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It was the most useful and down-to-earth piece of group productivity software I’ve ever used. It combined intra-organization email, document editing/storage and task management perfectly for my/our needs. It was like a whiteboard and notebooks in a room, combined into a single, cohesive product, adapted perfectly for the mouse-and-keyboard web.

Granted, we only used it once. I went to a high school with an intensive mass media track and was part of a core group of students who were assigned with doing all ‘media things’ for school and local government events. So for the biggest school/community event of the year (when Wave was around… i think that was a single year…), which was a sort of fancy prom/stage presentation/formal ceremonious thingy involving about 1400 ppl, we had to set up an 8-piece camera crew, multiple extremely difficult recording angles (multiple steadycams and camera cranes and such), two different recording formats, audio and lighting for an arena-type space, an HD projection of what we were recording live so ppl in the back could see, etc.

Wave was perfect for planning. Pre-production for us was basically a drafting process, so for the huge amount of textual information that we were producing (with the occasional sketch of the arena’s layout, camera positions, etc) Wave turned out to be a very useful tool: not only was everything editable, undo-able, appendable, etc; the best part was having those little inline comment threads that you could collapse into the main body of our text. So all our actual conversations happened inside the document, which made sharing and presentation (but also, weirdly, internal consensus-building) much more efficient.

Since they discontinued Wave I’ve also stopped doing this kind of stuff, but when I’m working on a uni paper or something with a bunch of other people I still sometimes feel like GDocs and other tools are just not there yet… Wave was extremely ahead of its time and was probably the most innovative communication tool created in a looong while. At least for my uses.

I think the main problem was neither marketing nor features… most people just didn’t make an effort to try and “get” Wave. Yes, some of this was Google’s marketing failure, after all, they did state originally that it was supposed to be an email/chat/gdocs replacement. But I think if anyone actually gave it more than 30 seconds of thought of the thousands of internet-savvy-ish people who signed up in the beginning, it could’ve been a huge success and some of its quirks would’ve been ironed out to make it, well, the next email/chat/collab thing that Google wanted in the first place.

Haven’t used it since its discontinuation, even though apparently the Apache folks still host the source code.

27 days ago on To anyone who actually used Google Wave: was it a failure for you?