Google aims to reinvent email with Wave (2009)
cbc.ca

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81 points

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xattt

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16 days ago

95 comments

rs186 ・ 15 days ago

Was a Wave user, and to this day I can't believe Google botched their opportunity to build their Slack/Teams years before those products existed. Of course, hindsight blah blah.

Still, this tells me having the right ideas or the technology has nothing to do with releasing a "right"/successful product.

  • glenstein ・ 15 days ago

    I think this is a meaningfully different variation on the "Google doesn't commit to their products" convo. If we look at the subset of those where, retrospectively, we see that others enter the same space executed successfully and built big businesses, it's a new way of articulating Google's collapse of strategic vision.

    Wave is a good example. I think Stadia is another one, they checked out right as handheld gaming started taking off. Probably others once you start looking through everything.

    • nvarsj ・ 14 days ago

      It’s classic big company syndrome. Stupid performance processes, obsessions with metrics above all else, the MBAfication of the entire leadership chain. It’s basically impossible to build a good product in this environment. All big tech has this - they succeed through acquisition and anti competitive approaches instead.

  • markhuggins ・ 15 days ago

    My (admittedly sketchy) memory of Wave was that it felt like a tech demo rather than an end user app. There's probably a market for it as -a-service in the modern cloud world managing distributed interaction.

  • goku12 ・ 15 days ago

    It wasn't the lack of foresight that failed Wave. People recognized it as the base platform for a lot of future applications. They botched the rollout instead.

  • brayhite ・ 15 days ago

    I tried to use Wave to collaborate on a blog post with friends, rather than emailing each other critiques.

    They thought it seemed to complicated and stuck with email.

    I’m haphazarding a guess that maybe Google didn’t stick with it because, if I recall, most if not all of their services were free and this one probably cost a lot to run without a clear monetization strategy. If it didn’t increase the size of a captive audience, and they weren’t willing to show ads in the product itself, and they weren’t going to get better data from users to inform their ad services elsewhere…why run it?

    Of course that’s all speculation.

    • woleium ・ 15 days ago

      I thought it was used as a vehicle to have users agree to a much more “we can do whatever we want with your data” tos. From that standpoint i guess it was successful, everyone signed up.

  • scoofy ・ 15 days ago

    Was a Wave user too. I thought it was very cool.

angry_moose ・ 15 days ago

I loved Wave. It came out my senior year of college; and for one class all four of us on a group project managed to snag it and it was amazing.

Unfortunately, for every other class, the Wave signups were so rationed that it was impossible to get everyone on it.

"Can we use Wave? No, Steve has been trying to get an invite for weeks".

  • OtherShrezzing ・ 15 days ago

    I had exactly the same experience. I was at university, and around 20% of students on my course had access to Wave, which functionally meant 0% of students could use it.

    “An app to collaborate on, but nobody to collaborate with” has to be the most economically destructive product rollout I’ve ever seen.

    • robertlagrant ・ 15 days ago

      Does anyone know why this was? Was the compute resource too scarce at the time? Seems hard to believe of Google even as I type it.

      • mid-kid ・ 15 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        GMail was still fresh at the time, and it rolled out in a similar manner, being invite-only at first. I think they didn't think about it very much, and just did the same thing.

        • devilbunny ・ 14 days ago

          But email was already interoperable. GMail offered a nice interface, lots of storage, and a good spam filter, but otherwise it was just email. You didn't need to have friends with it to benefit from it.

          Having used Wave, it was very taxing on low-end computers, so I never ended up using the fancier features - we used it for a group live-watch of LOST every week with several other friends.

  • teeray ・ 15 days ago

    > the Wave signups were so rationed that it was impossible to get everyone on it.

    IMO, this is what killed it. There was so much excitement for Wave, but it completely failed to build the network effects it needed. If you had it, you couldn’t use it with all your friends no matter how much you wanted to.

    • RockRobotRock ・ 15 days ago

      I remember actually paying someone to get an invite because I was so excited to try it.

  • PaulHoule ・ 15 days ago

    Kinda a reason why I'm unlikely to sign up for anything that needs an invite, has a wait list, etc. Every day I see "Ask HN" posts about how hard it is to get traction with users, that somebody who has traction is going to use it to dick people around is the baddest of all bad smells.

    • angry_moose ・ 15 days ago

      I still kinda wonder if they saw the success of the invite system for gmail (I remember a lot of late nights begging for an invite on various forums) and thought that it would work again.

      The critical difference is gmail still worked just fine with hotmail, yahoo mail, aol, etc. Wave was useless if both sides didn't have it.

      • WorldMaker ・ 15 days ago

        As I recall, at one point Wave sort of had enough of an XMPP bridge that you could terribly IM a Wave without having a Wave invite if you were one of the 20 people still using XMPP that month and your friends with Wave knew a "secret" @ mention and you felt like learning an XML mini-DSL of pseudo-commands and kinda-unidiffs to read the changes from the people actually in Wave.

        There was also plenty of talk about the "eventual" email bridge and real multi-server Wave federation, neither of which properly happened. (At least not in the invite months).

        Though, yeah, Wave really could have used the network effects of non-scarce invites, because it wasn't as interoperable or as much of an "open standard" as it wanted to be. Or it should have had all that interoperability and open standards properly ready at launch and the Google server could have just been sold as the "best" of several options (and people waiting for invites could self-host; that might have done enough for viral class projects in college environments).

      • roryirvine ・ 15 days ago

        They'd already experienced the downsides of an invite-based rollout for a closed network, thanks to Orkut in the mid-2000s.

        It flopped in English-speaking countries because invites were so limited when people first started talking about it, but became a success in Brazil and India as the buzz built a little later there, by which time it had become easier to get and share invites.

        They then compounded the error by force-partitioning their users between the existing service and an invite-only New Orkut, with no easy way to communicate between the two.

        That disaster was still playing out when Wave launched, so at least some part of Google ought to have been aware of the importance of network effects for a product of this type.

      • chii ・ 15 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        not to mention that i think there was some google+ initiative back then (i might've gotten the timing wrong tho). There's some office/department political machinations in the background, and the fallout of that ruined wave.

        • angry_moose ・ 15 days ago
          ・ 2 more

          Might be thinking of Google Buzz (hey, remember Buzz!?). Google+ was a few years later (2011)

          • chii ・ 15 days ago

            hah, you might be right! It was something to do with requiring all these new features being delivered/tested at google to include some social thing.

      • PaulHoule ・ 15 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        At that time email was validated, there was no doubt people wanted it, gmail was just better email. Contrast that to something like Wave which requires people to try something really new.

        • gsf_emergency_2 ・ 15 days ago

          If I read you correctly:

          Every public-private interaction needs to be obviously infoflow symmetric..

          previous example of putrescence was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44231879

          Where the author was not responsive to interesting comments that do not obviously provide direct utility to his social-protocol proposal

          (Def of DU here: https://archive.fo/I0nO4#selection-1307.122-1307.226 )

          https://wardenprotocol.org/blog/build-your-first-ai-agent-wi...

          What could Wave have done better? explain why they need invites? Even better, expose their reasoning, eg they don't need to ease server pressure but they need quality signups? Anything fun I'm missing? Like skin-in-the-game moves from the private side, for macroscopic values of skin?

          For Wave, I'd imagine they needed to publish data on which fun parts keep the new users returning ---there were MANY!

          (So, we're both clearly not wishing to see their bugs from swiftly tilting these parts :)

      • LambdaComplex ・ 15 days ago

        I wouldn't be surprised, considering they made the same mistake with Google+

  • 1oooqooq ・ 15 days ago

    the invites for wave was just a lame attempt to bank on the success of Gmail... they thought the invites was the reason, not 1gb instead of 10mb elsewhere.

    google would really be awesome if PMs/VPs weren't so clueless and powerful.

xnx ・ 15 days ago

People's minds could not comprehend Wave at the time, and I'm still not sure they can now. Even years later articles classify it was a social network (what?), email killer, or chat app.

I saw it as one of the first live collaboration spaces native to the web, not trying to be a paper document, mailed letter, or phone call.

  • glenstein ・ 15 days ago

    It was a mystery at the time, but in retrospect it seems obvious that it was, at a minimum, a precursor to Slack and Teams. And could have been something else too, it was raw and open ended enough that new usage norms could have emerged and pushed it in any number of directions, setting the tone for any number of possible use cases. It could have been a social network, if the idiosyncrasies of community usage imprinted that on it.

    As ever with Google ventures, especially during the DBE era, all they had to do was stick out and let it take on a life of its own. But I think what it takes for growing into an organic identity is more than the average time a developer works on a Google project.

  • Taikonerd ・ 15 days ago

    I felt like Google was weirdly bad at explaining what it was. IIRC, they had all these vague phrases like "a new way to collaborate! Live! Shared spaces!"

    Those phrases weren't wrong, but it was like the proverb about the blind men feeling the elephant: one man thought Wave was like email, one man thought Wave was like a wiki, one man thought...

    In retrospect, maybe Google should have said, "look, we can't describe it with words. Please watch this 1-minute video and you'll understand." ;-)

    • epistasis ・ 15 days ago

      This is what I think about 95% of startup web pages too.

      Somebody told them to advertise the benefits, rather than the what, and it leads unintelligible meaningless ad copy.

      Probably, Google didn't want to limit what Wave was and wanted to learn from user usage patterns that people invent. Give people a blank slate and they know to take notes or draw. Give them a blank slate with knobs and drawers and zippers, and they will be wondering "what does this zipper do, why do I need that on a blank slate?"

    • paulcole ・ 15 days ago

      Was there ever a 1-minute video that made it understandable? I definitely never saw one.

  • hi41 ・ 15 days ago

    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?

    • JumpCrisscross ・ 15 days ago

      > 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.

      • more_corn ・ 14 days ago

        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.

    • xnx ・ 15 days ago

      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.

hbn ・ 15 days ago

I never used Wave personally and I think it had a lot of cool innovations for the web at the time, but I also would disagree with a lot of the premises it was designed around. It seemed too overcomplicated to ever really latch on in the mainstream, and honestly I hate the idea of instant messaging in a Google Docs style where people can see my unedited drafts of messages where I likely said something stupid, just for the luxury of "not having to hit enter". Being able to edit my message before I send it off to the other person is a feature!

  • moritonal ・ 15 days ago

    I'll say it as I always do. One time I threw together a "blurred version of your text is shown as you type, becomes clear when you hit enter" and it was some of the nicest instant-messaging I've ever had with another person. Blur was the trick, to give a sense of the length and activity, but not the message.

    • thesuitonym ・ 15 days ago

      As a person who constantly writes, rewrites, edits, reads, edits, deletes, and rewrites, that sounds completely awful. I don't even like having typing notifications.

      • moritonal ・ 15 days ago
        ・ 3 more

        Just going to say it. It sounds like you are using the wrong medium. What you're doing is emailing, nothing wrong with that, but imagine if someone talked as you described face-to-face. It would be a very weird experience.

    • evbogue ・ 15 days ago

      Throw a short LLM summary in there also, that will mask the content and also give everyone an idea of what the message contains without revealing the message contents until it's sent.

      • mock-possum ・ 15 days ago
        ・ 5 more

        Oh god no, I wouldn’t trust a robot to summarize my unfinished messages.

        • evbogue ・ 15 days ago
          ・ 4 more

          I was totally joking! My humor is not compatible with the current SV trendscape.

          • brewtide ・ 15 days ago
            ・ 3 more

            "also a distant relative bought a piece of farmland."

            • evbogue ・ 15 days ago
              ・ 2 more

              I don't get the reference. How does this interact with my commentary on the rapid proliferation of "AI" keyloggers in SV text areas?

  • escapecharacter ・ 15 days ago

    I am a person who loves building and testing new interaction models. When you do this as a team, you end up climbing away from the main local maxima and building a new one. However, you get so used to living in that new local maxima and thinking about how great it is, you forget how to onboard people to it.

    With a new interaction model, it often matters more to build the path to get people there, not the new local maxima itself (unless you're going to get kids to adopt it first, but Wave was definitely not targeted at them).

    The Wave "onboarding" experience definitely should have had more demo videos, had features that turned on or were discoverable slowly, or had sandbox rooms where you could try it out with basic bots. It's a major missed opportunity that Google didn't do this; it feels to me like Google didn't have an internal playtesting or dogfooding culture where they intentionally left some people out so they could be fresh. I wrote about how to build this culture here: https://dustinfreeman.org/blog/playtest-rituals/

  • AlanYx ・ 15 days ago

    It was overcomplicated, but arguably it paved the way for Slack.

    • fastball ・ 15 days ago

      Slack is more successor to IRC than Wave, imo.

      • leoc ・ 15 days ago

        Were the Rasmussens who created Wave maybe earlier involved with some kind of IRC variant, by the way? LysKOM? I do seem to remember people comparing Wave to LysKOM back in the day, at least.

Apreche ・ 15 days ago

I was so hype for Google Wave. There is one major reason it failed.

They promised a feature that would enable waves to be embedded into normal web pages. This would allow me and others to collaborate on waves, but for the results of our work to be publicly viewable in a read-only fashion.

Because they never delivered on that feature, I never actually used wave much. There was no reason to because as a private-only space it was just a weird chat room / document.

Even if someone else doesn’t think that feature was important, I still think their biggest failure was simply not continuing development. They released it and hardly updated it at all. Even if it wasn’t getting traction out of the gate, they were on the right track. They just had to keep iterating and it would have ended up in the right place. They just gave up almost immediately.

  • bsimpson ・ 15 days ago

    They built a product that needed a bandwagon effect, rationed how many people could join the bandwagon, and then complained that not enough people were on it.

  • alganet ・ 15 days ago

    > their biggest failure was simply not continuing development

    Wave was a technology demonstration that eventually became Google Docs collaborative editing.

    In my books, that's a major success.

    • MorpheusZam ・ 15 days ago

      I came here exactly to say the same, it’s a classical case of trying to solve a problem and end up with a completely different product. I think it was a great success, we used it at college for collaborating over documents, exactly the way we use Google docs now

    • resoluteteeth ・ 15 days ago

      Was that functionality really based on work from Google wave?

      • alganet ・ 15 days ago
        ・ 7 more

        Yes.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

        https://web.archive.org/web/20090531063923/http://www.wavepr...

        https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-n...

        • resoluteteeth ・ 15 days ago
          ・ 6 more

          Isn't this just showing that they both used OT rather than that the docs functionality was based on wave? It seems like the version of docs that added this was likely in development at the same time as wave so unless you specifically know that the people who worked on wave then worked on docs I would assume that different people were responsible for it so the fact that they both used OT (which is pretty standard) doesn't seem to necessarily imply a connection.

          • alganet ・ 14 days ago
            ・ 5 more

            The following section of the Wave whitepaper suggests that the chat app aspect was minor to the project. It was all about solving collaborative rich text editing:

            > Waves are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications.

            The following section suggests that the Wave team had a specific goal related to rich text OT extensions, which were NOT trivial at the time:

            > There are others that offer rich text, such as Google Docs, but do not offer a seamless live concurrent editing experience, as merge failures can occur.

            It also suggests that it was specifically intended to be featured later in Google Docs (it would not make sense to dunk on their own product). It actually doesn't matter if it is the same team or not. It is common to have a dedicated R&D separate from the deliver team for such breakthroughs.

            • resoluteteeth ・ 14 days ago
              ・ 4 more

              I'm not saying it necessarily wasn't used in docs but it seems like you also don't have any information indicating that it actually was and are just assuming that it must have been, so I would ideally want confirmation from someone who was actually involved with it at Google.

              • alganet ・ 14 days ago
                ・ 3 more

                I provided enough information, including the Google Wave team _explicitly_ citing the feature on Google Docs before it was launched. This is way more than an assumption.

                If you have any doubts about it, feel free to contact Google.

                • resoluteteeth ・ 14 days ago
                  ・ 2 more

                  > I provided enough information, including the Google Wave team _explicitly_ citing the feature on Google Docs before it was launched. This is way more than an assumption.

                  You just quoted a part where it mentioned that google docs didn't have collaborative editing at the time. That's not the same thing as saying that the google docs collaborative editing was then based on google wave.

                  Again, you may very well be right, but you haven't provided any source actually indicating that google docs collaborative editing was based on wave.

                  • alganet ・ 14 days ago

                    I'm not confident you would be able to recognize a valid source if you saw it, and I'm not confident you understand what I claimed.

                    Let me sum up this:

                    Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.

                    What if it was made by another team?

                    It doesn't matter. Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.

                    What if they discarded the entire Wave codebase?

                    It doesn't matter. Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.

                    What if both teams were researching the same stuff?

                    It doesn't matter. Rich text OT, first appeared in Google Wave, and eventually became the technology used in collaborative editing in Google Docs. That is a fact.

                    --

                    Up until I mentioned OT, there was room for ambiguity. Was I talking about the _product_ becoming Google Docs or the _technology_ being used in it? The onus was on me.

                    As soon as I clarified the issue, you should have recognized what I was talking about. You didn't.

io84 ・ 16 days ago

I have very fond memories of Wave. My non-tech friend group embraced it as our primary communication platform for a brief period and it hosted a frenzied chaotic fun that was only matched over a decade later by the tech exuberance of AI image gen and LLMs.

  • arkh ・ 15 days ago

    It was too early.

    The UI was slow due to the browser not being able to handle it. A new Wave with top performance on phones would have a chance of becoming a thing.

jmyeet ・ 15 days ago

There are lots of lessons to learn from Google Wave.

The first is: what problem does this solve (for users)? That was never clear. It always seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Any communication platform needs to ask "how does this compete with text messaging, group chats and email?"

The second is: this was peak "startup within Google" experimentation. And it cannot work. No new product will be able to compete with existing billion+ dollar businesses. There's no incentive to succeed and political inertia preventing you doing anything. A whole bunch of people got a ton of equity thrown at them for mediocrity.

Third, Wave was still in the era when Google was pushing Google Web Toolkit ("GWT") as a solution to UI engineering. This didn't really solve any problems and created a bunch of new ones. For example, for the longest time (this was eventually fixed many years later) you had to use special versions of protobuf Java classes.

Lastly, i believe I heard that the internal implementation was incredibly complicated such that people managed to produce the same functionality with a fraction of the source code in Python/JS.

  • kevmo314 ・ 15 days ago

    The same could've been said about Slack. It's easy to find reasons things failed.

UI_at_80x24 ・ 15 days ago

I liked using Wave. I ran RPG campaigns with/through it. It allowed both real-time interaction for "game nights" and play-by-email slower interactions that happened between gaming nights.

Before Wave we used email only, and Wave was an improvement. IIRC there was a module/addon for RNG that we adapted for 'dice-rolls'.

blamestross ・ 15 days ago

I feel like Wave was "we figured out CRDTs lets go nuts with them"

Many of the features that were revolutionary did get baked into docs over the years. I don't think people realize just how similar google docs has become to wave over the years.

The parts missing are the breadth of features and extendability.

mark_l_watson ・ 15 days ago

I loved Wave and was sorry to see it go away. I did then run the open source Wave distribution from Apache but I couldn’t get friends and family to use it.

Also, I have always been a fairly clever programmer (starting to code around 1964) but I gave up trying to work with the Wave code base.

  • josephg ・ 15 days ago

    Yeah the wave codebase is a bit of a poster child for me of how the enterprise Java programming style can easily drown you. I think we opensourced ~350k lines of Java and it honestly doesn’t do anywhere near enough to justify its weight.

    I feel like you could rewrite the whole thing today in about 1/20th as many lines using modern tools & frameworks.

    Thanks for trying to keep it alive. That was a tough thing to do!

  • glenstein ・ 15 days ago

    What was your experience with the Wave code base?

thendrill ・ 15 days ago

Me and my entire Com.Science class used to keep all kinds of class notes, source code and exercises on Google wave... It was amazing...

We loved it but we were also software engineering students so I guess we were ahead of the curve and we were still in our Google-honeymoon state....

hkchad ・ 15 days ago

Me and a few buddies used it to plan trips and coordinate plans, it was awesome. The shutdown of Wave and Google Reader is what turned me off to investing any more of my time into Google products.

shadowgovt ・ 15 days ago

16 years on I think it's fair to say that while their implementation didn't hit the mark, the general idea that email is the primary interaction model was waning was correct.

Nowadays, business is done on slack, more casual interaction happens on discord. Email is still there when a paper trail is desired for business reasons, but I interact with few firms that use it as their primary means of coordination, planning, or communication.

rkagerer ・ 14 days ago

I was in the audience when they previewed it for the first time at I/O.

The Internet at that conference was awfully intermittent (ironic considering this was Google), and I have fond memories of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over the connectivity hiccups:

https://youtu.be/v_UyVmITiYQ?t=19m35s

greatgib ・ 15 days ago

The idea was a little bit interesting but the problem was that they wanted to replace gmail and emails by that.

At that time, email was kind of a safe, frozen thing, interconnectable between all providers. Wave was the first step to a walled garden, and doing everything but too many things.

And in the end, people like gmail because it used to be light, fast and sleek at that time. At the opposite wave was slow and very heavy.

jap ・ 15 days ago

I was a big fan of Wave. One aspect I really liked that I haven't seen in other apps is other people would see the letters/words you typed as you typed them, making for very active discussions... But then some people also hated that others could see their typed-out thought process and typos before they finished editing and hit send.

tzury ・ 15 days ago

We (me and a friend) built an entire project management system on top of it, so you can turn discussion into actual planning.

I remember us struggling with drawing a gantt, using the limited (and poorly documented) API. Just as we were sure we have got a product, they announced it will shut down in such a such months or so.

esafak ・ 15 days ago

What did Wave offer that today's products still don't? I never used it so I'm curious.

7bit ・ 15 days ago

Wave was really ahead of it's time. The same app with the same visionary goal of today's time is MS Teams. Microsoft state multiple times that they imagine Teams to replace email.

Funny how these things go, sometimes.

selivanovp ・ 15 days ago

Wave was an interesting project. I really liked to be able to subscribe to certain waves and read the news from there. Sad that it ended up in a grave of most other Google projects.

jdmg94 ・ 15 days ago

I was a wave user, barely had any friends in it, but it felt truly revolutionary back then. This started my disillusionment with Google and their products.

strangescript ・ 15 days ago

google was way to obsessed with immediate success during this time, if they had that same mentality now they would have given up on LLMs and now they are in first in most categories

robertheadley ・ 14 days ago

Wave was a solution without a problem. Neat though.

2059901302 ・ 14 days ago

Trying to sign in on myROKO device

more_corn ・ 14 days ago

I still get hives remembering this. Excitement, drama, disappointment, disillusionment. Wave was everything an exciting new technology could be, everything that can go wrong in product, and everything a big company can screw up.

All wrapped up in one huge wave of information overload.

musikele ・ 15 days ago

I liked it, I thought it was a great idea. the rest of my friends... no.

  • esafak ・ 15 days ago

    What did you like most about it?