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".
“An app to collaborate on, but nobody to collaborate with” has to be the most economically destructive product rollout I’ve ever seen.
Having used Wave, it was very taxing on low-end computers, so I never ended up using the fancier features - we used it for a group live-watch of LOST every week with several other friends.
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.
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.
There was also plenty of talk about the "eventual" email bridge and real multi-server Wave federation, neither of which properly happened. (At least not in the invite months).
Though, yeah, Wave really could have used the network effects of non-scarce invites, because it wasn't as interoperable or as much of an "open standard" as it wanted to be. Or it should have had all that interoperability and open standards properly ready at launch and the Google server could have just been sold as the "best" of several options (and people waiting for invites could self-host; that might have done enough for viral class projects in college environments).
Every public-private interaction needs to be obviously infoflow symmetric..
previous example of putrescence was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44231879
Where the author was not responsive to interesting comments that do not obviously provide direct utility to his social-protocol proposal
(Def of DU here: https://archive.fo/I0nO4#selection-1307.122-1307.226 )
https://wardenprotocol.org/blog/build-your-first-ai-agent-wi...
What could Wave have done better? explain why they need invites? Even better, expose their reasoning, eg they don't need to ease server pressure but they need quality signups? Anything fun I'm missing? Like skin-in-the-game moves from the private side, for macroscopic values of skin?
For Wave, I'd imagine they needed to publish data on which fun parts keep the new users returning ---there were MANY!
(So, we're both clearly not wishing to see their bugs from swiftly tilting these parts :)
It flopped in English-speaking countries because invites were so limited when people first started talking about it, but became a success in Brazil and India as the buzz built a little later there, by which time it had become easier to get and share invites.
They then compounded the error by force-partitioning their users between the existing service and an invite-only New Orkut, with no easy way to communicate between the two.
That disaster was still playing out when Wave launched, so at least some part of Google ought to have been aware of the importance of network effects for a product of this type.
google would really be awesome if PMs/VPs weren't so clueless and powerful.