Ask HN: Why hasn’t Google Wave caught on?

I was an early adopter and I actually saw quite a few non-techies in my circles want invites right away, because it was seen as the next Gmail.

Except it delivered none of the "wow!" that Gmail did. It was slow, didn't really seem to have an immediate purpose (where as when Gmail came out, most people I knew had hit some sorta inbox-size limit before and knew that pain point)

and so on.

I played with it some, and besides the fact that only a few geeks were using it, the UI was terribly frustrating: it was slow, and had just enough "desktop app" functionality to put you in that mindset, but not enough to actually behave like you expected (kind of an uncanny valley sort of thing)

Well besides the fact it was closed down, Google was trying to "replace email". That was just too big of a step to attempt in one go with drastic changes in interaction.

That coupled with the fact you could only communicate with other Wave users made wide-spread adoption impossible.

I don't even know what it is, I think that's probably at least part of the problem for people.

It kind of did, but in another form. Google took their tech and what they learned and implemented live, multi-person documents in Google docs.

Maybe the idea for wave to replace email was flawed, but it works well for specific documents and folders like in Google drive.

I used and liked it, but imo it was more an experiment for google and they had no real use-case/focus.

Searching for Public Waves on various topics was amazing, and it was a feature that not even hardcore Google fans knew about.

It was like Tweeting hashtags combined with Google Docs. It was very immediate, and you'd see people showing up to discuss in realtime.