Google Wave Makes its Final Splash

I should caution you: the following paragraph is drowning in wave-related puns.

Today, Google announced that it has finally sunk Google Wave. It was announced with a tsunami of hype, but soon after release the internet was flooded with a deluge of confusion and bafflement. Now, it’s finally slipped beneath the waves. Why did Google’s new, titanic collaboration protocol fail to surf the wave of promise and hype?

Ryan Paul of Ars Technica still thinks that the idea has potential:

Wave’s full potential remains unrealized, and the path to transcending e-mail remains elusive. Breaking down the barriers between e-mail, instant messaging, and microblogging is a non-trivial task, one that will require a more incremental approach.

Let’s figure out the old analogs to these modern technologies. E-mail is the modern day form of letter-writing, the tool being the mailbox. Instant messaging is for quick communication, best accomplished with a phone back then. Microblogging is kinda like putting up a flyer on a supermarket corkboard, or maybe one of those plastic-lettered editable signboards, as you’re sending a short message to the community.

Consider if someone tried to combine all three of those technologies. Can you think of what would come out of that? I can’t figure that out, and nobody ever figured Google Wave out.

If your combination of implementations includes the difficulties and learning curves of each individual implementation, you’ve already failed. The technology probably exists so that cars can fly now. Flying cars don’t exist, however, because you can’t drive a car with flight controls, and you can’t fly a plane with a steering wheel.

Apple may be proving how to get past this problem, though. Video and telephones have not gotten along very well for countless years. Now, perhaps FaceTime is changing that equation. It can do this because it’s no more difficult to use than the phone is. This is the key: if you’re going to combine a technology, don’t make people adapt to it or accept shortcomings to get the basic functionality.

Look at the technologies Google tried to converge. To email someone, you need their address, you compose a message with the address, and email them. To IM someone, you double-click their name. To Tweet someone, you just fill in the box and click Send.

To Wave someone, you had to make sure they had Wave themselves. Then you opened a new Wave, but this is where the convergence issues arise:

• If you want to do an email, you would have to type the whole thing out somewhere else before you send a message, lest the recipient interrupt you before you finish typing, or worse, they see your errors and respond badly to them.
• If you want to IM the guy, then it works okay for that, except for the lack of notifications. Most people prefer desktop clients for this, though.
• IF you want to send a Twitter-style update, well that’s pointless because a Wave has all the broadcasting abilities of an email: only the people you specify can see it.

The problem with Wave wasn’t so much that it was confusing, but that the unsuitabilities of each approach multiplied with each need it was designed to fill. In addition, what exactly do you gain by consolidating your services?

If everyone I knew ditched email, IM and Facebook/Twitter for Wave, and for giggles we threw in the notification ability that Wave never had, then I’d be able to get rid of two desktop notifiers, and keep two small applications closed that I don’t need open anymore. I think my computer can handle the burden, thank you.

To sum it up: Google Wave was a bold effort towards a pointless goal, with too many compromises and not enough benefits. Perhaps with all the latest Google projects and the huge number of employees, there’s nothing left to spend their 20% time on and they threw it at this.