Wave goodbye…
With Google announcing the end of development work on Wave, One’s development team pen some thoughts on what caused it to fail.
So Google announced the end of development work on Wave, the social communication / collaboration tool touted as the replacement for email.
With this announcement we can see that Google have joined the rest of the world in assessing the single obvious most pertinent question: “What am I supposed to use it for?” and drawing a blank.
Google Wave was announced last year at Google I/O by the two brothers behind Google Maps, Lars and Jans Rasmussen. Buoyed by their newly bestowed “Rock-star Coder” status and under pressure to produce that difficult second album, the two brothers set out on an experiment to answer the question “What might email look like if it was invented today?”
And as a premise it was an interesting question. In a world of Twitter, instant messaging, blogging and social networking news feeds, why does email continue to thrive? So they set out to take Google Mail into the HTML5 world introducing flashy features like live typing, embedded widgets, multiple collaborators and update playback. The community seemed pretty excited by it; in fact we became a little over-excited by it. Google released a closed beta, and attempted to replicate the success of the Gmail invite system.
But everyone who got access to it quickly got bored of it and gave up. The hype just didn’t deliver as the twitterati clamoured for invites – twitter streams were full of Google Wave invites, promises and potential. But once we went online, it just didn’t live up to the expectation.
So was it that there was just too much hype, Google Wave never stood a chance – or was it that it simply didn’t work. At the heart of it, Wave didn’t offer anything that solved a problem.
1. It didn’t stand alone.
It had an instant messaging feel – but you had no way of knowing if and when the other parties were online or watching, so it wasn’t that instant. It had a document collaboration feel, but the documents were disjointed, clumsy and hard to follow. It seemed to be offering a new take on the ubiquitous power-point presentations, but it wasn’t easy to setup a presentation and get people into it to give your presentation in conference.
2. It felt uncomfortable.
The live typing was entertaining, but it very quickly felt like instant messaging where everyone could see you procrastinate, edit, undo, rehash and censor. The power of communicating over the internet is that you get the opportunity to polish your message, and that makes feel more confident than when you feel you have to quickly respond with the right sound-bites in a face to face conversation. Wave’s live updates technology takes away all the polish and presentation of instant messaging, without giving back any of the social subtleties of face to face communication. Essentially not only can you still come across as harsh and abrasive with your abrupt responses. By using Wave everyone can see you filter out what you were really thinking, before you hit that backspace key and chose a more diplomatic phrase.
3. The browser just wasn’t ready for it.
It’s important to recognize that Wave was one of the first HTML 5 apps. And there is no surprise that the brothers who single-handedly kick-started the “AJAX” dynamic html revolution with Google Maps, would want to be early adopters of the possibilities of HTML 5. The difference with Ajax was that there wasn’t really that much for the browser to do. Google maps is really nothing more than a fancy Javascript image swapper. Browsers had been doing that for years, it was tested honed and refined. HTML 5 was brand new and until some test cases existed, the implementation was still largely theoretical. Wave felt sluggish, and the interface wasn’t responding intuitively.
4. Nobody knew what to use it for – including the developers.
It’s interesting looking back at that initial presentation made at Google I/O,re-evaluating what was being shown with the benefit of hindsight.
And a few things strike me about that presentation:
- “This is a very early developer preview”
- “It is open source – we need developers to create apps for the platform”
- “It’s a Product a Platform and a Protocol”
Watching the presentation again – the live “as you type” updates, the playback features, the collaboration tools; you start to get the impression that these were just toys bolted on top of what was essentially designed to be a data harvesting platform.
It feels as though Google were presenting it to the world not with the question: “What might email look like if it was invented today” but with the question “What can you build for us to help us index the worlds data?” And sadly for Google the development world responded with “Meh! I got nuttin.”
And so Google have given up. They did eventually sort out the interface problems. It’s much more responsive now. But they invested so much time in doing that that they lost the initial drive to explore the concept. Meanwhile, whilst they were pushing the envelope of HTML5, the developers who may have got behind the platform went away and developed Node.js. So today if you want realtime interaction in a browser, W3C and the major browsers have provided you with a canvas and Node.js has provided you with the engine that Google never really sold us on.
All you need now is an idea!
Maybe you could start with the question “What might email look like if it was invented today?”
In a way Google have provided us with an answer to that question: “Not like this.”
