Google

RIP Google Wave

By Peter Ha | August 4, 2010 | +

Surprised? You shouldn’t be! The Techland team has been using Wave since October and many of us are still confused about what it’s supposed to do. Looks like we’re not in the minority.

“…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 guess we’re going to have to pay for Campfire.

[via Google]

Related Topics: google wave, RIP, web, Google, News
  • Allie Townsend

    I am the only person upset about this.

  • http://www.lacunae.com/ Douglas Wolk

    I don’t know, I think I am too!

  • Rorschach

    I liked wave. I think they introduced it too soon it was way too buggy and confusing. I was hopingit would catch on

  • richardsrussell

    And here you had the chance to be the 1st to say “Wave goodbye” but missed it. By now you’d only be about the 200th.

    FWIW, I’ve never heard of this product before and didn’t have a clue what it was used for (nor was your article at all forthcoming at helping me figure it out), so this looks to me like this week’s winner of the gold medal in monumental shruggery.

  • http://redeleon.wordpress.com R.E. de Leon

    Aw nuts. I thought it was a really really great idea. Except it took too long to get everyone else to figure out when and how to use it. :S Kinda reminds me of those early tablet computers. Lotsa potential… before its time. :S I’ll continue using wave for now if they’re not pulling it. Someday I hope similar collaboration software will pick up users more quickly.

  • timgill123

    I really like wave, I know it has it’s issues but I thought they would get sorted. My biggest frustration is that I couldn’t get many other people to use it. I’m really sad about this.

  • http://synapticlight.com/ Phillip Gibb

    Well I am not surprised. I guess you can’t get everything right. Or the world is not ready for this yet.

    Phill
    http://synapticlight.com/

  • http://attentionbubble.wordpress.com Niall O’Malley

    Indeed, it was on the cards for a while. After talking to the social media community, I put together seven reasons why it failed: http://bit.ly/bXsYMe. Comments / responses appreciated.

  • http://www.twitter.com/leverus Lev Grossman

    Surprised they shut it down so fast. I figured Google could afford to let this one hang fire longer, build momentum.

    Still, classic example of Google’s problems w/ social engineering/interface design. Too many features, requiring too many IQ points to access.

  • sorebuttcheeks

    I’m afraid i’m one of the people who has no idea what google wave was all about. http://steroid.blog.co.uk

  • dspringfield

    Google Wave could have been spectacular as a standalone application. I really liked it, but I wanted a bit more. It needed to be a little more intuitive. I wanted to be able to drop images and files directly into the sessions. It would have been nice to be able to highlight a portion of the conversation and right click to display selection properties such as who originally posted the content, if/when it was edited and by whom.

  • monkatron

    I fooled around with Wave briefly; like many others I couldn’t figure out what it was or why it was.

  • beckie66

    I am not that surprised. I tried to get friends and family to test it with me back in November, – not many takers. A few of us messed around with it until the end of January, and we haven’t touched it since. It is confusing, and for our needs, YIM or AIM does the same thing. I think it is a great product for an office, but it was pretty convoluted from the start. Goodbye, Wave.

  • bobmacneal

    Google Wave was an engineering triumph – a creative mash-up of tried and tested technologies.

    However, usability was never improved. User experience was never demonstrably considered by Google. Most users just didn’t get it.

    My Posthumous Retrospective on Google Wave
    http://is.gd/e4IxY

  • http://pankajunk.wordpress.com/ pankajunk

    They could have run with it a little longer. It was a great product, but its lack of structure and ill defined use cases made it a turn off, especially for businesses. It was like a lego set, you can do wonders with it, but you need help to get started.

    Pankaj
    http://www.hyperoffice.com

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