Google Wave
Reviving Google Wave: what 320px will bring back
Google Wave was Google’s 2009 attempt to make email and chat one live conversation. Its service closed in 2012, and its code lived on as Apache Wave until 2018. 320px is building a modern revival of Google Wave, built on the open-source Apache Wave code. It’s in development and isn’t available yet.
What Google Wave was
A wave was a conversation and a document at once. Everyone in it could reply, edit and add to it, and everyone else saw the changes as they were typed.
- Live typing. Other people in a wave saw your words appear as you wrote them.
- Replies anywhere. You could reply inside a message, not only below it, so each thread stayed next to what it answered.
- Playback. You could replay a wave to see how it grew, one change at a time.
- Extensions. Robots and gadgets could join a wave and add to it.
- Federation. An open protocol let other servers run waves and share them.
From Google Wave to Apache Wave
- : Google announces Wave at its I/O developer conference.
- : The preview opens to about 100,000 invited people.
- : Wave opens to everyone.
- : Google says it will stop developing Wave as a standalone product.
- : Wave enters the Apache Incubator as Apache Wave, with its server, Wave in a Box.
- : Existing waves on Google’s service become read-only.
- : Google switches its Wave service off.
- : Apache Wave retires from the Incubator. Its code stays available under the Apache License.
Why it faded
When Google stopped developing Wave as a standalone product, it said Wave hadn’t been adopted as widely as it had hoped. Common explanations at the time were:
- It was hard to explain. Wave mixed email, chat and wikis in one place, and people weren’t sure what to use it for.
- Invitations arrived slowly, so most people’s colleagues and friends weren’t on it, and it didn’t reach their email.
- Many people found it slow in the browsers of the time.
Why it’s worth reviving
The ideas held up better than the product. Teams now split their work between chat, which moves fast and scrolls away, and email, which keeps a record but is slow to answer. Wave put both in one place: a conversation you could talk in live and still read later, with every reply where it belongs.
What 320px will bring back, and what it will change
320px is a modern Rust port of Apache Wave. These are our plans, not features you can use today.
- Live conversations. New messages and replies will appear as they’re typed, as they did in Wave, and edits as soon as they’re saved.
- Threads and history. Replies will stay next to what they answer, and you’ll be able to step back through how a conversation changed.
- Rust and PostgreSQL. A new server written in Rust, with PostgreSQL as its database.
- AI, used carefully. Summaries and answers will come from Anthropic’s Claude models, labelled as generated and linked to the messages they rely on.
- MCP for AI agents. An MCP server will let agents such as Claude and ChatGPT search and work with the conversations you let them read.
- Public and private spaces. There will be a free public space for open projects, and private spaces for organizations, each encrypted with a key of its own.
- Open source. Apache-2.0, like Apache Wave, so anyone will be able to run their own. The open-source page has the details.
Not planned: Wave’s federation between servers, and importing every detail of old Wave data. We plan to import old Wave exports where we can.
Plans for hosting on 320px.com are on the pricing page.
Follow the revival
Join the waitlist and we’ll email you when 320px opens. We’ll ask you to confirm your address first.
Sources
- Google, “Went walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.” (28 May 2009)
- Google, “Update on Google Wave” (4 August 2010)
- Google, “More spring cleaning out of season” (22 November 2011)
- The Apache Incubator’s status page for Wave
- Apache Wave’s source code, archived on GitHub
- Wikipedia, “Google Wave”, for the preview and public release dates
Checked on .
Apache Wave, Wave in a Box and Apache are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. Google Wave is a trademark of Google LLC. Claude and Anthropic are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC. ChatGPT is a trademark of OpenAI. Slack is a trademark of Slack Technologies, LLC. Microsoft Teams is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. 320px is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by The Apache Software Foundation, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Slack or Microsoft.