When Google Wave was announced and previewed at the Google I/O conference, we loved it. We even ran contests to offer the Google Wave invites to you woikr readers.
They’ve put forth amazing use cases of real time collaboration and communication which we all were excited to see. I’ve got goosebumps thinking how this would be applied to create awesome apps.
Now, Google has announced that it’s going to stop further development of Google wave, as it hasn’t seen enough user adoption.
Many a times, at woikr we collaborated over website development tasks and maintained notes there. We even had discussions between old class mates.
So what might have went wrong?
- People are just scared to change – they don’t want to adopt newer collaboration techniques. No one used this as a primary mode of communication like email.
- Unstable wave platform as the technology wasn’t perfected yet.
Every one likes Google products even in Beta as they’re stable than most “released products” from the likes of Yahoo and M$, but this was different.
The Google wave dev team was continuously fixing issues and this demanded a lot of “Client processing power” too. Thanks to immense amount of JavaScript usage. - Related to #1, users just didn’t get it.
User’s don’t get twitter either, but that’s one place to rant and some how helped twitter get off pretty well. - Official Gadgets – Should have been much more to start with, although users wrote their own Robots and Gadgets which weren’t explor-able easily.
Who still continue to use it?
- People who require translation, don’t believe me? Check out the Public Waves (filled with translation requests).
- People who’ll brainstorm (Yes, it’s a great live collaboration tool).
Hell, users hated it so much that Google suggests “hate messages” too.
We still think it was a great product & for the future & hope it’ll be back.
Go and congratulate the development team, wave them good bye.
[Via Phandroid, Official Google Blog]
