Wave Goodbye

I don't know about you, but I'm kind of sad to see that Google has halted the development on their Wave product.

I saw it as a bold re-imagining of email. Wave was originally introduced to me as "what email would look like if it was developed today" and that's exactly how I saw it - a more collaborative tool designed around sharing beyond simple forwarding. Those you chose to share a wave with were now part of the conversation, not just recipients.

The problem, as I see it, is that email DOES already exist and has been such an effective and easy to use tool, that people weren't ready to replace it. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like satisfy the need to share (and often overshare).

I understand the low adoption that Google cites as the reason to stop development. I tried pretty hard to get friends to sign up, and the few that did couldn't understand why they needed a separate account from their existing Gmail address. I found the interface confusing (especially for a Google product) and always hoped it would just become a part of Gmail (perhaps a separate box for My Waves). Having yet another app open all day just didn't seem logical.

I had mixed feelings when Google introduced the ability to get email updates when a wave was updated. On one hand, I no longer needed to keep it open all the time. But it meant that the tool that was created to replace email now admitted that it was reliant on it.

I still have hope that there is a team of mavericks working on it as a business tool. I think it has a place along side the rest of the apps. I can see geographically separated project teams using it very effectively to keep everyone up to date on various tasks.

I'm curious, were any of you using Wave regularly or in interesting ways? I'd love to hear about it.

Kris Dougherty | Director of Operations