Summary

  • Google said its September 2009 Wave preview would send more than 100,000 invitations. It also said participants could not yet be removed, groups were unavailable and a wave's user permissions could not be configured.
  • Early group permissions appeared in December 2009. By the open sign-up of 18 May 2010, Google listed removal of mistakenly added participants and permission management among available features. The company stopped standalone Wave development that August.

Imagine inviting a colleague into a document and watching her type appear as she types it. Now imagine adding the wrong colleague. The first action was Google Wave's sales pitch; the second exposed an unfinished control surface. In its May 2009 introduction, Google described a wave as conversation and document at once: participants could edit the same material, see live typing and play back its changes. It presented the web application, developer platform and federation protocol as three layers of an ambitious project. The live editing was the spectacle. Managing who could stay in the room would become the less glamorous part of the product.

Google's 29 September preview notice put both sides on the same page. Starting the next day, more than 100,000 invitations would go to active developers, early sign-ups and selected business and university customers of Google Apps. Invitees could nominate others. The team had concentrated since May on scale, stability, speed and usability. Yet it wrote that users could not remove a participant, define groups or configure a wave's permissions. Draft mode was missing too. A participant list was easy to enlarge and hard to correct.

That sequence matters because a wave was a persistent shared object, not a temporary chat window. Google wanted people to use it for team plans, documents and work that accumulated revisions. As the company itself explained, editors could insert replies or alter the original wave directly. Adding someone therefore changed access to a continuing body of work. The 2009 preview gave a host an invitation mechanism before a complete membership and role mechanism. The omission was public in Google's own release note, not a problem inferred from a later obituary.

In December 2009 the Wave team introduced an early answer for groups. A user could add a Google Group to a wave, set permissions, then view and edit with that group. The team called the integration early-stage and said group waves appeared in Wave, not in the Google Groups interface. This was a new way to define a room and its occupants. It did not establish that every individual control had been solved at the same moment.

By 18 May 2010, Google opened Wave to anyone as a Google Labs product, without an invitation. Its announcement now advertised two abilities absent from the September list: removal of participants added by mistake and permission management. It also cited better performance, email notifications and an extensions gallery. The precise release date for each control is absent from these announcements, but the order is plain: the large invitation wave came first; the public open door came after the tools to manage entry had arrived.

The product's later fate is a separate clock. On 4 August 2010, Google said adoption had fallen below its hopes and ended development of Wave as a standalone product, while describing open-source code and a planned way to export content. In November 2011, it scheduled a read-only service for 31 January 2012 and full shutdown for 30 April, with individual PDF exports available until then. The record gives Google's stated adoption decision; it gives no evidence that the preview's missing controls caused it.

The more revealing story sits in the first seven months. Wave made co-writing feel immediate, then spent part of its preview building the boring authority that makes shared work usable: who may enter, who may edit and how an erroneous invitation can be reversed. A collaboration tool can dazzle with ten cursors. Its owner still has to ship the eleventh action: tell one cursor to leave.

Original records