The Shareflow Google Wave Ripoff Debate
July 17th, 2009 by Peter Stern · comments · http://blog.zenbe.com/giujiEven before Alex Payne’s tweet, the debate has been raging in tweets and blogs: did we make Shareflow to copy Google Wave?
Well, what do you think?
I think this debate is such a great example of how people’s brains are wired to make causal assumptions based on recent history of hearing things. This is why people think sharks are dangerous to people, and that shark attacks come in waves, based on hearing or reading about shark attacks, when the statistics show that shark attacks are remarkably constant from year to year. Toasters, donkeys, and coconuts on beaches are all much more likely to kill you than a shark, regardless of what you hear. I am sure Malcolm Gladwell has a book about this, but one of my favorites is this one, that I picked up at Heathrow one dreary winter day.
Let’s suppose that Zenbe HAD copied Google Wave. That would mean that Zenbe managed to design, build and deploy a real, complete, useable product, along with everything needed to actually support a public service, all in less than a month! That would be phenomenal! Miraculous! You should check out Shareflow just to see the magic!
If you search the Internet you will realize that Shareflow must be a separate, independent solution, perhaps to a similiar problem, and has nothing to do with Google Wave.
Shareflow grew out of our own efforts at solving our own communication and collaboration needs. We wanted a something that would let us ditch IM, email, wikis, and other disconnected tools. We have been working on Shareflow for more than a year, its been out in public since February 09, in private testing for a few months before that.
You want proof? How about a Youtube video from March, or a blog post from April? Or this one. Or just ask anyone who signed up for our subscription service Zenbe Mail earlier this year.
The history of technology is filled with solutions that are appear to be copies but that actually arise independently. My favorite example is the Soviet Space Shuttle, Buran. Did you know that the Soviets built and launched a space shuttle in the 1980’s? It looks like an exact copy of an American one, caused quite a shock, people started looking for spies, but the educated conclusion was that if you need a spaceship that has to land like a plane, carry a few people, and haul payload of a certain size, its going to look pretty much exactly like a space shuttle.
Google, or any large company, can afford big announcements of grand visions. Google Wave might be a good idea, and it might be a big success. Wave seems a long way off from being a usable solution for us regular folks.
Shareflow is here to make your life better, and your teams’ life better, right here. right now. Give it a try.
July 17th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
What I find so interesting about the comparison is that there are lots and lots of other products that are similar to Shareflow. In fact, as we were building Shareflow, both FriendFeed and Facebook launched redesigns that were eerily similar to what we had on our staging servers.
Indeed, the Wave hype is a bit like Shark Week, and people are missing the bigger story: the way we all communicate is changing. It’s not just like Wave came out of nowhere. It’s in real-time feeds and streams and flows all over the web these days.
That said, I feel good about our solution, because we designed and built Shareflow based on our experience over the past 2+ years trying to rethink what email should be. A lot of what I see in other solutions are ideas that we considered, iterated on, and left behind, because they weren’t necessarily beneficial to users’ real behavior.
July 17th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I believe you. I signed up to zenbe email sometime last year after reading about it in webuser magazine. I think it was at the time when potential users had to ask for an invite to use Zenbe email. I can’t remember that much about it as I wasn’t too keen. However I really like shareflow, you’re quite right in saying that no one could develop something like that in just a few weeks.
On a lighter note, whilst I can believe a donkey or even a coconut is more likely to kill you on a beach than a shark, I have to admit to being somewhat puzzled by a toaster?? When was the last time you saw a toaster on the beach, I mean where do you plug it in or am I on the wrong kind of toaster, is there one I don’t know about?
July 24th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
[...] plenty of accusations, Zenbe’s team is vehemently denying any notion that Google Wave was the direct inspiration for [...]
July 25th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
[...] plenty of accusations, Zenbe’s team is vehemently denying any notion that Google Wave was the direct inspiration for [...]
July 25th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
[...] plenty of accusations, Zenbe’s team is vehemently denying any notion that Google Wave was the direct inspiration for [...]
July 26th, 2009 at 4:59 am
I wrote about Shareflow in Google Wave Community : http://googlewavecommunity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=25 …I’m not much aware of the whole functionality. So if anyone from here can elaborate, it would be better.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:24 am
[...] easier and more fun, Zenbe has a feature called Shareflow available that has been compared to Google Wave. To be clear, they get high points for innovation despite the resemblance because, as the blog post [...]
August 5th, 2009 at 3:31 am
[...] Il s’agissait en effet de Webmail ou de To-do liste. Toutefois, Zenbe et ses employés démentent fermement avoir voulu “copier” Google Wave en sortant leur service Shareflow, mais il leur est [...]