RIP Google Wave
PrintAfter promising to revolutionize online communication, Google Wave suffered from the same thing that many Google services do: engineers designing user interfaces is a bad, bad idea. Google announced today that Wave will no longer be developed, although pieces of it may be moved into other Google products. said on the Google Blog today:
…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. 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.
I am actually disappointed in this, because I saw huge opportunities for Wave in libraries. Given a better UI, I think it could have changed a lot of things about communication online. Here’s hoping that others do decide to extend the protocols that Google used for this product, and make something even better from it.
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Comments
Thanks for posting on this,
Thanks for posting on this, Jason. Like you, I saw a lot of potential for Wave to revolutionize communication—and even said something to that effect a couple times in print.
It’s interesting to me that you attribute Wave’s slow adoption to its UI. I never really thought of it that way (although the UI was a kind of awkward, yeah…). I thought Wave’s biggest shortcoming was that it was solving problems we didn’t even know we had and that those solutions were, by their nature, bound up within the product itself, limiting their appeal because of lack of integration with plain old email.
Despite its limitations, plain old email is pretty much universal, and we’ve formed our habits around it. Usually that means working “offline” and passing around files as attachments, with naming conventions, track changes, and so forth. When Google showed us that all the collaboration could be done server-side and in the browser, we realized how inefficient our email habits were, but we’re still so entrenched in those habits that it’s hard to break away. In my experience, this entrenchment is especially deep in the workplace, where I think Wave had the most potential.
I was disappointed to hear this news, but now instead of being forced over to Wave to reap the benefits of Google’s magic, I look forward to seeing some of those features better integrated into other tools, standard tools we already use every day.