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Wave “Goodbye” to Google Wave, a wonderful collaborative silo

August 6, 2010 By 8 Comments

Like other users who have had access to Google Wave for the past 8-10 months, I was impressed by Google’s technology — and frustrated by my inability to use it effectively.

Wave, Google’s innovative web application for real-time communication and collaboration, was a collaborative silo. This is why, on August 4, 2010, Google announced the suspension of Wave development: “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 collaborative tools of Wave were fierce… It bundled email, instant messaging, threaded conversations and rich media as “waves of content” to be shared with others.  Wave updates were available in real-time — and historically via playback in chronological order. Any participant of a wave could reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process.

However, the distribution model for Wave was flawed. it was only released to 100,000 developers as a preview. Thereafter — until May, 2010 — it was only available by special request or invitation. As a result, people who obtained Google’s collaboration tool had few people to collaborate with.

Google’s distribution model based on ‘exclusivity’ was a poorly-chose approach for a collaboration tool.

Meet Doctor Wave

Product manager Greg, a.k.a. Dr. Wave, gives an introduction to Google Wave and points out parts of the user interface. (Note: This is meant to be viewed inside Google Wave.)

Further Reading:

Filed Under: Cloud, crowdsourcing, Email, google, Misc T, Twitter, Web Tagged With: , , , ,
About Troy Janisch

Troy Janisch, Publisher of Social Meteor, is a digital marketing professional and social media beatnik. He is a contributor to SmartBrief on Social Media. Troy leads the marketing team at Sentry Insurance, but don’t let that scare you. He rarely talks about insurance in mixed company [grin]. Like a good social media program, SocialMeteor.com is all about content. It’s not a consulting company or marketing agency.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/troyjanisch Troy Janisch

    Debbie Pascoe, via LinkedIn: It was a good idea, poorly executed. I and a bunch of my colleagues shared wave invites and jumped in early, and after the initial oooooh-aaaaah, forgot all about it.

  • http://tomkuplic.com Tom Kuplic

    I had the exact same reaction to this great technology. At the time of my getting an account, I was working on this project that would have been perfect for Google Wave collaboration model. Unfortunately, getting everybody on with an account would have taken as much time as getting the project started. Ease of adoption was certainly it’s downfall. I will miss Google Wave for what it could have been…

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/troyjanisch Troy Janisch

    Brian Kennett, via LinkedIn: Ditto to the majority of the comments. The “concept” was phenomenal….the UI and execution was just not solid enough to matter….too bad

  • http://simonhamer.wordpress.com Simon Hamer

    I felt it was just too hard to learn for what I perceived as an up hill struggle to use with others…. in that I thought I’d have to pursuade them to try it for what … an “I’m using the Google Wave” badge … look how cool I am.

    I get increasingly sick of large companies (and I include Google in these) thinking they need to fix something that isn’t broken, or create something no one really wants. We all know several examples recently, but lets not go there.

    There are some great sites out there making it easy to network, communicate and transact business, I tend to gravitate towards those and do more on those.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/troyjanisch Troy Janisch

    Shay Osullivan, via LinkedIn:

    We evaluated Wave internally in Nov 2009 as a form to maintain fluid communication between members of our geographically diperse team. But after 2 months it was clear that WAVE was the typical “solution looking for a problem”, and it certainly did not resolve our problem. We also started to evaluate Teambox but our “energy” to try new things had burned out with WAVE.

  • http://www.socialmeteor.com troy janisch

    Posted by David Pisanick, via LinkedIn: Google missed the mark on the roll out. I know it was in Beta stage but it should have been rolled out to the masses. The invitation only part of Wave was what penultimately killed it, IMHO. I liked the concept of Google wave, especially for organizations that have employees working remotely. I don’t think this will be the end of Wave — I feel that we will see some morphed iteration of it in the near future.

  • Anonymous

    It is an informative article. Google is most popular search engine. Google Wave is a new web application for real-time communication and collaboration.

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  • Anonymous

    A wave is equal parts conversation and document. The google announced that they do not plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product.

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