I had exactly the same experience. I was at university, and around 20% of students on my course had access to Wave, which functionally meant 0% of students could use it.
“An app to collaborate on, but nobody to collaborate with” has to be the most economically destructive product rollout I’ve ever seen.
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.
> the Wave signups were so rationed that it was impossible to get everyone on it.
IMO, this is what killed it. There was so much excitement for Wave, but it completely failed to build the network effects it needed. If you had it, you couldn’t use it with all your friends no matter how much you wanted to.
Kinda a reason why I'm unlikely to sign up for anything that needs an invite, has a wait list, etc. Every day I see "Ask HN" posts about how hard it is to get traction with users, that somebody who has traction is going to use it to dick people around is the baddest of all bad smells.
I still kinda wonder if they saw the success of the invite system for gmail (I remember a lot of late nights begging for an invite on various forums) and thought that it would work again.
The critical difference is gmail still worked just fine with hotmail, yahoo mail, aol, etc. Wave was useless if both sides didn't have it.
As I recall, at one point Wave sort of had enough of an XMPP bridge that you could terribly IM a Wave without having a Wave invite if you were one of the 20 people still using XMPP that month and your friends with Wave knew a "secret" @ mention and you felt like learning an XML mini-DSL of pseudo-commands and kinda-unidiffs to read the changes from the people actually in Wave.
There was also plenty of talk about the "eventual" email bridge and real multi-server Wave federation, neither of which properly happened. (At least not in the invite months).
Though, yeah, Wave really could have used the network effects of non-scarce invites, because it wasn't as interoperable or as much of an "open standard" as it wanted to be. Or it should have had all that interoperability and open standards properly ready at launch and the Google server could have just been sold as the "best" of several options (and people waiting for invites could self-host; that might have done enough for viral class projects in college environments).
They'd already experienced the downsides of an invite-based rollout for a closed network, thanks to Orkut in the mid-2000s.
It flopped in English-speaking countries because invites were so limited when people first started talking about it, but became a success in Brazil and India as the buzz built a little later there, by which time it had become easier to get and share invites.
They then compounded the error by force-partitioning their users between the existing service and an invite-only New Orkut, with no easy way to communicate between the two.
That disaster was still playing out when Wave launched, so at least some part of Google ought to have been aware of the importance of network effects for a product of this type.
not to mention that i think there was some google+ initiative back then (i might've gotten the timing wrong tho). There's some office/department political machinations in the background, and the fallout of that ruined wave.
At that time email was validated, there was no doubt people wanted it, gmail was just better email. Contrast that to something like Wave which requires people to try something really new.
What could Wave have done better? explain why they need invites? Even better, expose their reasoning, eg they don't need to ease server pressure but they need quality signups? Anything fun I'm missing? Like skin-in-the-game moves from the private side, for macroscopic values of skin?
For Wave, I'd imagine they needed to publish data on which fun parts keep the new users returning ---there were MANY!
(So, we're both clearly not wishing to see their bugs from swiftly tilting these parts :)
the invites for wave was just a lame attempt to bank on the success of Gmail... they thought the invites was the reason, not 1gb instead of 10mb elsewhere.
google would really be awesome if PMs/VPs weren't so clueless and powerful.
Totally fair point — and really appreciate the honest feedback.
Our goal is to build a platform where people can learn, educate, rent, and share tools within a community that loves DIY. The “Explore” section is part of our effort to surface great tutorials and ideas, but we hear you — the rental experience should be front and center.
We’re working on making that more clear from the start. Thanks again for the insight — it really helps us improve.
Just to piggyback off this I had a similar thought. I read your post about the tool rental, got to the page and immediately saw random articles which unfortunately this AI age has got me to distrust that things are human written/curated when just presented with no context.
Seeing the rental and more community features would be best, then when you like the concept/community it makes sense to get invested in the posted articles because you've seen the site is active with people.
We’re working on bringing the rental and community features to the forefront so it’s clear from the start what Patio is about. In a world flooded with AI content, we get that leading with articles can feel impersonal without context.
The goal is to build trust through people and tools first — then let the content support that experience. Thanks for the kind words and thoughtful feedback!
Don't blame them, they just asked their agentic AI to make a successful site for renting tools. A Show HN post, and engagement in the comment section is a required step.
Any thoughts on how you'd decide what tools to rent, or which might be considered too hazardous? For example, I see you have angle grinders, but I'm not sure I'd want to start there if beginning a tool library.
Yes, we’re exploring features to help libraries or hosts decide what tools to buy based on local demand — things like surfacing what people nearby are searching for or requesting most.
We’re also adding ways to flag higher-risk tools, so if you’re just starting a library, you can focus on safer, high-demand items first. Really appreciate you bringing this up — both access and safety are key to getting this right.
That’s awesome — $35/quarter for full access is such a great deal, and tool libraries like yours are doing amazing work for local communities!
Unfortunately, not every city or neighborhood has a tool library yet. That’s one of the reasons we built Patio — to make tools more accessible wherever you are. We’re also working with tool libraries to feature their listings and provide tools to help manage inventory, grow memberships, and reach more people.
If you’re interested in collaborating, feel free to reach out at julien@patio.so — would love to chat!
How do you protect agains "professionals" abusing the system. So maybe thats not relevant in USA but I see potential in our communities that smaller repair shops or construction contractor would come and use tools disproportionally to their input. That's especially relevant with consummable parts like blades, files, etc
I do a lot of diy, jobs on the side for friends and I know a handful of professional tradies.
None of them would want to not own tools they use even semi regularly and for insurance purposes (and peace of mind) they would almost certainly have to hire tools they don’t own from a rental company and they will just pass the rental cost on to the client.
Absolutely, it’s not for everyone. Tool libraries aren’t meant to replace pro setups. I think they’re more for casual DIYers, for occasional project, or people who don’t want to buy something they’lll only use once or try a new tool before buying.
A professional usually needs a tool when they need it and can't rely on the vagaries of availability at a library. And it's easy to kick out someone who checks out a tool all year.
Most consumable parts can be excluded from lending. Batteries are trickier.
You're totally right! I agree that batteries are also trickier but we're working on fixing this. If you have any ideas or thoughts, feel free to contact me at julien@patio.so
Yeah, that can happen. Having some basic rules and keeping an eye on things usually helps. People are often asked to bring or replace their own consumables too.
It might be part of the feedback loop, but from my experience it always starts at the company level.
I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6 years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.
Thats kind of part of the problem, though. Yes, switching jobs constantly is a solid path to higher wages in fields like tech (at least it was before this year, some of the most competent people I know are struggling to change jobs), but in my experience that act tends to reduce ones number of "give a damns".
I've been "lucky" enough to get to trial some AI FEM-like structural solvers.
At best, they're sortof ok for linear, small deformation problems. The kind of models where we could get an exact solution in ~5 minutes vs a fairly sloppy solution in ~30 seconds. Start throwing anything non-linear in and they just fall apart.
Maybe enough to do some very high-level concept selection but even that isn't great. I'm reasonably convinced some of them are just "curvature detectors" - make anything straight blue, anything with high curvature red, and interpolate everything else.
I don't see any reason its not theoretically possible but I doubt it would be that beneficial.
You'd have to map the results back onto the traditional model which has overhead; and using shaky results as a precondition is going to negate a lot of the benefits, especially if its (incorrectly) predicting the part is already in the non-linear stress range which I've seen before. Force balances are all over the place as well (if they even bother to predict them at all, which its not always clear) so it could even be starting from a very unstable point.
Its relatively trivial to just use the native solution from a linear solution as the starting point instead, which is basically what is done anyway with auto time stepping.
Ended up being fairly easy to look for - I compared the David Woodard list to the United States list and found instances where it claimed there was an article for the former but not the latter. Most David Woodard articles have a link to where he was born (United States), so an easy crosscheck.
UR is Urdu, GUR is Gurene (a language spoken in parts of Ghana and Burkina Faso), and VEP is the Veps language, spoken by the Veps people in Karelia. VE is Venda, spoken in parts of Zimbabwe and South Africa.
I like Babbel a lot for reading/writing/listening but their speaking is a little weak. It's there but I find it pretty flaky - either so permissive it'll accept just about any sound you make, or so buggy it won't accept a single thing.
I haven't done a lot with it, but Pimsleur (https://www.pimsleur.com/) seems quite good for conversational. I've done a couple trials of it and plan to dive in when I finish my Babbel courses.
For conversational though you might be better off just finding an online tutor. 1 hour a week with a native speaker is probably more effective than any of the apps.
Duolingo is little better than a gacha game these days. It wasn't bad early on but its nearly unusable these days.
I like Babbel a lot for early levels - its gotten me back to a rough-B2 German level. I was probably approaching C1 in college, slipped to an A2 from lack of use, but I'm building it back up; and spent a while learning Norwegian from scratch a couple years ago on it.
Pimsleur is probably next on my list once I top out on Babbel to build up speaking.
Interesting idea on the ChatGPT sentence prompts. I'm not sure I fully trust it for that, but its worth a try.
Edit: Hm. Interesting idea. It's definitely a bit better at German than me, but its still making a handful of mistakes (as compared against other sources).
Unfortunately, for every other class, the Wave signups were so rationed that it was impossible to get everyone on it.
"Can we use Wave? No, Steve has been trying to get an invite for weeks".
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