May 27, 2009 at the Google I/O conference a new development was announced that I felt may cause a decent stir among web users. Something that might not only establish Google as a serious social media player but also change the way we use the web to communicate. Google Wave was described as “a new web application for real-time communication and collaboration”.

The idea was essentially to combine e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking into one real-time environment. It also allowed for spelling/grammar checking and automatic translations, but in the main a wave was a working real-time collaborative message, therefore it could potentially replace email!

Google Wave had 100,000 users in September 2009, each of which were allowed to invite additional users. But it wasn’t until May 19, 2010, Google Wave was released to the general public. This is why it seems strange Google are ditching the development of Wave only 3 months after the full web community could get their hands on it?
One of the main reasons I’ve heard Google are no longer developing Wave is that it simply hasn’t had the traction Google expected? Well, maybe not, but how much marketing has Google put into Wave since it’s been made widely available? Not a lot!

The other reason Wave has failed so badly is because of the perception it has amongst even those tech-savvy web users that have heard of it. It’s seen as a complex application and one that requires studying before anyone can pick it up and use. In this day and age when time is the most precious commodity of all, people just haven’t got the time to learn how to do something new… Like create a Wave.
The only surprise here is how Google missed the fact they had to make Wave at least appear simple. It’s the very fundamental that made Google search such a success – a logo, large search bar and a couple of buttons on a plain white background – that’s all it took before!

So, was Wave a complete failure? No, not completely. It was maybe a little before its time, maybe had the wrong perception amongst users and maybe had a much better development team than marketing team behind it. But it was also a new fresh approach to communicating, collaborating and socialising online and in that sense it has left behind some great ideas that a company like Google can surely build upon to create something special. Maybe that something is just around the corner and google doesn’t want anything to be stealing any limelight, not even Wave.

“Google Me” anyone?