[HN Gopher] Google aims to reinvent email with Wave (2009)
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Google aims to reinvent email with Wave (2009)
Author : xattt
Score : 48 points
Date : 2025-06-17 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cbc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cbc.ca)
| io84 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| musikele wrote:
| I liked it, I thought it was a great idea. the rest of my
| friends... no.
| esafak wrote:
| What did you like most about it?
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The same could've been said about Slack. It's easy to find
| reasons things failed.
| hbn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| evbogue wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Oh _god_ no, I wouldn't trust a robot to summarize my
| unfinished messages.
| evbogue wrote:
| I was totally joking! My humor is not compatible with the
| current SV trendscape.
| brazzy wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31g0YE61PLQ
| thesuitonym wrote:
| 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.
| AlanYx wrote:
| It was overcomplicated, but arguably it paved the way for
| Slack.
| fastball wrote:
| Slack is more successor to IRC than Wave, imo.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| 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/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| thendrill wrote:
| 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....
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| 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." ;-)
| paulcole wrote:
| Was there ever a 1-minute video that made it understandable?
| I definitely never saw one.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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?"
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| hi41 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| rs186 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| goku12 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Was a Wave user too. I thought it was very cool.
| Apreche wrote:
| 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.
| alganet wrote:
| > 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.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Was that functionality really based on work from Google wave?
| alganet wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090531063923/http://www.wavep
| r...
|
| https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-
| about-n...
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| What did Wave offer that today's products still don't? I never
| used it so I'm curious.
| ndr wrote:
| It was magical at the time. But the collaborative everywhere
| and multimedia was particularly nice.
|
| Now you get that in Figma, Linear, and others but it's still a
| feat.
|
| Looking forward for Patchwork to come out and see if it can
| generate that magical feat again:
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/project/patchwork/
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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.
| glenstein wrote:
| What was your experience with the Wave code base?
| josephg wrote:
| 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!
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| 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'.
| selivanovp wrote:
| 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.
| angry_moose wrote:
| 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".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| chii wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Might be thinking of Google Buzz (hey, remember Buzz!?).
| Google+ was a few years later (2011)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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).
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised, considering they made the same
| mistake with Google+
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| roryirvine wrote:
| 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.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| 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.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| 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.
| strangescript wrote:
| 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
| tzury wrote:
| 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.
| blamestross wrote:
| 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.
| 7bit wrote:
| 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.
| jap wrote:
| 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.
| jdmg94 wrote:
| 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.
| hkchad wrote:
| 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.
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