Google Wave hits a breakwater

Google officially announced the end of Google Wave today. Wave was intended to be a new way for people to work collaboratively on everything from sales proposals to technical documents and designs. Yes, I was most definitely a Wave user myself. In the early days of Wave, I was one of the people lucky enough to get a Wave invite. For being billed as a collaborative work platform, it was in fact remarkably difficult to collaborate on.

Back then, daily Twitter conversations amongst storage and VMware professionals would often include a mention of having a Google Wave invite available—which would generally remain so for about thirty seconds before being claimed. Eventually, the majority of us were on Wave, and we produced some truly amazing results. The greatest asset of Wave wasn’t the special features or anything like that—it was the ability for us to put complicated ideas and thoughts in front of a larger audience, get feedback, and gain understanding.

In fact, the majority of us were the kind of Wave users that Google probably didn’t want. We didn’t use anything other than text entry, most of the time. To us, Wave was a collaborative word processor, and an extremely frustrating one at that. Problems with losing text, or exiting the editor without intending to were common. But it did, at least in our case, fill an important need that no other product addressed.

Google’s official statement reads in part, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” And to be honest, for many of us, it’s not very surprising. While we created and innovated our pants off for a brief period, it was quickly forgotten, and saw less and less use. It filled a need, but ultimately ended up as little more than a fad, as many of us returned to email because it was easier to use and more reliable in some ways. Some of the biggest and most active Waves I was part of haven’t seen any activity since March. People just lost interest in Wave.

Google will not be shutting down Wave, though. Quoting, they “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.” So while Wave itself may be dead, we may yet see the technologies and innovations from it in future Google products.