Posted 08.04.2010 at 5:51 pm
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The much-hyped, rarely understood Google Wave project--essentially an email application with more intensive real-time collaboration and communication tools bolted on--will be developed no longer, Google announced in a blog post this afternoon. Can't say that it's much of a surprise.
Wave was composed of several technically innovative individual parts, like its real-time, as-you-type chat, an advanced spellcheck algorithm and the ability for developers to build their own add-ons. Innovative enough, in fact, to receive a Best of What's New nod last year. But the service lacked cohesion. Put simply: no one knew what to use it for.
Here at PopSci.com, we looked at using Wave as our command central for running the site (we currently use the web chat service Campfire), but found it too complex and in many ways ill-suited to the task. Having co-workers see what you're typing each keypress at a time--mistakes, recasts, backspaces and all--was more awkward than useful. And I still don't think I understand the methodology of storing conversations and projects in "Waves."
We, apparently, weren't alone. Google says "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." It will be maintained through the end of the year, and for those rarefied few that understood the service enough to start using it, they'll have a way to export all their data before the plug is pulled for good.
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Google Wave was a good concept poorly executed. It was not at all intuitive unless you were sending a simple message. I am not aaying I could have done any better. I was excited when I read about Wave, I saw the beta launch video showing its capacity, but when I got my beta, it did not seem too impressive, I could not intuitively accomplish tasks they had on the video. Again, great concept...
It's a real shame. The real-time multi-user apps supported by wave have a great future. We have a Google Wave travel-planner called "Travel WithMe",
and people love the real-time experience.
Sensing that wave might not be going places, we've put it on facebook now as well, but still with Google Wave's realtime features. It's at apps.facebook.com/travel-withme.
Stupid users. Stupid. You don't know a good thing when you see it. It is a collaboration tool. Not a chat client. Not a BBS. Myself and some fellow musicians have been using it for many months now to collaborate on music, share recordings, working on song lyrics, etc. It is an effective tool for such things. Me and my buddies have hundreds of Waves that we are going to have to export out.
I suppose that since it didn't include inane games like Farmville, it was beyond the intelligence of the average use to figure it out.
Google Wave was an engineering triumph – a creative mash-up of tried and tested technologies like XMPP and Wiki.
However, usability was never improved. The "user experience" was never demonstrably considered by Google. Most users just didn’t get it.
My Posthumous Retrospective on Google Wave http://is.gd/e4IxY
I have to say this seemed inevitable but I hope they learn from it, for instance possibly integrating the spell checking into gmail, which personally I'd love to see.