It was so cool, except that the scroll bars were terrible and it didn't work with existing email, so it wasn't really usable.

I had big dreams of creating an IT support contact system using Wave. I imagined users initiating contact and being greeted by a robot which would ask them for the basic details. Based on this information they would be picked up by the appropriate support team member who would seamlessly take over the conversation.

I could foresee that continuous improvement of the robot to include logic to deal with common problems and questions would, over time, eat away at the number of support tickets which were mundane "easy fixes".

Then Wave "died" and I took a new job where dealing with helpdesk ticketing systems wasn't a pressing concern any more.

Two things surprised me about this:

1 - I can't believe its's been over 4 year since Wave launched (and flopped)

2 - In those 4 years, UI trends have changed a lot. The UI in that screenshot looks horribly dated.

To be fair, Wave looked dated when it came out.

It's seems Apache Wave has moved from SVN to git since the last time I checked it out. Does anyone know if the project is still alive?

Misleading title...should be: Google Wave: A Complete Guide (2009)

But yes, I miss it too.

Well it's not like it's gone anywhere, you can still run an Apache Wave server if you want. Sure it's annoying to have to setup a server. I'm surprised a commercial hosting service hasn't sprung up.

I miss Google Wave too. Seems stagnant, if not dead. :-(

Rizzoma, Kune, Novell Vibe, Google Wave is still alive.

the google inbox announcement made me think of google wave. ahead of its time. maybe they will bring it back modernized...

So jump in and help keep it alive... it's Open Source now and an Apache Software Foundation incubator project.

http://incubator.apache.org/wave/

thanks for the link!