<story><title>Google Kills Wave</title><url>http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alextgordon</author><text>It failed because it was completely invisible.&lt;p&gt;Facebook spams your inbox. They &lt;i&gt;make sure&lt;/i&gt; you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc).&lt;p&gt;With wave, it&apos;s silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I&apos;m only just finding out &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt;. What kind of a communication tool is that? It&apos;s like they&apos;re selling a phone that can&apos;t ring.&lt;p&gt;The other UI and social issues were important but weren&apos;t fatal. If Google had actually &lt;i&gt;notified&lt;/i&gt; users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer.&lt;p&gt;Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m104</author><text>You&apos;re right: completely invisible.  Wave would have been so cool if Google had plopped it right on top of Gmail, like Gchat and Buzz.  Our Wave-enabled contacts would have gotten their messages as waves, seamlessly, and non-Wave contacts would have continued to receive regular emails.  Wave collaboration could have been supported with notification emails to non-Wave contacts, like &quot;we&apos;re editing this on Wave, so click here {...} to join in.&quot;  Best of all, every Gmail user would have been upgraded to Wave... I thought that was supposed to be the plan!  What a waste.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d like to ask one of the top Googlers just what they were thinking by positioning Wave as a replacement to email, chat, and online collaboration and NOT integrating those services into Wave itself.  IPv4 to IPv6, hello!  No migration plan means no migration.  Email support means being able to use Wave and email at the same time; not having to choose.&lt;p&gt;Still trying to wrap my head around this, but at this point I&apos;m not sure what&apos;s worse:
a) Planning, developing, implementing, marketing, and supporting Wave as communications platform without regards to Gmail, Gchat, and Buzz or
b) Axing Wave before trying to add Gmail, Gchat, and Buzz support</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Kills Wave</title><url>http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alextgordon</author><text>It failed because it was completely invisible.&lt;p&gt;Facebook spams your inbox. They &lt;i&gt;make sure&lt;/i&gt; you know that you have an account and that people are trying to reach you (or tell the world about their cat, etc).&lt;p&gt;With wave, it&apos;s silent. There was activity on a wave I was following in January. I found out about it in March. Someone replied to something I said on July 21st. I&apos;m only just finding out &lt;i&gt;now&lt;/i&gt;. What kind of a communication tool is that? It&apos;s like they&apos;re selling a phone that can&apos;t ring.&lt;p&gt;The other UI and social issues were important but weren&apos;t fatal. If Google had actually &lt;i&gt;notified&lt;/i&gt; users when they got new messages, they would have logged into wave, sent more messages and wave would have lasted longer.&lt;p&gt;Instead, messages were sent but never read, so Wave lost all the momentum it had.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jaybobzin</author><text>The sad thing here is that Google did the polite thing, and turned off email notifications by default.  It actually took some searching to figure out how to turn it on.&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with Buzz, where they dropped it right in the middle of your inbox.  Quite the opposite strategy.&lt;p&gt;I suppose the solution I favor is to ask the user if they want notifications when they sign up.  Or at the very least making it very obvious how to turn on notifications if you want them.&lt;p&gt;The notification messages were also not very well thought out, it was often confusing what had changed, requiring you to log in to Wave just to read a new message that could have easily been read via email.</text></comment>