I used Wave on a number of projects as well as some of the biggerish discussion "waves" back when it was still with Google.

For the projects, it was awesome. This was a long time ago, so I don't remember all the excruciating details, but it made coordination and collaboration on big documents pretty trivial. We also had some group messaging and file-storage accounts that went virtually unused because of Wave.

Our use-case was in writing large-ish documents (a few hundred pages each) as a committee. And it was pretty trivial to just create a wave for each section of each document, then use top level comments in the Wave for each subsection, and capture everybody's brainstorming for each section. It was like a living collaborative outline that eventually filled itself in and turned into a section. We used links off of the discussions into Google docs for collaborative editing of the documents and when we felt everything was good, somebody would simply go in and copy-paste all the text into master good doc for final cleanup.

Having worked on similar projects in the past, coordinating this kind of activity with email and word docs (or even google docs) is a huge PIA. When we decided to move it to Wave for a small trial (to figure out the workflow) it was pretty trivial and sort of worked naturally. There was a minimum of document syncing issues, or confusion about who said what in which meeting or email. The entire past history of discussion, with threading and everything was open for review. It was amazing despite many of the obvious issues with the Wave client.

The big discussion "groups" on the other hand were mess. It was impossible to find where new comments in old threads were posted, and once the conversations got big enough, the UI slowed to an unusable mess. Wave didn't last long enough for anybody to figure out how to deal with this.

Outside of those two use-cases I really didn't use Wave for much else. I suspect I would have found other uses as time went on if it had survived (and especially if it had flowered and federated).

I've thought long and hard about why Wave failed and it really does come down to 2 things:

- lack of focus

- poor user experience that never seemed to get any better

Wave tried really hard to be all things to everybody, with some really neat tech demos to show use cases (arranging a group meeting by embedding a poll and a map etc.). I think it was kind of like the C++ of communication mediums. It's sort of everything, but you can only realistically use some subset of the functionality in practice and the parts you don't use just end up seeming useless and weird.

On the user side, carving out just the functionality for your use-case was also hard. And the slow as syrup client really was a huge turn-off. Weird, non-standard scroll bars everywhere (which never got fixed and never worked like anybody expected), nobody liked real-time global echo as they typed (brought about by a confusion of how IM actually worked in practice), and way too many half-baked widgets and bots and things.

I think Wave should have simply focused on a few simple use-cases, nailed and refined those, then grown all the other awesome ideas organically so the user-community could start to slot those into their workflows.

Wave might have worked better if it was launched simply as a threaded messageboard with real-time replies showing up in a post. Users would have also needed 1 more layer of organizational abstraction, a "Wave container" to carve out different groups of Waves. In my use-case above we really needed to have a container for each document, with each Wave for each major section. But in the most general case, a "pg" type person could have created a "Hacker News" container, and each submission and comment history would have been the individual Waves.

When Wave launched, everything was a wave and there was no way to organize them, so people ended up using top-level comments in the waves as the "topic submissions" and the Waves went on for thousands of comments across dozens of topics before they started to break. It just wasn't a good organizational metaphor, but the system and the client didn't offer a good alternative.

Then the client was clunky and slow, nothing else on the web felt as slow even with such little graphical sparkle. It was basically a side-by-side email client by look, yet acted like it was folding proteins or mining bitcoin in some worker thread.