#oneaday, Day 199: Waving Goodbye

So, Google Wave is going bye-bye, huh? Can’t say I’m particularly surprised. As cool an idea as it was, there just wasn’t the buy-in from people that it deserved. Largely because a goodly proportion of the Internet population didn’t seem to understand what it was actually for.

It’s easy to assume people who didn’t “get” Wave are just a bit slow. But the fact is, Google never did a great job of explaining what the technology was for in the first place.

“Yay, collaborative editing!” they’d say.

“Yay, we can do that with Google Docs!” everyone else would say.

“Yay, you can see people typing!” they’d say.

“Yay, who gives a shit?” everyone else would say.

“Yay, it’s like a combination of email, Twitter and a word processing document!” they’d say.

“Yay, I’ve never wanted to combine those three things together!” everyone else would say.

It’s a pity, as I’ve seen some genuinely interesting uses of Wave out there. One particularly cool Wave I was invited to took the form of a moderated “text adventure”, where participants could direct the protagonist (played by the moderator in the role of an interactive fiction-style narrator) by inserting commands. Eventually, the non-linear nature of Wave allowed two parallel storylines to develop at once—one happening in the present, another as a flashback. Wave’s ability for anyone to edit and insert new content at any point in the “conversation” meant that these two things could continue going on without becoming overly confusing.

Then there were all the possibilities for things like education. But then you have to deal with your average teacher’s technophobia.

When I was working in schools, I had a grand idea that Wave could be used for the preparation of interactive resources. The fact that media such as YouTube videos, flash thingies, pictures, text, hyperlinks and even iFrames could be inserted meant that Wave could have been an ideal tool to use on interactive whiteboards during lessons, and also a good means of collaborative planning if teachers in question weren’t able to meet and discuss things. As they frequently aren’t.

As a result of many of these things, I had a Wave account which largely went unused because no-one else was using it. This is a shame, as I could see the potential in the service. But the fact the service was invite-only for so long, and then by the time it went public people were still scratching their heads and wondering what to do with it—these things meant that it didn’t have a particularly “mass market” appeal for the average Internet user.

All is not lost for the moment, anyway. Wave is going to remain open—Google have just said they’re stopping development on it. They’ve also open-sourced a goodly proportion of the code, so enterprising clever people with mathematics in their brains will be able to pull it apart and make it better, faster, stronger, I’m sure.

So it was a swing and a miss for Google on this one. To be honest, though, I think it’s good to see them experimenting with different technologies as a company. It would be very easy for Google to just think “Right. We do these things. And we do them well. Let’s just stop there and make bundles of money and stick them in our ears.” But no; they seem to be on a constant quest to make the lives of the Internet’s denizens better. Sometimes these things work. And sometimes they don’t.

So raise a glass to Google Wave, the web app that couldn’t. And start speculating on what they might be up to next!