The forgotten Google app that was way ahead of its time

Google’s product cemetery is littered with both bad and good ideas. Some failed because the execution was poor, others were simply released half-baked, or too soon.

Google Wave is probably the greatest example of this, and I was an early believer back in 2009, but just three years later Wave was dead despite doing so much right.

Mixing chat, documents, and email into a single real-time canvas

We take live collaboration in online documents for granted these days, but when Wave let people type, edit, embed, and dynamically work together all in one live space it felt like the future had arrived.