RIP Google Wave – We hardly used ye

Google Wave has been pronounced dead, per the Official Google Blog, just a mere 14 months after the big debut at Google I/O.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Aside from a few cursory “DUDE! I GOT MY WAVE INVITE!” blips, my Google Wave account was – and remains – largely dormant. I do remember freaking out over the status of my Wave Invite during the phased rollout of accounts… and then turning around and playing kingmaker doling out my 9 invites to friends, family and co-workers.

Why did Wave fail?

Contrary to what Google would have you believe, Google Wave didn’t fail because it was too revolutionary or ahead of its time — quite the contrary, actually. Google Wave failed because it was largely unusable. It was a leap of faith from Google that the typical Google account operator had enough knowledge, time and understanding to invest in Google Wave.

Unfortunately, even with all of the benefits of Wave – from live type & playback to real-time collaboration – mass adoption never caught fire like Google hoped. This was largely due to the fact that the average Google account operator doesn’t give a rip about those features, or could actually make appropriate use of them. My parents, for instance, have Gmail accounts. I had to teach them how to use webmail, how to chat, how to reply, forward, etc. to emails. If they represent even a 51% share of Google account operators, Wave was doomed from the get-go. There’s no way Google could justify the development cost for a pet project.

Will you miss Google Wave?

I won’t. Like I said, I was active on wave for roughly 2 weeks, in which time I made an extremely quick realization that it wasn’t worth my time. I recently logged in and noticed that it was a radically different UX than it was in it’s infancy. But still, no activity on the blips that were once all the rage at launch – in fact, the last update I have in my active blips was from November 2009.

Better watch your back, Google Buzz.