The Demise of Google Wave
On Wednesday in an Official Google Blog post, Urs Hölzle of Google informed us that Google Wave would no longer be developed:
Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
Hölzle goes on to give some hope that some of this initiative may live on in other ways:
The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.
I can’t say that I am surprised. I have enjoyed using Google Wave with a few different groups on projects. Still, use never really went past experimental. There was not enough to compel people to return to the site. Even though it was billed as email reimagined, we are all too wired into our email to make a shift over like this. Even when Google introduced email updates about what was happening in the Waves, it was too little too late.
Did you use Google Wave? Will you miss it?
Hi Connie,
I for one will not be sorry to see the end of the wave. It’s kind of like when a wave gets started at a sporting event. It starts out with some enthusiastic fans who just keep at it in earnest until they finally build enough momentum to get fans around the stadium to rise to their feet and raise their hands in unity. But pretty quickly interest dies out as most fans’ attention returns to the play while the diehards keep struggling to keep it going in awkward clumps of 3 or 4 scattered throughout the stands. Until finally everyone gives up the ghost. I never really ‘got’ google wave. It’s one of those applications that seemed more like technology for technology’s sake than something that actually met a need in the marketplace. I love new apps and am always willing to give them a whirl, but they better facilitate my workload rather than adding to it, or this sports fan is sticking to her seat!
I like that analogy, Tracy. There was certainly an element of that with the public waves.
I found the best use was when there was a small private group (4-10 people). It was great for authoring something as a group and, at the same time, discussing it, thereby taking out all the back-and-forth out of the email and having it retained somewhere for future reference.
This I *will* miss. The big, public waves? Not so much.
I am disappointed to hear this news.
I found the wave to very useful as a singular place to put everything I found related to a project, or piece of research I was working on.
Bits of news, video, podcasts, articles and other documents,excerpts thereof, books, commentary, blogs, photos….anything at all in any digital medium could all be thrown in there to be found, perused, analysed etc, so that I could design my paper or project based on my findings.
It is so much more effective than all the bits of paper I used to have to refer to when doing a project in my university days.
And best of all, it’s a wonderful resource for the person who is managing, or has ownership of the project. She/he can look at the wave and in one reading, can tell exactly what information his team has found, or done so far, on the project. It won’t tell what is the status, but it will give her an idea of ‘what we have on this’, so the team leader can decide ‘where we go from here’.
Traditionally, one would have an idea of what he wants a project to look like, based on his/her own experience.
But we live in an age of collaboration and it behooves us to tap in to the fertile minds of others who come from different perspectives and experiences. More often than not, seeing (in a place like the wave), what others have found, or seeing their ideas expressed there, is what inspires a whole new idea that the team leader may not have imagined.
So I for one hope that the wave will continue to be available in some other format.