While I know that it was useful during manhunts and that Lifehacker loves it, I still don’t really understand Google Wave. But no more worrying about this particular lack of knowledge though, because Google appears to be abandoning the project:
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. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.
Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.
Rest in peace, Google Wave. I truly never understood or used you. [Google Blog via TechCrunch]
Sam
Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 8:17 AMWave was a brilliant idea, but too close (in the real world) to email to replace it.
opm881
Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 11:47 AMit needed more features. I know for a major assignment I had in one of my programming classes at uni. The class consisted of 19 people and there was 1 guy that did the assignment himself[was already fully qualified but his qualifications werent recognised in australia] and the rest of us were in a group split into 3 groups to work on different parts. Was a great way of communicating as a group and in between the groups so that everyone was kept up to date with what was going on. Unfortunatly towards the end of the project we just ended up emailing because it was alot easier to get onto people and get a response quicker than what wave was doing. That, and it was a resource hog, my netbook would freeze up when ever it would try to begin to load wave under linux.
Art Nau
Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 12:02 PMwtf! i liked it
finally some move from good old email in a right direction and they killed it ?
Robert Mark Bram
Thursday, August 5, 2010 at 2:19 PMThis is very sad. I thought it was a great product but suffered from lack of good marketing AND positioning (as in it wasn’t good enough to do what Google wanted it to, and it was never marketed adequately to fill a niche). In particular:
- It isn’t a good replacement for email because there is no integration with gmail or other established mail systems.
- It isn’t good enough for creating documents (blogs, company documents) because there was no security (ability to make something read-only to certain people).
- It isn’t good enough as a collaboration tool because after a few people edit a Wave, it looks so confusing – you lose all notion of it being a single consistent document because it looks too much like a complicated chat.
I also wonder if it was just too heavy in terms of Javascript and network processing.
Either way, this is a big shame – I was very much looking forward to Wave taking a greater part in my tech life.