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Google Kills Wave Development
We've mentioned several times over the past two years Wave, Google's ambitiously multi-channel, perhaps plain overwhelming entry in the social media wars. Now, reader mordejai writes "Google stated in its official blog that they will not continue developing Wave as a standalone product. It's sad, because it had a lot of potential to improve communications, but Google never promoted it well, denying it a chance to replace email and other collaboration tools for many uses."
Clearly I am in the minority but it was really useful and good for collaboration, imo. Then again I enjoyed Google Notebook too. It will be a shame to see it go.
I used it. Specifically, I used it for hyper rapid content development among small groups of dispersed people. The advantages of simultaneous editing of single documents (along with the edit history) were huge for this particular niche.
The thing is, there aren't many small dispersed groups needing hyper rapid content development. If you weren't as dispersed, or had the time for consecutive (rather than concurrent) editing, other traditional tools were better. The interface, and its tendency to bog down once the wave sizes grew large, didn't help either.
But as I fell into the small niche it was really useful for, rather than just as a novelty, I will miss it.
I'll predict that we'll instead see most of Wave's functionality/technology incorporated into gmail, either as a separate panel like Buzz or integrated pop-ups like Google Talk is. It really didn't make sense to have it be a dedicated site, since it made it harder to integrate with one's other activities. I imagine that within a few months Gmail will probably introduce functionality to convert an existing email and/or chat thread into a wave.
Code dying on the vine is part of the Darwinistic process that maintains the quality of Open Source. If nobody cares about it, nobody will develop it. What I suspect in this case is that there might be a community willing to carry on this project. It's an interesting product.
Bruce Perens.
So now the projects will actually have to have some merit? Sounds good to me.
Google Wave had tons of merit. But three months out of closed beta just isn't enough time for any new software product to prove itself. None of the big, successful tools you use today would be here if they had been dropped that quickly.
The new Google Docs set up actually shows you exactly where someone is and has almost the same rapid updates as Google Wave. I would guess they are using something similar in Google Docs as they did in Wave.
An important change for education.