years ago

Some of the UI features didn't get released when wave was open sourced, Google not wanting exact duplicates of themselves running around.

nuttendorfer• 15 years ago

Who runs this site?

STenyaK2• 15 years ago

A kind guy who is interested in Wave, and regularly contributes patches to improve the original version open sourced by Google :-)

desigooner• 15 years ago

It would be nice if the site listed some demo accounts for people to try the service before signing up.

albertsun• 15 years ago

Sign-up is super easy. Doesn't require an email address.

dereferenced2• 15 years ago

Use test/test, it works.

splitrocket2• 15 years ago

Kill the live typing. No one wants anyone else to see their edits in real time. Except perhaps in pair programming. Maybe. Its an antipattern for social communication. It is also the number two reason my team never used wave. The number one reason being it was totally divorced from the tools they allready used to communicate: gtalk, Gmail, irc, etcetera.

I just checked my wave account on the news it was sunsetting. I had four new unread waves from friends that were at least four months old. How was I supposed to know they were there? mean, I used Google products daily!

RobAtticus2• 15 years ago

1) I like the live typing, though it does sometimes lead to people ignoring the rest of somebody's message after reading the first sentence. It's good for collaborating on documents like class notes, to-do lists, and other things. Maybe it would be nice if you could adjust the level of syncing: every character, every word, every blip, etc.

2) You could turn on email notifications. I suspect this wasn't done by default because for people like me who had waves constantly being updated and changed, the notifications would have flooded my inbox. The integration definitely could have used some work, but there were ways for you to be notified.

adhipg• 15 years ago

I thought the email notifications weren't turned on by default was because Wave was being marketed as the new alternative to email - a system to use to get rid of emails.

spot• 15 years ago

Live typing makes for way faster and more interactive conversation, I like it.

splitrocket2• 15 years ago

As a total nerd and a bit of an extrovert, I also generally like live typing, however, I don't like it enough to consider it a feature when for several members of my team it was a complete blocker. One person actually yelled across the room "Don't watch me while I type!". If there was an option to turn off the live typing, I think we may have actually used wave seriously.

bane• 15 years ago

1) It's Wave

2) It looks different (similar, but a cut down GUI)

3) It's far more performant than the old Wave GUI

RobAtticus2• 15 years ago

1) Yep

2) Not a huge fan of this

3) Disagree. It's far more performant than Wave when it launched, but this new GUI is on par or worse than the current Wave experience. At least for me, I guess your mileage may vary.

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

I run Wave in a Box - easy to build, configure, and admin. I can think of at least two good use cases for WIAB: a private setup for family use, and a private setup for a companies' work groups. I don't see much value in global large-scale WIAB deployments. However, it seems well tailored for collaboration in small groups.

andrewflnr2• 15 years ago

My impression from the mailing list is that it doesn't have a working persistence system. Is that still the case? I'd love to run WiaB for personal use, but that's a fairly major block for me.

yurize• 15 years ago

No, WIAB has persistence system, even if the implementation is not finalized and can change.

icarus_drowning• 15 years ago

I'd previously tried WiaB and wasn't able to get it running, but, inspired by your comment, I managed to get it up and running in a single evening. You weren't kidding: it is easy (especially if you figure out early that Google's original WiaB instructions assume you're going to clone it from them instead of from Apache, and update the instructions)...

true_religion• 15 years ago

Where do we find the source code for WaveInABox?

talbina• 15 years ago

http://incubator.apache.org/wave/source-code.html

3lit3H4ck3r• 15 years ago

Poor Poor Google Wave...you could have been a contender... Epic Google Fail! :(

ChrisArchitect• 15 years ago

big fan of wave as a simple collaborative editing system. Live editing is intense, but works great when hashing out ideas on a document. Have used for over a year in a small team working on document writing. Have yet to find a good replacement, so this is interesting. Actually, it's not so much there isn't a good replacement -- EtherPad is quite good, especially some of the newer incarnations of it with slicker UI -- but Wave's 'inbox' feature being able to manage and organize multiple waves under account is the thing keeping me using it. I don't want to have to bookmark all my EtherPad docs and somehow track them.

STenyaK2• 15 years ago

Most overlooked feature is the ability to interconnect several Wave servers, the same way you can interconnect several e-mail servers.

That can transform typically suggested alternatives into non-alternatives for some.

dylangs1030• 15 years ago

Great idea, but doesn't Stypi already implement this?

Granted, as a disclaimer, I didn't sign up. I'm making an analysis from what the homepage says.

Question - in Stypi, live typing can be overwritten by anyone else who is in the same room. Does this work the same way? Because that is a huge flaw - but then, I don't think there should be live typing at all.

Open Sourced Google Wave demo site. Run from a single server

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