A farewell wave to Google Wave
Google |
Image by rickhanger
Earlier this week, Google announced that they have decided to discontinue the development of Google Wave, the company’s attempt at cross-platform, real-time platform that aims to fuse together different iterations of online communications. This, the search engine giant announced through Senior VP of Operations Urs Hölzle on their official blog.
“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” said Hölzle on the blog post announcing the Web application’s stunted support and now halted development. “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.”
Launched last year during Google I/O 2009 developer’s conference, Google Wave was presented as an innovative communications tool that capitalized on real-time collaborations via a Web browser. It was designed on a protocol that aimed to combine e-mail, instant messaging, social networking and wikis and visually resembled an e-mail inbox with threaded messaging. A message thread is called a Wave and can carry text, links and photos, among other things which can be shared with people in your buddy list and viewed in real-time.
Along with its unveiling, Google also made its API open for developers to create supplementing tools and possible expansions to the consumer hardware space; just as Google had intended for their other properties like Chrome and Android.
While some viewed it as a game changing application, others were still skeptical, even saying that it was merely a flashy Web development solution looking for a problem to latch onto. Some of us here at SEOP.com believe that its death was forthcoming; that, as hard as it was for many to admit, it’s been dead in the water for months and just waiting for someone to declare its actually TOD.
As early as late 2009, it hasn’t gotten any proper marketing support that not a lot of people outside tech journalism and the search engine industries can even understand what it’s for. And by February this year, Google launched Google Buzz which, by comparison, was getting relatively better resonance with third party site owners and even mainstream Web users implementing its use and its button on their own sites.
All these contributed to Google Wave not having gained any traction to begin with; and no traction online means a fleeting and dwindling user base that practically sent it six feet underground next to other deceased Google products like Jaiku and Google Catalogs. But Google Wave really did have a few handy features that didn’t really get much face time, particularly the real-time and the collaborative aspects and hopefully these would be resurrected into other Google projects as Hölzle had stated.
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RSpears @ August 6, 2010
A farewell wave to Google Wave…
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