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!
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.
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.
One of the big reasons Wave failed at Google was that everyone thought it was supposed to be a replacement for email and it wasn't--it wasn't meant to be and it doesn't serve as one.
Wave was meant to replace a certain way in which we use email, which is a subtle but important difference. It was supposed to replace the emailing of versions of documents around, or the long email threads to organize simple things like getting lunch or dinner. These are things where email still to this day falls flat, and Wave solves completely.
There is ample room for startups to be disruptive using nothing more than the open source Apache Wave software.
I have always been dumbfounded by the fact that Google didn't try integrating wave into gmail. If they managed to make a back-end to support turning any email exchange (between people with Google accounts) into a wave at the click of a button (and without leaving the shell of the gmail interface), I have a feeling this product would have been a resounding success - the same way gchat became an instant success when integrated with gmail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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.
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!