I saw it as one of the first live collaboration spaces native to the web, not trying to be a paper document, mailed letter, or phone call.
As ever with Google ventures, especially during the DBE era, all they had to do was stick out and let it take on a life of its own. But I think what it takes for growing into an organic identity is more than the average time a developer works on a Google project.
Those phrases weren't wrong, but it was like the proverb about the blind men feeling the elephant: one man thought Wave was like email, one man thought Wave was like a wiki, one man thought...
In retrospect, maybe Google should have said, "look, we can't describe it with words. Please watch this 1-minute video and you'll understand." ;-)
Somebody told them to advertise the benefits, rather than the what, and it leads unintelligible meaningless ad copy.
Probably, Google didn't want to limit what Wave was and wanted to learn from user usage patterns that people invent. Give people a blank slate and they know to take notes or draw. Give them a blank slate with knobs and drawers and zippers, and they will be wondering "what does this zipper do, why do I need that on a blank slate?"
It was magic for collaborative note taking. In lecture or if we divided up reading and summarisation. Also, of course, for scribbling together live memes.
Imagine being able to experience all the instants of your life in a single moment. Now do that with information and the connections with other people on various topics. You can see the whole thing at once and it updates in realtime!
Now granted I had hundreds of waves going and most of them didn’t warrant full attention, but it always felt like drinking from the firehose.
It made me want to quit tech and take up pottery.