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Does anyone know why this was? Was the compute resource too scarce at the time? Seems hard to believe of Google even as I type it.

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GMail was still fresh at the time, and it rolled out in a similar manner, being invite-only at first. I think they didn't think about it very much, and just did the same thing.

But email was already interoperable. GMail offered a nice interface, lots of storage, and a good spam filter, but otherwise it was just email. You didn't need to have friends with it to benefit from it.

Having used Wave, it was very taxing on low-end computers, so I never ended up using the fancier features - we used it for a group live-watch of LOST every week with several other friends.

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