Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove - Ashleigh Brilliant
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Google kills its Wave
INTERNET SOFTWARE HOUSE Google has taken an axe to further development of its web application for real time communication and collaboration that it called Google Wave.
Wave allowed live typing in group chats and whiteboards, the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop and even "playback" of the history of changes within the web browser.
While Google said it was quite jazzed about Wave, it did not see the user takeup it would have liked.
Apparently the outfit does not want to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave's innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue to find uses for the software if they want.
Google said that it is working on tools so that users can easily liberate their content from Wave. µ
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I thought Google Wave was an amazing piece of technology, but as the first poster mentioned, and I fully agree, they should have brought this ability into Gmail.
They also made it way too complicated to understand. Why call it Wave, its just insanely confusing.
All told I guess this isn't surprising. I collaborate daily with 2-5 people and the tool worked well for project status and floating ideas.. However, it took me at least two months of use before I was comfortable using it. if it replaced email, I'd use would morn the switch.. but having both just makes it "yet another" technology I'm forced to keep up with. Maybe Zoho will pick up the code and integrate it..
I feel bad... I never got around to logging into my invite. I thought it would have been a really cool service for communicating with friends. I think they should still keep in with less support. I'm sure it would catch on if they integrated some of the tech into the mail system. It is true maybe the shift was too much. For the majority you have to make the change a little slow, or at least expect the change to happen slow.
It's a real shame. The real-time multi-user apps supported by wave have a great future. We have a Google Wave travel-planner called "Travel WithMe", and people love the real-time experience.
Sensing that wave might not be going places, we've put it on facebook now as well, but still with Google Wave's realtime features. It's at apps.facebook.com/travel-withme.
I'm sure that Google Wave was great technology and a wonderful tool beneath the covers. Too bad it was, for all practical purposes, completely undocumented. Maybe if you read the dozens of blogs and sat through the interminable videos you'd finally figure just what it was supposed to be and for what problem it was supposed to be a solution, but frankly if they can't be arsed to explain this in a single, easily-accessed, well-organized document, I can't be arsed to do more than tinker, shrug and move on.
As it is, I got the impression that Google Wave was, in essence, Lotus Notes Lite in the Clouds. (Yes, this is a disparaging comparison.)
Maybe this will mean they'll concentrate on Google Talk, especially since Wave was just Google Talk for multiple people?
Haha, yeah right. Another abandoned project from Google.
It was a fine service.
The only problem (as I see it) was that they didn't merge it with gMail.
So it was just another messaging system. If I received my ordinary mail in the Wave, I'd still be using it. As it was, one had to make additional effort to use it. On it's own it just didn't provide enough benefits.