Google Wave

Google Wave tried to reinvent conversations as live, editable threads where everyone could write at once.

Wave blurred the line between a message and a document. A conversation could be revised while other participants were present, making the shared space feel active rather than a fixed sequence of sent replies. That was an ambitious change to the familiar rules of email and chat.

The idea also demanded new habits from participants. People had to understand what kind of object they were creating together and how to follow its changes. Its brief life remains interesting as an experiment in collaboration, even apart from whether it became an everyday tool.

Google ended development after the real-time collaboration experiment failed to find a broad audience.