Wave Goodbye

Google announced yesterday that they have decided to scrap Wave. First announced on May 27, 2009, it was introduced as “a new web application for real-time communication and collaboration.” Basically, it allowed the user to combine email, instant messaging and social networking, effectively tying everything together into one easily digestible dashboard. Just over a year later, the Wave seems to be dead in the water (disclaimer: I’m going to make a very concerted effort to make as many puns as possible in this article. If you’re not comfortable with that, I suggest you jump ship now. Told ya. Moving on).

If you’re like many of us at VaynerMedia, you thought this had a chance to be a big win and that it could possibly take off in a big way. I remember listening to folks at the office talk about how this might be a total game-changer and agreeing with them 100%. Wave had the potential to make extended conversation and interaction exponentially easier. A wave (or ongoing conversation) had the ability to show what people were saying in real time. More specifically, users could weigh in on different parts of the conversation chain and extend it in a different direction. Each contributor’s actions were distinctly marked and recorded so that every Wave participant could see exactly who was contributing what. It really seemed as if this was a tool that was going to be widely used once everyone became comfortable with it. Unfortunately, the platform never caught on and the anticipated popularity never materialized.

I got my invitation to try Google Wave on November 29th. I played around with the features and, honestly, I really liked it. I think that the UI was great and that the platform did exactly what it set out to do: visualize conversation in an easily digestible way. In my opinion, and I think that a lot of people will agree with me, the main problem is that the features of Wave, are just that, features. It’s just not enough to support an entire platform. I think that as time goes on, Google will chop up the different pieces of Wave and distribute them to already-thriving platforms. Example: I don’t think that the “visualization of conversations” feature is enough to warrant a dedicated platform. However, I do think it can compliment the hell out of GMail.

I should note that Google has already said that they plan on using some of these aspects on current and future projects. Furthermore, they are going to release most of the source code of Wave so that users (both commercial and private) can customize it to their own specifications.

I’m really curious to hear your thoughts on this. What about Wave was useful? What about it wasn’t? What aspects of Wave would you like see integrated into your everyday Google experience? Was it a failed product or was it just ahead of its time?

And in conclusion, I want to point out that, in my opinion, this is not a loss for Google. Yes, Lars and Jens Rasmussen’s, co-founders of Wave and Google Maps (thanks for the latter, by the way) project didn’t pan out the way they intended, but it will end up vastly improving the future user experience of Google as a whole. So, you could say that Wave didn’t rock the boat like it was supposed to, but its ripples will be felt for a long time to come (finished strong).