Great comment. Why Meta could ship Muse but Google could not.

What Meta got right with Muse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946526 - October 2026

Except the part where it trains on your private of information by default.

This would've been great but given what they came out with on a greenfield project, I strongly suspect an in-Gmail approach would have ended up qualitatively worse from UX & design perspective, likely driving users away from Gmail as a whole, & not just Wave. It would've resulted in a backlash from the mainstream, rather than Wave which was simply a damp squib the mainstream mainly ignored.

In an ideal world you're right, but I still think it was an engineering failure as, theoretically, it should be easier to make something usable on a greenfield project, & it was a horrific mess.

It was the type of product that was an engineering impossibility to launch at the time. Mobile browsers of the time (and many users' desktop browsers!) couldn't run JS quickly enough to allow for the real-time experience - and reportedly Wave would consume 300-500 MB of RAM at the time, which was a ton for 2009!

https://theappslab.com/2009/10/05/google-wave-the-aftermath/

So they would have needed to invest in native mobile apps, and in significant levels of optimization. And none of this, not web or mobile, had the developer experience necessary to iterate quickly enough as the UI would inevitably evolve upon contact with customers, and you'd end up having many widgets reflecting a centralized global state.

Not to mention that you needed sticky server-side sessions to run the operational transformations efficiently, which harkens to the KV caching challenges that still challenge us today.

But it was an incredible dream, and it was a key source of inspiration to me to choose CS as a path.

There were plenty of apps at the time doing real-time experience, they just weren't running 300-500mb of RAM while doing so because they weren't overengineered by idiots.

There was nothing about the wave protocol or concept that necessitated the bloated mess of JS they churned out. A big part of the problem with optimisation, on top of it doing way too much in poorly thought through ways, was simply that nobody in Google even knew JS, because they were just transpiling Java to JS.

They tried that with buzz. It flopped even harder

I didn’t remember Buzz, so I looked up a video about it. It looks more like a social network than an evolution of email. I think that was the issue there. They tried to shove social networking into email. I don’t know about anyone else, but I always wanted social networks to be an island, especially in that era. The social contract and expectations with email are different from social networking.

Huge mistake! I loved Wave, and used it very successfully on one creative project. When I tried again, with some of the same people, we'd collectively burned all of our invite tokens and couldn't get any more, so we had to revert to emailing things back and forth so the new folks weren't kept out of the loop. That killed it, as far as any of us were concerned. I think I used it one more time, to plan a party or something with my sister, and never again. Integrating it into Gmail, as you suggest, would have been a better path, but hardly necessary. It was great as a stand-alone product, but destroyed itself because the damn invite system stopped the network effect cold.

In other words, you wish Google had EEE'd email. And also stopped supporting normal emails between two Gmail users, and completely redesigned the product.

You think this wouldn't get people who just wanted email to quit Gmail and use something else instead?

If you could attach or insert a wave into an email, that would make more sense.