Comment Wave's problems were about control and lack of it (Score 2, Interesting) 179
Google did a great job creating an open protocol. But they made two mistakes:
1. They were not open enough. Although they had suggested that people would be able to build their own clients (and demoed a curses based client) they never opened an API for writing a wave client. They wanted it to be a flagship web application - but just as people like all sorts of different clients for email (even if many now like web clients), they would probably have liked client choice for wave - especially if 3rd party clients had shown waves along side email and the like.
2. They were too open. Their programming model for wave (web-hosted applications with read and write access to your wave) had huge security implications. It was not clear from the UI who would have access to your data and when.
Both of these were things that slowed adoption of wave.