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Google wave
I think its downfall was being a closed beta, which made it useless for communicating with other people who weren't already invited
Just like Google+ or Bluesky.
Combined with Google's demand that every thing be The Next Big Thing, any closed beta is basically doomed. It worked exactly once, for Gmail, and only because of longstanding widespread demand for a big reliable e-mail service. Everything else had its initial obsessive weirdos and was left to rot on the vine.
Google+ only survived so long because they desperately wanted to undermine Facebook.
Google Wave was beautiful. I was rooting for it to replace email as a standard. So many possibilities lost...
In retrospect, wave did feel like an EEE attempt by Google on email, I am happy it didn't replace email, but Google wave's features have since spread to web app standards
I used it to generate a shit ton of policy documents in a hurry.
The company I was at was being staged to be purchased. We had Jack shit for policy documents. The company that was organizing our sale said they needed a wide range of formalized documentation.
I basically set my entire team up on wave. I threw up outlines in different threads and we all just went to fucking town writing policy. We would peer review, make suggestions on each other's policy read over stuff while we worked on our own things.
It really was an amazing product.
All that collaboration stuff was integrated into Google Docs.
It's so good that Microsoft copied it - first with the web version of Word in live.com and then eventually into the desktop version of Word.
I agree though - Wave was ahead of its time.
It's been quite a while so I might not be remembering correctly, but even though they advertised it as an application, wasn't Google Wave more akin to a proof of concept? I was under the impression they took that engine and incorporated it into their collaboration products like Google Docs?