If memory serves well that was also the time Wave was supposed to take our communication to the 21st century
So much stupid.
It was more an intergrated workplace thing - sort of a predecessor to Notion+Slack in a single app. But it was very flaky to use.
The famous post (now gone but referenced from [1]) about how they spend who-knows-how-long reimplementing scroll bars in the browser when the app was so janky it barely worked was the kind of thing that doomed it.
The HN discussion at the time is interesting too[2]
[1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...
https://web.archive.org/web/20091012020227/http://www.easier...
https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/https://www.compl...
- A public and open protocol that could have replaced email with structured messages if it got popular, and
- A series of self-love technical exercises like the scrollbars and the live-typing which nobody cared for and killed adoption (worked in Chrome only, very few people care to share half-composed emails with their correspondents).
A textbook example of losing sight of the goal and giving devs too much rope to hang themselves with.