Wave was great for project management. It was project management without the rigid structure.

I am still hoping for something like wave to do organized work.

I think there was an open-sourcing of the code behind Wave.

Yup, it's in the Apache incubator.

Or the use case centered around friends when really it seemed more suitable for a business network.

This sentence is baffling to me. Do you not know what Wave does? Really? Or do you NEED a marketing person to tell you how to use a product?

My ex-Googler friend and I (both of us developers) excitedly started using Wave together, but soon gave up. It was neat, but we couldn't think of anything we needed it for. So this isn't a matter of ignorance.

I was, however, happy to see that some of the cool parts, like simultaneous realtime editing, made their way into Google Docs.

I'm guessing he needs a product to be intuitive enough that he doesn't need a marketing person to tell him how to use it. Wave was pretty far from that.

Worked great for me as a substitute for setting up a forum. It was a lot easier to just make a wave and invite other people on google to discuss things.