Good riddance to Google Wave.
I never understood what the fuss was about.
Wave may have been clever programming, but it didn’t do anything other applications already did better. Google has better tools for most Wave tasks.
It did instant messaging although Google already had tools that do the same job.
Wave did communications. Why bother when Gmail is so much better?
Wave was a collaboration tool. Who needs that when collaborating on Google Docs is so easy?
There was a social media twist to Wave, but Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all simpler to use and way more polished. Although they each come with problems.
Wave had a bad user interface and was difficult to use.
More importantly, it was difficult to understand what was going on and what one was supposed to do.
That said, Google Wave had some success.
While Wave in itself wasn’t useful (or at least wasn’t fully utilized), it was the precursor to the very application which ‘already did better’.
The Wave project is why we have such great collaboration on Google Docs. It’s also from Wave that Google has built a foundation for its future cloud suites.
Google Wave might not have come into fruition, and was difficult to pick-up-and-go, but all the fuss it got was well deserved. I for one farewell it with respect.
@Sim – You have a good point. I’m sure some of the technology in Wave will turn up elsewhere in future Google projects.
I don’t mind being used as a guinea pig in software projects when I can see the goal, but in the case of Wave I think Google threw the technology out into the world without thinking about whether it filled any needs.