Wave in a box continues to disappoint.

Wave in a box was supposed to allow people to run their own Wave style servers due to the fact that Google abandoned the project. They provided tools for exporting existing waves, but the progress on Wave in a Box appears to have completely stalled, which is disappointing.

I know most people felt it was too different and had no significant benefit, but having used it to manage some in-house projects with a distributed team I can say that it did come with a set of benefits that were too often overlooked.

The biggest one was the fact that, unlike e-mail, the discussions and documents in a Wave were sharable with a team and everyone could see the current state. The past could be edited, but a history of that past remained visible so any vandalism or mistakes could be undone. Yet it had the immediacy of chat and a shared document being edited in real time.

Once you got past the quirks, it was addictive. Sadly, I have tried at various points during Wave in a box's development to run a server and have always come away disappointed in the fraction of features that are implemented and the horrible crash rate.

The current build (development branch as of 2011-06-09) can't even store a wave. The system throws an error of "Received overlapping submit requests to subscription" and only the first few characters survive. It appears to allow you to continue, but it actually ignores all input past that point.

This error appears to be time dependent: if I type slowly I only save two or three characters. At my normal rate, two or three words. Using cut and paste I can actually "beat the clock" and get more in, but that seems to defeat the purpose of an editor and anyways it crashes more seriously after I add a reply to any content I slip in.

I wish I could find a competent wave replacement, but nothing I have found combines the immediacy *and* the persistence of Wave.