Wave Goodbye to Google Wave

Google announced yesterday on their official blog that they would be ceasing development of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration. It allowed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. What it didn't do was give you a valid reason for using it. From the start it was overly complicated and proved difficult to use.

Google Wave was a real time application and you were bombarded with information whether you wanted to be involved or not and often felt that you had to respond in real time - dropping whatever you were doing to reply to waves.



The buggy nature (I know it's Labs) also meant that for a period I could amend other Wave users' typing in real time (a very dangerous ability - imagine if you could take control of facebook chats and amend them - how mcuh trouble would that cause?).

By mid November here at I-COM we had all decided that enough was enough and it was a distraction from work that we could all do without. In fact by November 6th it had already been summed up.




Google Wave was a great example of excellent technology being developed without truly understanding what the user wanted. Yes we would like real time collaboration on files and projects and to be able to chat in real time but we also want to be able to do this using a very simple interface and also be able to filter the massive amounts of information that would be generated by Wave and real time collaborations. It always felt like you were in a "shouting" match - the fastest typer would win.

In addition there were no real examples of how Google Wave could increase your productivity. Yes there were extensions but no clear explanations of where and how you could use them. Templates for meetings, task tasking etc. were confusing. It seemed like everything was over complicated. Simply too much to learn in a very short span of time. Perhaps Google's downfall was thinking that people are much smarter than they really are and would be able to pick up (or were willing to invest the time and effort) Google Wave vey quickly.

I'm not knocking the developers who built Google Wave - they have introduced new technologies that are superb and I certainly hope that Google wil be able to introduce real-time collaboration technologies into other areas (perhaps a feature within Google OS?) but any new technology needs to be simple and contain clear instructions on how to be used before take up by the masses.