Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

Google Wave.

Edit: you asked why. I first saw it at SELF where Chris DiBona showed it to me and a close friend. It was awesome. Real time translation, integration of various types of messaging, tons of cool capabilities, and it was fully open source. What made it out of Google was a stripped down version of what I was shown, the market rejected it, and it was a sad day. Now, I am left with JIRA, Slack, and email. It sucks.

wave was fucking amazing. buggy but amazing

Discord is function wise the best now...

I was blown away by the demo but then after I thought about it, it seemed like a nightmare to me. All the problems of slack of having to manually check channels for updates except X 100 (yea, I get that slack wasn't available then. My point is I saw that it seemed impossible to keep up with nested constantly updated hierarchical threads. Keeping up with channels on slack is bad enough so imagine if Wave had succeeded. It'd be even worse.

Google sucked/s at executive function because they completely lack appreciation for proper R&D and long-term investment and also kill things people use and love.

Isn't Nextcloud (including Nextcloud Talk) a viable alternative? Certainly, something like Discord (centralized and closed source) isn't.

Immediately thought of this.

Even the watered-down version of wave was something I used at my host startup, it was effectively our project management tool. And it was amazing at that.

I don't know how it would fare compared to the options available today, but back then, it shutting down was a tremendous loss.

Honestly a lot of the time they seem to be be in "what do humans want?" mode.

Wave was great for conversation with one or two other people on a specific project, which I'm sure most people here used it for. I can't imagine it scaling well beyond that.

Is there a video or anything of this version of Wave?

Google wave was built on an awesome technology layer, and they they totally blew in on the user interface.... deciding to treat it as a set of separate items instead of a single document everyone everywhere all at once could edit.... killed it.

It make it seem needlessly complicated, and effectively erased all the positives.

Google Wave was way ahead of its time.

Maybe one could have worked around that by embedding Yahoo Pipes, thus automating the X 100.

I think this is spot on. A document metaphor would have made a Wave a lot easier to understand.

Google Wave had awesome tech but if you look at the demo in hindsight you can tell it’s just not a very good product. They tried making an all-in-one kind of product which just doesn’t work.

In a sense Wave still exists but was split into multiple products, so I wouldn’t say it’s “dead”. The tech that powered it is still used today in many of Google’s popular products. It turns out that having separate interfaces for separate purposes is just more user friendly than an all-in-one.

I managed trips with friends and it was a great form factor for ad-hoc discussions with docs and links included. I thought it was the future and in my very early programming days wrote probably the most insecure plugin ever to manage your servers.

https://github.com/shano/Wave-ServerAdmin

It's been 16 years. I should probably archive this..

I don’t get the downvotes. Discord for all its flaws is amazing. I never experienced wave so maybe the comparison is not a good one?

It's indeed not a good one. Discord refined instant messaging and bolts other things on top like forums but isn't fundamentally different. Google Wave was (and still is) a completely different paradigm. Everything was natively collaborative: it mixed instant messaging with document edition (like Google Docs or pads) and any widget you could think of (polls, calendars, playing music, drawing, ...) could be added by users through sandboxed Javascript. The current closest I can think of is DeltaChat's webxdc.

Yep. And rather than ask people, focus group, or look at the evidence, they just guess or do whatever they want. Not much leadership or community engagement appears to be involved.

I don’t think that’s an entirely fair characterization. They obviously spend a great deal of time focusing on what their (human) shareholders want.

I haven’t found one showing what Chris showed. Most seem to focus on just communications with little demonstration of productivity or other features. This is sad to me because its most glorious asset was being open source with a rich set of plugins/extensions allowing tons of functionality.

Well, that's fair. Overpaid managers and principle engineers spun "secret projects" and products like Glass well to be an elitist experience for special people. But I won't forgive not letting Wave bake and mature.

Q: Do they have non-human shareholders I don't know about, or do they have shareholders who lack qualities present in most living human beings?

I’ve only met a few of their significant shareholders and based on that, I’d say the jury is still out.

I remember being excited by wave when the demo hit but never had a use for what it offered at that point in my career.

Slack is the new Google Wave, Wave was too much ahead of time.

It was smoke and mirrors, spiced with everyone letting their imagination run away.

I downloaded the open-source version of the server to see if I could build a product around it, but it came with a serious limitation: The open-source server did not persist any data. That was a complete non-starter for me.

At that point I suspected it wasn't going anywhere. My suspicions were confirmed when I sat near some Wave team members at an event, and overhead one say, with stars in his eyes, "won't it be groovy when everyone's using Wave and..."

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Cool concept, though.

Studied for some CS/EE final with my class on Google Wave. It absolutely rocked for making a study guide together. I can't even really remember how it worked, just that I was blown away by it.

Twitter has hierarchical threads and it succeeded.

Mailing lists use hierarchical threads and they haven't gone away.

Hard to say what Wave could've become, but in Google fashion, they didn't really try and threw it away. Maybe it could've become a Discord-like meets Zoom platform but with more integrations.

Honestly, I'd like to see something like a hosted FOSS Hubot (bot) for Signal that can tap into zillions of IoT and cloud integrations.