[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.

[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.

[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.