The Death of the Wave

Google has announced that it will no longer be developing it’s Wave web application. RIP. The technology was incredibly innovative, with tools such as context linked spell-check, that could truly begin to revolutionise the way that web applications, and/or browsers work.

Real-time collaboration seemed to be such a wonderful idea. When I first heard about wave from an incredibly excited Rhodes Computer Science Honours student I imaged groups of people, all sitting at their own computer in their own spaces, in their own time-zones working on long and interesting documents – perhaps environmental policies, or proposals for projects to liberate women – but it seems that the reality isn’t as rosy.

It’s been a while since I had to collaborate with anyone on a document but I do remember it being laborious enough when you could express yourself using your body language (I talk with my hands like an Italian stereotype) and your tone of voice. When you are forced into a situation where there are say, more than three people trying to express their ideas and collaborate on a document, despite wonderful context linked spell-checkers, things might end up a little confusing.

Too early?

Possibly. I don’t think as a species, humans are yet able to hand all of their unique character traits over to a homogenising space like Wave. We like seeing people’s faces – which is why Skype has become such a hit – we like hearing people’s voices – which is why VOIP is becoming a success – but we like people most face-to-face.

One degree of separation is enough for us for the moment. If we can send documents over email and then meet to discuss them, that’ll work. If we can conference call to allocate tasks, that’ll work. If we can IM to check up on progress, that’ll work too. But we need that close association to make sure we know what’s up.

The facts are:

Wave was a fabulous idea. Incredibly innovative on paper and extremely exciting as a concept. But people don’t like to figure new ways of communicating in such a radically different way.

Web 2.0 social media has made all sorts of communication possible but my image of the distant people all collaborating on world-spanning projects using wave is probably happening via email and IMs. Or the traditional route of splitting and allocating the task and hoping it comes together.

There’s no denying that Wave is a good idea. But, it was too good, too soon. 

Thanks so much to MyNameHere for the wonderfully appropriate pic. To follow MyNameHere's photostream go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/inseminator/.