It was bound to happen: Google Wave is dead. Google Wave has always been a problematic product: What does it really do?
(*) What is wrong with email, instant messaging, forums, and collaborative editors? Why do they need to be merged into a single product? It was a typical Google product: Technologically very impressive, only for technical people (I have yet to meet a non-technical person that has used it), abandoned after a short while.
By the way: If anyone has an answer to (*), I would love to hear about it.
Update 2010-12-25: Google Wave has now become an Apache project.
I’ve thought about it some more and there is something intriguing about continually updating information and tracking the changes that are made. But a wiki that allows one to follow changes should be enough for that. Instead, Wave conflated this kind of documentation with instant-messaging-style brainstorming. I suspect that keeping brainstorming fully documented does not make sense and goes against the human tendency to maintain order by throwing stuff away and/or transforming it into something new.
2 comments:
It was for collaboration on projects. It flowed similar to IM, except you could edit the flow of previous messages and embed multimedia content. The result would be reference material.
At least that is my impression after playing with it a little bit. Google Documents works for my purposes, so I never used Wave for a project.
Good point. For projects, multi-purpose makes sense. But a suite of programs is maybe easier to handle than a single generic program.
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