Google just announced that Google Wave development has ended. It’s a shame, because Wave was certainly one of the few communication products that tried to innovate. Mashable even called it a massively disruptive communication tool.
We had been working on the foundations of Flowdock for about 6 months when Google initially introduced Wave. At first, it was a horrifying moment: Google is known to enter new markets, crushing the existing players. They seemed to have many of the same ideas, and even the concepts (like flow vs. wave) sounded surprisingly familiar.
We are often compared to Wave, although Wave and Flowdock do not bear much resemblance UI-wise.
However, we do share some high-level similarities:
Natural real-time communication. Communication tools say they are real-time, but in Flowdock you can actually feel that you’re solving problems as a team. Any message, be it via chat, e-mail, Twitter or RSS, sent to your team’s flow will appear within a second. That’s the kind of experience you expect but you’re not used to.
Disruptive ideas in text-based communication. Chats have looked the same for 20 years, and even a Facebook-style stream with comments and the likes is not disruptive anymore. Wave had the courage to try things like “everyone can edit anything”, the same way as Flowdock is innovating with the powerful tagging system.
But Wave didn’t die for no reason. It was a splendid protocol engineering exercise, but it was left for the extension developers to find out the use-cases. Without Google’s guidance they sometimes got a bit lost: when I went to Google’s local Wave event aimed at business types they explained how to look up your favorites movies using the IMDB wavebot.
Some design choices were also very confusing. Because everyone was allowed to edit everything, it became very unclear how a discussion actually had evolved. Wave offered a playback feature to work around this problem, but it wasn’t very convenient. A normal person just couldn’t understand what’s happening inside his Wave.
We ended up taking a very different path than Google. Our mission has always been to help teams communicate more efficiently. We don’t solve cross-organizational communication issues, teams are our thing.
Because of our focus, we could actually serve our users much better than other tools. Team compositions are relatively static, meaning that team members could actually share a common categorization – something that wouldn’t be possible in random e-mail threads. This led us to investigate how tags could be used to find the important parts of a discussion.
Eventually Flowdock evolved to be a bridge between communication and knowledge. In Flowdock, a piece of discussion can be turned into a ToDo item. Or a link you shared can be marked as a potential competitor of your company. The team’s internal communication can directly help the team to organize itself, but traditionally communication and knowledge management have been separate issues.
While the product strategy for Wave obviously wasn’t very clear, I think Google certainly did a favor for the online community by showing that there’s still room for innovation in the collaboration field.
Flowdock will continue experimenting with new ways to connect your communication to your typical workflow. There’s some cool stuff coming out in the end of the summer, so stay tuned and follow us on Twitter.