Google Can’t Start the Wave
Google Wave, which sprang to life last year, seems to have become a dying storm. Designed to push the envelope and change the way people fundamentally use the web, Wave allowed users to drag files from their desktop to start a discussion, share photos, gadgets and even feeds from other sources in real time. Users could spell-check as well as show other friends/other users their character by character response as they typed their reply.
This type of service, if there had been widespread user adoption, would have rivaled some of the most successful online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. But it turns out that there are even some niche markets that an internet giant such as Google cannot strong arm.
On August 4th Google announced that it would stop developing Wave as an individual product and more than likely, will shut it down by the end of this year. However, the technology will remain available if people want to develop new tools with it, but further production and investment on Google’s part will come to an end. Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of operations stated, “Despite having numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” Many attest that Google Wave’s failure was due to the fact that Wave was not very user friendly in comparison to other social networks. Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never quite figured out how it worked.
One would believe that a power ghjhouse like Google would reign supreme in every aspect of the internet world, but because the online social networking niche has been perfected by companies like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, Google has found it hard to amass the same amount of users as the popular social networks. If Google had marketed the Wave more and garnered more interest in the product before they officially launched it, they might have been able to start the Wave Tsunami instead of creating only dying ripples.
