Oh lord. I knew Google Wave was going to be a disaster from the get go. It was a secret project inside of Google that was not required to follow any of the normal google product design. This meant that it could use whatever database technology it wanted. This lead to some really terrible design decisions that would make sense at a very small startup but not for a large multi-million user product.

At the time I was working on the mail delivery infrastructure and they basically reached out to us at the last minute asking about email functionality. That was horrible because its not easily to wedge into a product after the design phase.

It annoys me so much because it was such a cool idea but the tech stack was badly implemented from the start. =/

I was in high school when Google Wave came out so I had no one to really talk to on it or real reason to use it, but I do remember it seeming pretty cool at the time. Looking back it was ahead of it's time.

Your post got me to go through my emails to find my Google Wave invitation for a nostalgia rush