Wave Goodbye

When Google Wave went public near the end of last school year, I tried out a quick (and honestly half-baked) project that went over really well. I was really excited about trying to incorporate it more next year, but it looks like that won't happen. This week, Google announced that it will no longer be developing Wave. It will still be live through the end of the year, but what's the point now? The good news is that some of the functions of Wave are coming to other Google products (drag and drop attachments to and from Gmail, real-time collaboration in Docs, etc.), but I hate to see Wave die so soon. It had limitless potential.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

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Permalink Reply by ΔΕΣΠΟΙΝΑ ΜΑΚΡΗ on August 7, 2010 at 12:52am

it is a totally unludky-unexpected situation , as soon as we came to a plan of using it in a number of different ways next school year.What kind of user adoption they expect to be satisfied ? It is only some months time .....many collegues of mine does not even know what is it ....What a disappointment!!

Permalink Reply by Jeff Williams on August 7, 2010 at 6:50am

In a way I always thought that if they had made Wave open to everyone in the beginning... kinda like like Google Buzz, but without the disastrous rollout... It would have had a chance, at least with educators. I was lucky enough to get an invite (from one of my students no less!) and there was such excitement in the Ed. Tech world everyone wanted to get all of their kids signed up and start "waving". But we couldn't. If the kids couldn't all sign up at once and start collaborating, then it was useless to me. This practice of begging each other for invites, only having 8 invites at first then, oooh, now I have 10 invites, wow(!!) now I have 20! I understand needing to scale properly, however it was really frustrating having this cool tool that we could use and not really being ably to use it. It IS sad to think about the possibilities of what "could have been".
Let's all wave goodbye.

Permalink Reply by Jeff Williams on August 7, 2010 at 11:04am

Comment part 2: I've been thinking about what Google can do with Wave. As you mentioned Derek, there are some cool aspects to Wave. They should just integrate Wave fully into the Google Docs. That would definitely beef up Docs and we would not lose the innovation that Google Wave brought, ie real time typing, the drag and drop, etc.
I might use Google Docs more if they did that.
Let's see what they do.

Permalink Reply by Derrick Waddell on August 8, 2010 at 9:11pm