Robert Sears provides social media expertise for InView Communications. He is responsible for directing the agency’s online communications/PR projects, as well as working with clients to develop and monitor successful public relations and high-tech communications programs.
On Friday, Google announced that it would no longer be actively developing its 'Wave' product due to lack of interest. This announcement comes less than three months after the service was first offered to the public. It's a surprising and rare miss, considering that most of the products Google creates are extremely popular (think GMail, Analytics, Chrome, Earth, Picasa, Talk, Adwords, etc). The idea behind Wave is that it allows people to collaborate online in real time, like a souped up email-wiki hybrid.
It works like this: Wave works like email, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, message documents (referred to as waves) contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) and are shared with collaborators who can be added or removed from the wave at any point during a wave's existence. Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process. Each edit/reply is a blip and users can reply to individual blips within waves. Recipients are notified of changes/replies in all waves in which they are active and, upon opening a wave, may review those changes in chronological order. In addition, waves are live. All replies/edits are visible in real-time, letter-by-letter, as they are typed by the other collaborators. Multiple participants may edit a single wave simultaneously.
On the one hand, this announcement is very disheartening; the Google Wave software provides a powerful platform for collaborating on projects, assignments, experiments, discussions, whatever. Imagine implementing this technology to streamline your client communications - you could have an entire team develop a project in a shorter amount of time.
On the other hand, the announcement is sort of predictable. The system is a bit too complicated for a casual user, especially ones who are already settled in their ways of collaborating. It also requires a Google account for each collaborator. I think in the end Google's downfall was not that they developed a bad or unnecessary product, but that what they came up with was actually a bit ahead of its time.
