Google Wave was a software framework for real-time collaborative online editing, announced by Google on May 28, 2009, and later carried forward as Apache Wave under the Apache Software Foundation. It wasn't just another app — it was an attempt to merge email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking into one web-based platform, where conversations could unfold in real time or at your own pace. It had contextual spelling and grammar checking, automated translation, extensions that felt like the future arriving early. For the people who used it, Wave wasn't confusing — it was ahead of its time, and we knew it.
The end came quickly. On August 4, 2010, Google announced it was suspending stand-alone Wave development, with the site kept running only through the remainder of the year. The project found a second life as Apache Wave, adopted as an incubator project by the Apache Software Foundation in 2010, but the thing Google had built — the energy, the momentum, the 100,000 users invited in September 2009 passing invites to friends like treasured tickets — never returned. What was lost wasn't just software. It was the belief that a communication platform could be reimagined from scratch rather than patched together.
We ask that Google Wave be brought back — even a limited run, even a respectful revival that honors what Apache carried forward. Every year, tools rediscover ideas Wave shipped in 2009: live typing, shared conversations, one place for everything. The signatures below are not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. They are from people who used it, understood it, and never stopped thinking the world caught up to Wave without ever crediting it. Let it come back and take that credit in person.
— filed by the fans of Google Wave, at products.rip
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