News Google stops development of Google Wave

Google has stopped developing their Google Wave product due to "lack of adoption". In all honesty, I didn't use it much but could see a lot of potential. I think a lot of people just didn't want to change their way of thinking/working (myself included). I did find some use for it and had some spirited debates and conversations on it with various people and did find some use for it as a collaboration tool for certain work situations.

The problem was, it tried to be an email/IM/Sharepoint/Social Networking conglomeration all-in-one type system and never really excelled at any of them.

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We 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. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we 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 the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

source: Google Blog
 
Great idea, but never having anything I need to collaborate with anyone else on I really never used it. Those that used it everyday are going to miss it allot though, as it really was like nothing else out there.
 
I think the problem with stuff like this is that most individuals don't have much use for it and groups large enough to have a need for it either use a commercial product or don't want their private data on google servers. I know a lot of places that have strict rules about google docs and company documents, etc.
 
I think the problem with stuff like this is that most individuals don't have much use for it and groups large enough to have a need for it either use a commercial product or don't want their private data on google servers. I know a lot of places that have strict rules about google docs and company documents, etc.

I believe Google was in the works of making it so a company would host their wave on their on servers. It was one of the "selling" points of Wave.
 
I believe Google was in the works of making it so a company would host their wave on their on servers. It was one of the "selling" points of Wave.

Oh really? Interesting. Admittedly I don't know a lot about Wave I'm just speculating as to why it was not a big success.
 
Oh really? Interesting. Admittedly I don't know a lot about Wave I'm just speculating as to why it was not a big success.

I think it was being it was such a broad use case that people had a problem wrapping their head around it. It wasn't *just* a social app, it wasn't *just* a collaborative app, ect. Because of this it never hit the "critical mass" that would draw more people.
 

Members online

No members online now.

Latest profile posts

Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
Xie wrote on Electronic Punk's profile.
Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
Electronic Punk wrote on Sazar's profile.
Rest in peace my friend, been trying to find you and finally did in the worst way imaginable.

Forum statistics

Threads
62,015
Messages
673,494
Members
5,621
Latest member
naeemsafi
Back