from Hacker News

Google aims to reinvent email with Wave (2009)

by xattt on 6/17/25, 12:02 PM with 93 comments

• by rs186 on 6/17/25, 1:51 PM

  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.

• by angry_moose on 6/17/25, 2:11 PM

  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".

• by xnx on 6/17/25, 1:46 PM

  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.

• by hbn on 6/17/25, 1:35 PM

  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!

• by Apreche on 6/17/25, 1:53 PM

  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.

• by io84 on 6/17/25, 12:23 PM

  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.

• by jmyeet on 6/17/25, 1:33 PM

  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.

• by UI_at_80x24 on 6/17/25, 2:04 PM

  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'.

• by blamestross on 6/17/25, 2:23 PM

  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.

• by mark_l_watson on 6/17/25, 2:03 PM

  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.

• by thendrill on 6/17/25, 1:42 PM

  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....

• by rkagerer on 6/18/25, 8:28 PM

  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

• by hkchad on 6/17/25, 3:46 PM

  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.

• by greatgib on 6/18/25, 8:52 AM

  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.

• by shadowgovt on 6/17/25, 1:38 PM

  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.

• by jap on 6/17/25, 2:38 PM

  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.

• by tzury on 6/17/25, 2:22 PM

  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.

• by esafak on 6/17/25, 2:02 PM

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

• by 7bit on 6/17/25, 2:24 PM

  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.

• by selivanovp on 6/17/25, 2:09 PM

  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.

• by jdmg94 on 6/17/25, 2:55 PM

  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.

• by robertheadley on 6/18/25, 10:24 PM

  Wave was a solution without a problem. Neat though.

• by strangescript on 6/17/25, 2:21 PM

  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

• by 2059901302 on 6/18/25, 11:08 PM

  Trying to sign in on myROKO device

• by more_corn on 6/18/25, 9:53 PM

  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.

• by musikele on 6/17/25, 1:25 PM

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