Google Wave

So Google Wave Is Dead Already?

Google has a fairly inconsistent record of development when it comes to innovative products.  Remember Lively? They pulled the plug on that fast – even though they probably had enough interest and users to keep it going.  Now it seems Wave is going the way of Lively.

Or something like that – the official announcement was a bit unclear, especially since some of the code has already been released open-source. The basic gist of it is that Wave will no longer be standalone… but somehow integrated into other products. And the website will go away by the end of the year. The main reason given was that “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.”

That is probably going to be the closest Google will ever get to admitting failure.  It wasn’t that long ago that they were predicting the death of email, that email was obsolete, that Wave would forever change the way we communicate on the web, etc.  I like Google, but they aren’t exactly that great at eating humble pie.

The hard part for me and millions of others is that we still never figured out what exactly Google Wave is…

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Google Wave, but I did recognize that it was innovative. I know that I predicted that it wouldn’t make it, but I would have liked to have been wrong just to see where it could have gone.

I guess we will never know now.

Out With The Old, In With The New. Again. Yawn.

The new year is almost upon us. Resolutions are being made as predictions are flying left and right.  Oh… and nothing that was supposed to die this year has died yet.

So now it is time to just change the year on those predictions to ‘2010’ and hope that no one notices that our predictions from past years haven’t come true.

I apologize for the lack of posts this month, but most of the EdTech news has been so monotone recently.  Google Wave, Google Wave, Google Wave. I love to explore emerging technology just like the next person, but there are other things out there.  And many of them we can actually use now in education… not wait until some secret date in the future finally arrives.

The college I work for recently hosted a presentation by  Daniel M. Russell, a research scientist with Google. His insights into search were fascinating.  And his comments about Google Wave were concerning. He bluntly stated that the interface isn’t working for people at all. Then he clarified what the current status of “preview” means to Google: they can change or cancel the Wave project at any time if they want.  The email killer itself could get canned if Google just decides one day that it isn’t cutting it.

And just why does everything in the world of technology have to die? Why are there so many technology killers out there? iPhone killers. Email killers. Windows killers. University killers. Sheesh.

Why do we have to get rid of something just to get something new? Email works just fine (and 94% of the online activity of the millennial generation is spent using email (still), so I doubt it is just for old people). Why do we have to kill it? Why not use it with Google Wave?

I am one of those odd people that will listen to a vinyl record and an mp3 in the course of one day. I’ve always felt that if something has value now, it will have value in the future. New ideas and products should come along side existing ones, not kill them altogether.

Well, except for 8 tracks. Those never made sense to me.

Of course, since nothing that is predicted to die actually ever dies, I am really just making a big deal about nothing. I guess I am just growing bored waiting for people to realize that nothing ever really dies in the technology world, and that Google Wave is still too around the corner to be any use to us right now. Then maybe we can get some interesting ideas flowing again.