

Google Ceasing Development of Google Wave - prosa
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/wave-goodbye-to-google-wave/

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prosa
This is depressing to me. The interface still left a lot to be desired, but I
was using it very successfully at my startup to collaborate on documents and
interact with coworkers.

It never experienced the explosive growth they were hoping for, but I figured
it was a long term play. I guess new strategic priorities ("Kill Facebook")
are getting in the way of ongoing development.

~~~
axod
If they can get people via online casual gaming, which seems like their new
strategy, they have _way_ more chance.

People were never going to suddenly start using wave en masse. It doesn't
solve a problem that they couldn't solve other ways.

~~~
SkyMarshal
It solves the problem for remote teams of how to efficiently collaborate
online. I don't know of any better solution for that problem, do you?

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jacquesm
You were the first to submit this, but the discussion seems to be at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575892>

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guac
The announcement is on the official Google blog:
[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-
wave...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html)

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robertmarkbram
This is very sad. I thought it was a great product but suffered from lack of
good marketing AND positioning (as in it wasn't good enough to do what Google
wanted it to, and it was never marketed adequately to fill a niche). In
particular: \- It isn't a good replacement for email because there is no
integration with gmail or other established mail systems. \- It isn't good
enough for creating documents (blogs, company documents) because there was no
security (ability to make something read-only to certain people). \- It isn't
good enough as a collaboration tool because after a few people edit a Wave, it
looks so confusing - you lose all notion of it being a single consistent
document because it looks too much like a complicated chat.

I also wonder if it was just too heavy in terms of Javascript and network
processing.

Either way, this is a big shame - I was very much looking forward to Wave
taking a greater part in my tech life.

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antimatter15
I wonder how long they've been planning it. The wave team was still promising
API updates a few days ago (to fix some data api bugs with my wave client)
<http://micro-wave.appspot.com>

It's especially odd as they just rewrote the wave API docs 3 days ago.

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al_james
Ok, in other words google are becoming less willing to develop cutting edge
technologies and are going to spend more time on making money out of their
traffic (e.g. purchase of ITA and listing hotel prices).

If you make money on the internet from a sector that goole are / might be in,
be very afraid.

