Comment by Taikonerd
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?"