Google Wave was definitely a crowd pleaser at its launch last year. The hype was absolutely ridiculous. Speculation about whether it was going to kill email, Facebook, Twitter, or cure cancer abounded. Invites were a hot commodity as Wave remained private and you were the man if you had any. Now, according to the Official Google Blog, Wave is waving goodbye. There will be no more development on Google Wave as a stand-alone product. So what happened here?
In the private phase, many users kept saying that Wave would take off once it went public. The collaboration features were amazing, but the lack of users was the limiting factor. Once Wave opened up, many in this small group that actually knew what it was for did end up using it on the regular. Other users were still expecting a Facebook/Twitter/Email killer and were sorely disappointed. Rather than realizing they had got it wrong, they blamed Wave for not delivering. After that, the advanced real-time collaboration system pretty much became a running joke.
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. — Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow
There are a few key take-aways here, though. Many will tout the failure of Wave as a social media powerhouse, email killer or what have you, but that’s not the whole story. I’m sure Google would have loved for Wave to attract a bunch of users and go mainstream, but it’s simple existence did push developers to try for more.
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.
Was this simply another failed project by Google, or was it an experiment to push the envelope? I think because of Wave’s existence, we saw much more advanced web applications than we otherwise would have because Google showed what was possible using Wave. This is the same situation we saw with Google Chrome. Did Google really want to take over the browser market, or were they just looking to light a fire under the browser market?
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.
If you’ve been a hardcore Wave user, Google plans to make it simple for you to liberate your data. The site should be available through the end of the year, so you have more than enough time to do so.
Are you sad to see Wave go?