Think of a service and protocol that could be self hosted, federated, and combined instant messaging, forums, and email. You would have live collaborative editing, full post history, proper threading, the ability to jump into a thread at any time, and the ability to embed widgets into documents that could, too, leverage live collaboration, fine grained control over who can view fragments of a thread. And new posts would appear in your feed as soon as they were created.
It wasn't a dream. It existed as early as 2009, and it was called Google Wave. Surely someone around here remembers this!
At the time, web browsers were a lot slower and less optimized. Wave chugged on most machines due to its sophisticated functionality, and people weren't used to social media being so fast paced and immediate. It was rough around the edges. But for the time it existed, it was so fun and exciting. It really felt like the beginnings of a new frontier in online communication.
And then, naturally, Google abandoned the project. They tried to hand it off to the Apache Foundation, but it never went anywhere.
It wasn't perfect, but I feel like it was one of those things that was just way ahead of its time, invented around 10 years too early. Considering how people use social media today, I feel like such a technology would have a much better outcome now. I kinda miss it.
