Google Wave is dead. No big surprise.
Launched last year at Google I/O, Google Wave was heralded as the next big thing in communications. How could you NOT get excited about Google Wave. As Urs Hölzle, SVP of Operations at Google, noted in today’s blog posting, Google Wave “showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser”
Wow.. innovation. (OK.. yes there’s sarcasm in there)
Character by character live typing.
Drag and drop files from the desktop
Playback of history.
All at once know.. a collective.. “YAWN”.
Not surprisingly most users who were given access to Google Wave quickly stopped using it – wondering what the point was when we already were inundated with email, IM, text messaging, tweets, phone calls, you name it.
In a world where we are often deluged with too much information, I’d rather a system that summarizes a conversation than one that plays back the conversation. I don’t need to see each character being typed.. I just want to see the final representation. Sure it might be interesting to see what a person goes through to get to the final end result.. but that’s about it – interesting.
So.. goodbye Google Wave. It was nice knowing you. Of course as Urs notes, you will likely see some of the innovations of Google Wave in other products. Cool.. I guess?
(yeah.. I’m in a sarcastic mood today for some reason)
