Wave Goodbye

In a rather downbeat post Urs Hölzle has announced what is effectively the end of Google Wave. He notes that the core technology will be used elsewhere and that teh Wave site will remain active for the time being but due to the low adoption what was once an exciting technology is now no more.  Is this really surprising?  Do not get me wrong, I am, or is that was a Wave fan.  It pushed the bounds of what is possible in a browser, introduced new concepts for on-line collaboration and in a very geeky way was cool.  Wave could be a great collaboration tool, I could see many use cases, especially if extended to not just text but drawing, however all of those use cases rely on one thing that was always missing from Wave, a means to communicate as well as collaborate. This became the fatal flaw.

To collaborate using any form of media you must first be able to communicate.  Watch a team working around a whiteboard, unless all of the participants are mute they will talk about whet they are adding or changing.  It is what you do to help sell your contribution.  Wave relied on the users setting this verbal communications channel up, it needed to be right there in the app.  Every Wave hosting it’s own real time voice conference.  So when Google get into that market hopefully they will dust Wave off and give it another try.