[angry_moose]

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".

[OtherShrezzing]

I had exactly the same experience. I was at university, and around 20% of students on my course had access to Wave, which functionally meant 0% of students could use it.

“An app to collaborate on, but nobody to collaborate with” has to be the most economically destructive product rollout I’ve ever seen.

[robertlagrant]

Does anyone know why this was? Was the compute resource too scarce at the time? Seems hard to believe of Google even as I type it.

[mid-kid]

GMail was still fresh at the time, and it rolled out in a similar manner, being invite-only at first. I think they didn't think about it very much, and just did the same thing.

[devilbunny]

But email was already interoperable. GMail offered a nice interface, lots of storage, and a good spam filter, but otherwise it was just email. You didn't need to have friends with it to benefit from it.

Having used Wave, it was very taxing on low-end computers, so I never ended up using the fancier features - we used it for a group live-watch of LOST every week with several other friends.

[teeray]

> the Wave signups were so rationed that it was impossible to get everyone on it.

IMO, this is what killed it. There was so much excitement for Wave, but it completely failed to build the network effects it needed. If you had it, you couldn’t use it with all your friends no matter how much you wanted to.

[RockRobotRock]

I remember actually paying someone to get an invite because I was so excited to try it.

[PaulHoule]

Kinda a reason why I'm unlikely to sign up for anything that needs an invite, has a wait list, etc. Every day I see "Ask HN" posts about how hard it is to get traction with users, that somebody who has traction is going to use it to dick people around is the baddest of all bad smells.

[angry_moose]

I still kinda wonder if they saw the success of the invite system for gmail (I remember a lot of late nights begging for an invite on various forums) and thought that it would work again.

The critical difference is gmail still worked just fine with hotmail, yahoo mail, aol, etc. Wave was useless if both sides didn't have it.

[WorldMaker]

As I recall, at one point Wave sort of had enough of an XMPP bridge that you could terribly IM a Wave without having a Wave invite if you were one of the 20 people still using XMPP that month and your friends with Wave knew a "secret" @ mention and you felt like learning an XML mini-DSL of pseudo-commands and kinda-unidiffs to read the changes from the people actually in Wave.

There was also plenty of talk about the "eventual" email bridge and real multi-server Wave federation, neither of which properly happened. (At least not in the invite months).

Though, yeah, Wave really could have used the network effects of non-scarce invites, because it wasn't as interoperable or as much of an "open standard" as it wanted to be. Or it should have had all that interoperability and open standards properly ready at launch and the Google server could have just been sold as the "best" of several options (and people waiting for invites could self-host; that might have done enough for viral class projects in college environments).

[roryirvine]

They'd already experienced the downsides of an invite-based rollout for a closed network, thanks to Orkut in the mid-2000s.

It flopped in English-speaking countries because invites were so limited when people first started talking about it, but became a success in Brazil and India as the buzz built a little later there, by which time it had become easier to get and share invites.

They then compounded the error by force-partitioning their users between the existing service and an invite-only New Orkut, with no easy way to communicate between the two.

That disaster was still playing out when Wave launched, so at least some part of Google ought to have been aware of the importance of network effects for a product of this type.

[chii]

not to mention that i think there was some google+ initiative back then (i might've gotten the timing wrong tho). There's some office/department political machinations in the background, and the fallout of that ruined wave.

[angry_moose]

Might be thinking of Google Buzz (hey, remember Buzz!?). Google+ was a few years later (2011)

[chii]

hah, you might be right! It was something to do with requiring all these new features being delivered/tested at google to include some social thing.

[PaulHoule]

At that time email was validated, there was no doubt people wanted it, gmail was just better email. Contrast that to something like Wave which requires people to try something really new.

[gsf_emergency_2]

If I read you correctly:

Every public-private interaction needs to be obviously infoflow symmetric..

previous example of putrescence was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44231879

Where the author was not responsive to interesting comments that do not obviously provide direct utility to his social-protocol proposal

(Def of DU here: https://archive.fo/I0nO4#selection-1307.122-1307.226 )

https://wardenprotocol.org/blog/build-your-first-ai-agent-wi...

What could Wave have done better? explain why they need invites? Even better, expose their reasoning, eg they don't need to ease server pressure but they need quality signups? Anything fun I'm missing? Like skin-in-the-game moves from the private side, for macroscopic values of skin?

For Wave, I'd imagine they needed to publish data on which fun parts keep the new users returning ---there were MANY!

(So, we're both clearly not wishing to see their bugs from swiftly tilting these parts :)

[LambdaComplex]

I wouldn't be surprised, considering they made the same mistake with Google+

[1oooqooq]

the invites for wave was just a lame attempt to bank on the success of Gmail... they thought the invites was the reason, not 1gb instead of 10mb elsewhere.

google would really be awesome if PMs/VPs weren't so clueless and powerful.