. : : Valar Morghulis : : .

The Google Wave Experiment Is Over

Remember this?

Any new product from Google was bound to have a lot of interest in it so for a few months we were obsessed with Wave trying to see what it can do and what it could/would be used for. Invites were rare and coveted defeating the entire point of the service which was to collaborate/share/communicate.

Early users like me found that not many people I knew had been able to sign up for the service and so could not give it a chance.

The problem this time was that Google did not make Wave because there was demand for the product in the market. This was something new. Well, not quite. The concepts already exist in the form of forums and email groups.

Google basically reinvented the forum albeit with less features like quoting, subforums, moderation and added scripting and bots and gadgets. When I first tried out the service I found it confusing, cluttered and lacking in any specific purpose. Sure, you could embed videos and media and things and make it a colourful and interesting visual experience but would you really use Wave for this over a social network? Do you really see yourself and your friend/contacts doing stuff like what you see in the Wave ads?

I always thought that Wave wasn’t unique enough. It felt like an AJAXified forum with a lot of multimedia features and that simply wasn’t interesting/useful enough right now. If some of these features move into social networking sites and emails I would welcome it but using Google Wave as an application is just too vague a concept.

Now all the interest has died away and you see no more mention of it anywhere. Let us leave it to die a dignified death from disuse and work on something else.