Yeah I was hoping for it to take off and nuke Facebook. I hated Facebook from the start, even before it got super terrible.

i love signing into my youtube sub accounts and seeing that brief redirect to plus.google.com 🥹

It was seriously just like 3-5 years ahead of itself, lol

Wave was also a terrible loss, laughed out of the room for being too good.

Wave?

Wave was like, this collaborate doc replacement for email. It was a really good idea, much better than doc sharing, and was also an early superior implementation of the collaborative doc methodology. And even Colbert made fun of it because people just weren't prepared to understand the idea

GOOGLE WAVE MENTIONED

I will always. 🫡

People weren't used to online products being good back then, they only knew bad stodgy things, and web2.0 stuff was still considered "off-putting" and "incompatible."

It also had an underlying protocol that was meant to replace email but with way more features

yeah, it was such a cool concept, and it actually worked pretty damn well considering. god, google used to do such neat stuff. not that their AI work isn't impressive in its own right, but...

Google once upon a time was a much more exciting kind of product company. I think the walk back from that mindset when G+ vanished kinda killed that for Google outside of Android, and even Android over time has been ground down.

Lkf, it was also not written with mid OTs like Docs, but an early variant of what we'd later start knowing as CRDTs. That's the story I got from a former dev of it anyways. So it was the best kind of cool, algorithmically.

Wave was so cool!

So cool. 😔

Same. I think it would've had an easier time catching on if Google wasn't so aggressive about pushing it onto users of every other Google service; the way it impacted YouTube accounts in particular left a bad taste in a lot of folks' mouths (mine included).