Launched last year at the Google I/O conference, the tool aimed to combine features from email and chat with multimedia content to make sharing and real-time collaborating easier.

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked”, the search engine giant said in a company statement.

The development of Wave will no longer be continued but the tool will be maintained until the end of the year.

The move has sparked Wave fans to set up a protest site to persuade Google to change its mind. Despite the large-scale failure, Wave has managed to build up a small but loyal following.

The savegooglewave website appeals to keep the Wave alive:

“When we heard the news about Google Wave being shut down, we were devastated. Google Wave is an invaluable tool that we use every day to keep track and collaborate on projects (in real-time). Please help us to keep it alive and spread the word.”

The protest site has so far created over 32,000 likes and 1,142 tweets.

Source: Stuff.co.nz

Google Wave was announced a year ago in May with a great fanfare hailing it as “the next big step” in online communication. The beta testing stage in September complied with the company’s signature word-of-mouth approach designed to maximise the hype around the tool.

The start looked promising. At the peak of the hype, invitations were circling on eBay around £55.

But then it suddenly all fizzled out. A few weeks ago Wave was finally opened to the general public but the buzz is inarguably gone.

So what went wrong then?

“It’s that classic thing about new technologies, there needs to be a specific problem that it solves rather than trying to come up with things it could be used for”, Web 2.0 Consultant Trainer Steve Boneham says.

Steve is following closely the developments of emergent technologies and was recently involved in a project examining institutional use of Web 2.0 tools. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a natural place for Google Wave in that scene.

“While Google Wave undoubtedly has potential, personally, I haven’t yet found many times where I’ve thought that’s the best tool for the job.”

In theory, Wave should be every collaborator’s dream. A real-time platform that allows you to include all kinds of content – no more confusing email threads messing up project communication.

Chris Thomson, Steve’s colleague, says the potential is definitely there, but according to him, the exclusive nature of the launch may have cost Wave some of its future success.

“I think the tool suffered a lot from its closed beta stage. Not enough people had access to it to make it useful.”

Other benefits

Steve notes that despite it not yet being a huge success, Google Wave shouldn’t be flagged as a complete failure either.

“The technology behind Google Wave has been driving other things forward. Google had to change some of their underlying infrastructure in order to make Wave work and that has benefited other applications such as Google Docs”, he explains.”

A lot of the early criticism targeted Wave’s confusing user interface. Before releasing Wave to general public, Google made some revamps to the tool and is now hoping that the improved user experience, together with the wide availability, will attract more people to jump on board.

However, Chris points out, measuring the success of new tools and technologies isn’t always down to user numbers.

“There seems to be an expectation that in order for a new technology to be useful it has to draw huge amounts of users like Twitter and Facebook,” he said.

Case study

What could Google Wave be used for?

The official Google Wave blog outlines various examples of what can be done with the Wave. Fancy words like ‘creative collaboration’ keep cropping up, but the post does actually offer some useful real-life examples as well. Read more…