Just as fast as it was supposed to change our internet lives, Google Wave is no more.
Google announced on Wednesday that it would no longer actively support Google Wave, the collaboration tool that debuted to much hype in 2009.
That hype quickly wore off, however, as Wave became better known for it general uselessness than its groundbreaking online collaboration.
I was able to get my hands on an invitation code to Wave fairly soon after it was launched and after the initial fun of using a new piece of web software wore off, it was clear that Wave was generally useless.
Although there were a few fun drawing tools and the occasional game of checkers, the productivity promised with Wave never really amounted to anything.
A few of my friends and I once used Wave to submit answers to an in-class discussion, including our professor in the Wave and everything, but that wave really never went further than our group and was more of a laugh than anything.
In fact, later in the semester the same group used Google Docs in a much more efficient manner to prepare a presentation, which was seemingly one of the main uses of Wave, group collaborations on projects just like that.
So while Wave has been another example of Google failing to enter the social web, following Orkut and Google Latitude just to name two, lessons from Wave will be taken in products in the future and there were some cool aspects of Wave, although nothing revolutionary as we were promised.
Goodbye Google Wave, you’d be missed if anyone ever logged into you in the first place.
