Comment by hi41
I was one of those people. Really, I didn’t understand what Wave was trying to do. I tried to use it with my friends but all I saw was nested text boxes. Can you please tell me what it was trying to do?
I was one of those people. Really, I didn’t understand what Wave was trying to do. I tried to use it with my friends but all I saw was nested text boxes. Can you please tell me what it was trying to do?
It was a tool for massive information overload.
Imagine being able to experience all the instants of your life in a single moment. Now do that with information and the connections with other people on various topics. You can see the whole thing at once and it updates in realtime!
Now granted I had hundreds of waves going and most of them didn’t warrant full attention, but it always felt like drinking from the firehose.
It made me want to quit tech and take up pottery.
Probably the closest modern analogue is a more realtime version of Google Docs with the comments pane blended in. Slack is popular and useful, but good information that comes up in conversations gets buried by further responses, or lost to dumb retention policies. With chat apps, it takes extra work to preserve the useful bits of conversations. With Wave he goal was to collaboratively build permanent shared knowledge.
> Can you please tell me what it was trying to do?
It was magic for collaborative note taking. In lecture or if we divided up reading and summarisation. Also, of course, for scribbling together live memes.