Re:Apache Wave
by Jtsummers on Friday April 04, 2014 @02:54PM
(#7533511)
As I recall, I had several invites when I got in. The problem was that those invites went into a queue, they were a lie. With gmail (at least when I got to it), my invites were sent out immediately and the recipient could start using gmail that day. With Wave, my invites were queued and when Google felt it was time they'd send it out. This could be days or, in at least one case for me, weeks later. By the time I got enough people in to give it a shot, only myself and the most recent were interested in trying it.
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Well, even though many if not most of my friends ended up with an invite (and we made active use of Wave), that didn't make it a success: the client was just too slow and laggy. It basically only worked in chrome, and poorly there. Large threads were simply unusable.
I don't think the closed beta-ness of wave really hurt it. If wave had actually worked well, then maybe there'd have been a point where it was worth opening up to many users - but wave never got there, so it's a moot point.