I was extremely fond of Wave when it came out, but remember few people I knew shared that view. Now I am trying to think back to Wave and how it differed from Slack... wasn’t it pretty similar?
Wave was a leap forward. Slack maybe a baby step.
It also had a replay feature. So if you had someone jump in the middle of a discussion, they could rewind, replay and see how it happened. As subtle as that might seem just queues and context help understand - the knowledge and the people / group.
Those were what I remember thinking "this is The One" only to see them walk away too soon.
File under: great idea! Poor execution.
The latter was so bad I'm still surprised no one else picked up the idea and ran with it. It wasn't the idea that failed. It was the brand / company / org that conceived it.
It was a pretty exciting concept to me that ALL of my interactions for various disqus-like random posts, emails, blog comments, forum replies etc - could be handled from the Wave client.
But they realllly bodged the roll out. First it was the "developer-version" where everyone could pile-on - and it was madness. You could actually "reply all" to EVERYONE. Like sending a @everyone slack message to every slack channel! Chaos!
Then they went to the"invite-only" phase - and suddenly the whole thing became a ghost-town, and there was no incentive to open your wave client.
I wish they had have nailed it, because I'm positive there was a good idea underneath it.