Google Wave, when it arrived, was held aloft as being a platform of the future. It was greeted with frantic calls for invites, and subsequent scrabbling around for someone to use it with. Soon after, that madness paled into puzzled frowns. We all wondered what Google Wave was for, what its target market was, and how it fitted into Google’s mysterious roadmap. Turns our confusion was well placed, as Google has dropped any more development of Google Wave, and will be exporting the technology into other products.
Google Wave was launched in May last year, but Google say it’s not seen the uptake it had hoped for, after initial hype pitching it as something that would “set a new benchmark for interactivity”.
Google Wave looked like it was going to be a business tool, with the key function being the multi user editing abilities, but in the end, not enough people got involved, and many of those who wanted to were left without an invite.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he is not concerned, and that the technology behind Google Wave will be ported across to new Google products. For the handful of people who may or may not use it, Google Wave will remain live, but will no longer be developed any further, although parts of the code will go open source.
Schmidt said: “It’s absolutely ok to try something that’s really hard, and have it not be successful, and take the learning from that, and apply it to something new.” He also described Google Buzz as being “very Gmail centric” in terms of its user base. But was this part of the problem with Google Wave too? It was too Gmail centric to gather the user base in business and the workplace it was suited for?
Did you use Google Wave? Did you use it more than once? Will you miss it? Drop us a line in the comments…
