[apo]

Wave was a perfect example of leading with technology rather than the problem to be solved. Nothing I ever saw or read about it spoke to a specific user problem. Sure, Google has problems in spades that can be solved by Wave (engaging users, crushing upstart social media companies to name two). But in terms of eliminating something costing large numbers of computer time or money, Wave brought absolutely nothing to the table.

I remember seeing the hyperventilating response to Wave by tech people at the time and wondering what they were actually experiencing. Because what I saw was yet another Google initiative that would be shut down and forgotten fairly quickly.

[dullgiulio]

I believe Wave was pretty similar to what Slack has become today. It was bringing a lot to the table, but probably too early.

Not too early for users to see the value, but for Google to roll out widely enough to make it a proper social network.

Technology was not mature enough for such an application.

[WorldMaker]

I don't the problem was the maturity of the technology (much of it very quickly migrated over to Google Docs soon after the Wave shutdown). Wave was built in the original Google model of an open garden; parts of it were based on XMPP (like Talk was) and all of it was designed to support multi-instancing and federation between instances similar to both XMPP and email. It launched just in time for the Google+ efforts to decide the future of Google was only in an entirely proprietary walled garden.

[mekane8]

I remember watching a presentation that the creators gave. In it they described the issues of email, and how wave addressed them. So those were at least a few problems that it was trying to solve. Once I actually got in and started playing with it I felt pretty overwhelmed and didn't really feel how great it was to have those problems solved.

It would have worked better for me if they had kept it simple

[cromwellian]

Neither Google Reader nor Talk had been shutdown until 2012, so the whole storyline of Google constantly shutting down stuff hadn’t started yet, this seems like a false recollection.

[WorldMaker]

Though Reader, Talk, Buzz, and Wave were all killed in quick succession and to arguably the exact same forces (Google+), for very similar reasons (walling the garden, "reducing redundancy"). That shutdown wave was brutal and nearly simultaneous enough that of course it defines the narrative of Google constantly shutting down stuff.

[apo]

Google pulled support for its search API long before wave, leaving developers who started to build on it high and dry.