Google Wave is done with further development. No need to panic, the service was a bit too difficult for an average user to understand despite being one of the most powerful and interactive service that married instant messaging with Twitter and email, it never really got traction from users. Primarily because it was difficult to play around with, thanks to the likes of Twitter, Gtalk, MSN Messenger, etc that have made us lazy and more accustomed to less simpler services.
The folks at Google, who were so enthusiastic upon its revelation last year have finally accepted fate stating that the service hasn’t really lived up to its expectations. Not the people’s fault nor is it that of the team who put forth this idea, I personally think the whole issue was with the timing of releasing the service.
The service will remain active, but I personally think that it will eventually end up in the cemetery as just another Google product that couldn’t do great. Though I am just worried what will be done with its team? The folks are pretty smart and I bet Google can better utilize them, perhaps for the Facebook competitor it plans to release.
Did anyone of you use Waves? Share your experiences in the comments. Oh, here’s a blast from the past, the Google Wave video released back in May 2009:
Wave is simply the best communication tool ever released. It being free and part of google just makes it 10x-even-better.
Wave can be, and is used by our corporation as:
– chatroom
– replacement for skype group chat (less annoying as you can ignore it if just watching rather than participating)
– personal to-do list and checklist maker
– project management task assignments
– complete replacement for email inside the company, especially those times when an email reply becomes a long conversation with multiple topics, and then you need to pull someone else into it (please don’t make us go back to the days of reply to all)
– group / team / department announcement and newsletters
– incident status tracking
– 1-1 document collaboration
– sharing any file that requires discussion, comment, or revision instructions
– sharing designs, floorplans, graphics, proposals, accounts for comment
– discussing and rating marketing videos
– creating policy and training documents on the fly
– creating meeting minutes on the fly
– daily staff work activity reports
– staff travel arrangements and tracking
– copy pasting skype chats when they became too long and important to let disappear into the skype history void
… and a lot more
Wave keeps it simple, isn’t bloated with useless features (unless you want them via extensions), and is incredibly flexible.
It has also been amazingly fast and stable across different browsers and browser versions.
I think letting Wave drop is a huge mistake by google and I hope they will quietly keep it running for the sake of the early adopters who are proving it is an awesome tool.
The marketing for Wave was total pants from the start, remember the video with some uber geeks being excited about real time typing. That feature is really the least interesting part of wave.
Google should have pitched wave at corporations and sme’s not at individual social-networking / chat / friend type users.
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Sardar Mohkim Khan Reply:
August 31st, 2010 at 4:35 am
Hi George,
Thanks for this detailed response. I agree with your points and Google Wave wa sindeed a super service, which wasn’t really paid attention to by Google itself.
I personally think it won’t die totally and Google would definitely integrate it with some other more popular services it has like the Gmail or maybe Google.Me… Who knows..
Thanks!
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