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.
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." ;-)
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?"
> 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.
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.
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.