[idkwhattocallme]

The local public elementary school blocked all chat programs on student chromebooks. The 3rd graders figured out that they could chat with another in a shared google doc. They had thousands of pages of chat before the teacher finally put an end to it. The teacher only found out because a kid shared that it was getting unruly during class. I share this because most kids have an ipad and are digital communication natives. This landline concept is like puting a lid back on a can of worms.

[derwiki]

3rd grade, sure. This seems like a great fit for my 3 year old and her friends who don't have unfettered iPad access.

[idkwhattocallme]

A landline for a 3 year old to communicate with her friends. lol

[anotherhue]

Google Wave!

[floren]

I only used Wave a little (because my netbook was far, far too underpowered to work properly with it) but I really really enjoyed it for both serious collaboration and random bullshitting with my friends. Haven't seen anything comparable since.

[eszed]

Wave nostalgics of the world, unite! It's the best remote collaboration tool I've ever used, and imo nothing I've seen since has really come close. It still baffles me that it wasn't successful.

[devilbunny]

I always figured that they just couldn't wrap their heads around a good way to monetize it.

It was painfully slow on netbooks, but it did work, and we used to use it to live-comment on LOST episodes with two other couples that we're friends with (but live in different cities, so we couldn't just have a watch party every week).

[eszed]

I mentioned this somewhere else in my comment history, but I once used Wave with a group of creatives to develop a theatre piece, and everyone immediately "got" how to use it. (We'll not get into the debacle of the next project where we'd collectively run out of invite tokens, and... Ah, Google sure self-sabotaged that, didn't they?) Totally non-techy crowd, but took to Wave with appreciation and joy.

A decade-plus later, in my present (grown-up / sellout) job, I evangelized Dropbox Paper - which was sorta Wave-like, if you squinted a bit - and it Did. Not. Stick. No one else could stand it, and everything reverted back to interminable document-attached email chains and more-interminable Teams calls everyone's invited to "just in case".

I can't tell you whether that's because artistic people are more able to think non-linearly than business people, or because Paper didn't get some special something exactly right. I wish I could run the experiment.