Google, please don’t let the Wave die out

Posted by on . 5 comments.

Update: there is a campaign to save Google wave at http://www.savegooglewave.com/

Google Wave really struck me with its potential when I first saw what it was about. Adding the persistence of email to the real-time nature of instant messaging in an environment open to multiple participants was one of those things that now seems so simple and blindingly obvious. During its preview I’ve successfully used it with two clients and a few friends, and avoiding email copying to multiple recipients in order merely to have a textual conversation was great.

So I’m extremely disappointed that Google has announced it doesn’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product.

I’m aware many people’s response to Wave has been one of confusion or apathy. Many seemed to think that it was pointless. But I believe expectations were misplaced.

I didn’t view it as replacing project management or instant messaging. I didn’t explore the various extra bits and pieces, or the advanced techniques. I didn’t read The Complete Guide to Google Wave to find out about all the extra cool things that could be done with it. I just thought the basic concept was great, and found that it worked.

Google was even going to open-source the protocol, allowing the whole world to work with the technology.

Google states “But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” But it’s currently only a preview. Carry on making it, and it has great chance of shining through in the end.

If Wave doesn’t see the light of day as a full product/protocol in the near future, something similar will soon after. Change does take time, and the full potential of good things is very rarely seen by the masses immediately. But we humans are social animals, and we will find better and better ways of communicating with each other over time.

Google: please let that Wave build.

Comments

  1. Hopkins says:
    5 August, 2010 at 12:30

    Here here! I have been using it with several business contacts and it has made my life much easier for remote, collaborative working.

    It is my opinion that the marketing campaign has caused this apparent “lack of take up”. I have in my contact list the contacts of about 10 friends who created an account, had one conversation that would have been managed just as well by the GMail interface, and thought “What’s the point? Why is this going to replace e-mail? Email works just as well”. They have never logged on again.

    All Google need to do is lie low, package up some of the more useful extensions into default features (such as making tables, voting, diagramming, calendar organisation and mapping) and then come up with a different marketing strategy.

    I suppose there is another possibility. Perhaps it is not the lack of active users. Perhaps they came across a technical problem which imposes serious limitations of the scalability of the system. I mean, the potential power of the system is incredible – you could get 100s of authors to collaborate on a book of immense scale. Perhaps the system simply did not work at that level, and Google would rather start from scratch with that in mind and build something else that *will* allow that to happen. Perhaps they are just too proud to admit that the idea was flawed from a technical perspective. Perhaps this way, they are warning would-be competitors to “stay away” to give Google more time to solve the problems that they have encountered…

    • David Oliver says:
      6 August, 2010 at 10:19

      Interesting thought, Mike. I imagine a product that complicated can substantially drain even Google’s resources.

      Personally, I would have liked to have seen the protocol used in more specialised desktop software rather than in web browsers. I don’t know how difficult the transfer would be, but I would think it would solve some performance issues on slower machines and mobile devices.

  2. Hopkins says:
    6 August, 2010 at 08:58

    Here is a petition to oppose this change: http://www.change.org/petitions/view/save_the_wave

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