My Last Google Wave Post

Damn Google Wave, I hardly knew you. After all the hype it is now gone. Google canned Wave about two years after they first showed it off to cheers. I recall watching the demo while on vacation and being blown away. The pieces that were shown were literally transformative in their execution. Too bad people just didn't get it in a mainstream sort of way. Not that I really did after I finally got into the developers' sandbox. If I am honest, I haven't even logged into Wave in the last six months. It never made its way into my workflow and it never solved any sort of problem for me.

At the end of the day it failed to fill any sort of void for most people and I think that has to do with the fact that it wasn't built to fill a void. It was built to be transformative and mind blowing. I am convinced that aspects of Wave will make their way into Google Docs, Sites, Gmail, and their other properties -- you know, the tools that were built to do specific things. Imagine Docs with a Wave like panel that allowed teams to dialogue in real language while co-authoring something. That's a feature I could use right now.

I am actually really impressed that Google killed it so quickly (and sad) ... sort of restored my faith in the fact that they release stuff as beta and in this case saw it just wasn't happening. I need to eat a little crow at how much attention I paid to it in its pre-release days, telling everyone how much this was going to change things. In the end it did a ton of stuff, just not for a ton of people. Again, seems amazing to me that Google could just kill it. Maybe that is the transformative lesson to learn here?

Comments

[twitter.com/cogdog]

Waving Goodbye.

Buh-bye! Buh-bye!

It is too bad, we could arm chair quarterback it all kinds of ways, but thats how the web 2.0 chips fall.

My hunch is that in the spectrum of places we put our e-ttention, it was too far removed-- Wave-like activities maybe can/will flow into Gdocs? Gchat? or GNothing....

[Ellysa]

I thought it was pretty awesome that they killed it so quickly (perhaps because I work in a profession hesitant to kill services of even miniscule use...ever).

I hate to say it, but the other much ballyhooed technology that is not working out for me (for now) is the iPad. I know the tool (and tablet computing in general) is going to have great use in the future, but for now (for me), it is too close to an iPhone and not as capable as a laptop.

[Matt Meyer]

The announcement's timing is great because we just published our hot team white paper :) Wave's demise certainly made sense, just from the dynamic of our hot team; excited at first, then confused about how to make use of it and finally, arms-length involvement from the lack of 'conviction'. Even our paper concludes with something to the effect that Google may integrate pieces into other G-Apps. I think Google saw enough feedback to know what to do with the pivotal features. I'm sure they have something else coming down the road.

[Cole Camplese]

Matt, the same thing happened with me as I really started to use it. I was so excited by it ... and then I got to try and it and was more confused about where it would fit than anything else.

Ellysa, the iPad (unlike Wave) has found a home in my workflow. I use it as my home machine and leave my laptop at work all week. I take it to meetings and find it productive for shorter working sessions. Not a laptop replacement, but so much better for doing email, writing, responding, and consuming social media than my iPhone. But like anything else, that's just my perspective.

Alan, I do think we'll see Wave features emerge in GDocs down the road. The combination of real time collaboration and authoring would be a strong move forward.