I was extremely fond of Wave when it came out, but remember few people I knew shared that view. Now I am trying to think back to Wave and how it differed from Slack... wasn’t it pretty similar?
I'm kinda shocked by the comments referring to Slack. Wave was very different from any other chat platform. You could edit everything, add different media elements to the document/channel and keep commenting everywhere on everything. Slack to me is really just another chat software. I see very little difference between it, campfire or Hipchat and honestly for the life of me don't understand why everyone transitioned from Campfire to Hipchat and now to Slack.
Yeah I remember it being more like OneNote than a chat app. At least that's now I remember trying to use it. Maybe it was something halfway in between. As much as I tried to use it, it never really caught on. Can't really remember now.
I'm fuzzy as well but afaik Wave had threaded / hierarchical comments. The way they did allowed for new threads to be spun off. It better reflected how conversations happen and knowledge is collected, related to other knowledge, etc.
It also had a replay feature. So if you had someone jump in the middle of a discussion, they could rewind, replay and see how it happened. As subtle as that might seem just queues and context help understand - the knowledge and the people / group.
Those were what I remember thinking "this is The One" only to see them walk away too soon.
From what I remember the problem I ran into with Wave was basically a 'tyranny of structureless-ness' kind of thing. Theoretically, I much preferred the flexibility, but in practice I have to admit that the much more restrictive approach that Slack takes (single-level main channel chat + replies to main chat messages in sidebar) seems to work better.
No doubt it had its flaws. But those could have been worked out. Unfortunately, it was as if Google wanted to say this is how YOU are going to work, and wasn't interested in the possibility that they could be mistaken.
File under: great idea! Poor execution.
The latter was so bad I'm still surprised no one else picked up the idea and ran with it. It wasn't the idea that failed. It was the brand / company / org that conceived it.
It was like slack, but way better! I'm still sad it died, and still secretly hoping someone is working on "Wave Phoenix". My favourite feature of it was to replace/augment the comment fields on my blog posts with "waves". When anyone posted a comment on my blog, it would appear my Wave client inbox like it was a regular-ol' email thread - and I could reply in-place (and real-time).
It was a pretty exciting concept to me that ALL of my interactions for various disqus-like random posts, emails, blog comments, forum replies etc - could be handled from the Wave client.
But they realllly bodged the roll out. First it was the "developer-version" where everyone could pile-on - and it was madness. You could actually "reply all" to EVERYONE. Like sending a @everyone slack message to every slack channel! Chaos!
Then they went to the"invite-only" phase - and suddenly the whole thing became a ghost-town, and there was no incentive to open your wave client.
I wish they had have nailed it, because I'm positive there was a good idea underneath it.
In term of functionalities, Wave was wait above Slack from my point of view, it was the good tool to do collaborative work with real time multi-users document edition for example (today available in google docs), easy inline images in messages. I'm only using slack for messaging (as an email alternative).
