As much as Google might like to try new and interesting things there are some efforts that just don’t catch on. Google Wave was one of those things.

When I first saw the demo of Google Wave I got fairly jazzed because I thought that this was something that was truly unique and different; and not in a bad way either. At various times over the last year I have surfed over to Google Wave and seen what was happening but it turns out not much at all was happening.

The big problem with Wave was that there was no real need or practical purpose for what they were trying to do with the project – in short it just drifted along with no purpose.

It seems that Google has realized this and is draining the pool. Google Wave, while on life-support until end of year, is no more.

From the official blurb:

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

IT’s too bad because I think there was a lot of potential but I am also not surprised at this news.

Wave good-bye to Google Wave is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google Wave got a lot of tech press when it was first announced and techies lined up to try and get an early beta invite (myself included) hoping I think to get in on the ground floor of what many hoped would be the next Gmail success. In the time that followed the excitement over what Wave could bring to the table as some new transformative web technology began to fade.

Well at today’s I/O conference Google announced that it was taking the beta tag off of the service and that Wave would be available to anyone with a Google account. One has to wonder though if this new status for Wave will make any difference to the confusion as to what exactly the service is, or will it only become more confusing as more people try it out.

The thing is that for all the really interesting technology behind Wave the service is incredibly hard to describe to people. After all how do you describe something that is a mixture of an instant messenger, email, social network, and collaboration tool to people who think that Facebook is the Web.

During its time as an invite only beta Wave has found some traction as a collaboration tool with people like Chris Brogan singing its praises but from my experience with it has been less than stellar. Don’t get me wrong I still think that the concept is really interesting and full of potential, I just don’t think that Wave is something that will gain any real traction amongst regular Web users.

As it is, even amongst the more admittedly tech oriented contacts in my Wave address book, you can see the biggest problem facing Wave – no-one is using it (a small green dot will appear on their profile avatar is they are using Wave).

Google Wave goes public. Does anyone really care? is a post from: The Inquisitr

College Humor helpfully parodies a Google video- though I still don’t ‘get’ Wave (I understand how it works, just not how it’s useful) this actually isn’t a bad intro.

Someone finally found a use for Google Wave! is a post from: The Inquisitr

The web is buzzing today (pardon the pun) over the latest launch from Google, Gmail Buzz, a sort of social sharing come status updates service.

The early reaction has been mixed, and rightly so. Gmail Buzz (or is that Google Buzz in Gmail?) mixes features seen across multiple social networks and bundles them together in the one service; it seeks to be master of all, and yet suffers for the same reason. There’s the obvious comparisons: it takes on Twitter (status updates,) it takes on Four Square and even Google Latitude (location awareness,) it takes on Facebook (social sharing,) and it has features seen in dozens of other sites.

The two services it presents the biggest risk to are Google Wave, and FriendFeed, although with the proviso that FriendFeed is already dying anyway.

Gmail Buzz isn’t the same as Google Wave in a strict sense, but it’s the elements Buzz borrows that puts Google Wave on death watch. There’s the collaborative media sharing of photos and videos; hardly ground breaking stuff but a core feature currently offered by Google Wave. But the killer feature of Buzz is location: unlike Wave, Buzz is not a stand alone site/ application, and comes built into Gmail. Whether Gmail users like it or not, they all get access, and unless you’re using some of the more exotic features of Wave, Buzz is more convenient, more common, and will in a very short time surpass traffic and use rates for Wave.

The FriendFeed comparison is an obvious one: Buzz comes complete with the option to like an item, group comment on it, or share it. Some of those features are now common place on Facebook, but Buzz offers no risk to the social network giant. FriendFeed, already on borrowed time now has a serious competitor with a captive audience. If FriendFeed wasn’t going to be closed previously (they claim it isn’t, but we’ve never believed that,) it will be now, the only question outstanding being when.

Access to Buzz isn’t universal yet, with Google currently rolling it out. We’ll know for sure in about a week how well it’s received, but in the mean time we’re betting it will be moderately successful for Google in the short term.

Side note: Buzz also must present a serious threat to Google Latitude as well, and we can’t see Latitude remaining as a stand alone service for any significant length of time given Buzz would appear to duplicate its features.

Google Gmail Buzz: The Google Wave + FriendFeed Killer is a post from: The Inquisitr

2009 was a pretty eventful year.

The US inaugurated its first black president. Michael Jackson died. (And Billy Mays and Brittany Murphy and Patrick Swayze and DJ AM, too.) Something happened all up in Iran and media outlets across the globe ground to a halt because some kid was playing an extended game of hide and seek. Granted, nobody has a job yet and swine flu could yet kill us all- but hey, the Yankees won the world series! And there was a parade. With balloons and Derek Jeter.

The same parties responsible for the Google Wave/Pulp Fiction mashup have created a rather intriguing recap of the year in the Google Wave collage style, and it’s an interesting retelling of the year’s events:

[via Mashable]

Cool: Google Wave 2009 recap is a post from: The Inquisitr

Hands down, the least boring and most lulzy demo video I’ve ever watched online.

Using the “does Marsellus Wallace look like a bitch” scene from Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson as Jules gives you an in depth look at Google Wave. Some NSFW language in the clip:

[Via Mashable]

Jules from Pulp Fiction explains Google Wave is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you believe the hype, Google Wave is the biggest thing since sliced bread. The “reinvention of email” service remains in closed beta with invites slowly becoming available, and I managed to get my hands on one over the weekend.

Our own Steven Hodson has an extensive review of Google Wave here: Google Wave Review, but after several days trying to work Google Wave out, I had to chime in, because to put in bluntly: I don’t get the hype surrounding it either.

I get that Google Wave is about online collaboration, and once it opens up to the public it will probably become a moderately popular collaboration tool. What I don’t get is why it’s apparently so damn wonderful, and more importantly why this should be treated as something better than email.

If you haven’t tried Wave yet, I can’t help you with Google Wave invites, but I can break down the basics. Google Wave is basically threaded email with the ability to insert things, like Google Maps or polls. It’s set up so you can easily share a “wave” (basically a thread) with groups, so you have one stream of correspondence neatly merged into the one view, as opposed to separate emails which I guess can become messy. Updates are also delivered live, so it hits the sweet spot with Silicon Valley’s current obsession: the “real time web.”

The features are all very well and good, but why can’t these features be built into an existing Google product, one that many already use….like Gmail. There’s no massive reinvention of email in Wave, it’s just email with some neat collaboration tools added.

The flaw though is that it’s not compatible with Gmail, or any other email platform, so you can only share a Wave with others on the system. That might be fine for work group collaboration, but is it strong enough to be a stand alone product that people will use instead of email, or I suppose more likely alongside traditional email?

The Google Australia team should be congratulated for coming up with the idea, and products such as Wave do help drive thought about better ways of doing business. However there’s far too much kool aid being drunk, because although it’s clever at times, Google Wave isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, end of story.

Google Wave: not the best thing since sliced bread is a post from: The Inquisitr

Not even a day into Google Wave crashing upon the shores of the tech blogosphere and we have the L.A. Times gushing on over how it’s is going to transform how they work. Now that would be all well in fine if it were for the fact that the number of points they make about how much Wave is going to be the killer journalistic toolkit couldn’t be applied to tools that have been already with us for some time.

Collaborative reporting: this was their high point.

The idea that you could share, edit, and change the flow of any article being written by more than one person or a single journalist and an editor. Uhm …. hmmm .. Perhaps you guys should have taken a look at Google Docs since much of what seems to be all hot and cool for you in Wave already for the most part existed in Google Docs. This would also take care of that whole live editing you mentioned further on.

Record and archive interviews: repeating what is already available

Again to varying degrees this has already been done by a program called Evernote which can be shared and stored in the cloud. As well it can perform text searches in photographs and other scanned in images or digitally imported information – something that Wave can’t do.

Discuss while you read: the making of a confusing mess

They seem for some reason enamored over the idea of people being able to add comments or have conversations interspersed throughout the article. Suddenly semi orderly comments are not good enough, no now we have to totally throw any possible coherence right out the window by letting conversations pop up in the middle of a journalistic train of thought. How anyone can see this as a benefit to reading the news is ridiculous.

Transparent writing process: watch as we string words together.

Ya, that’s a great idea … let’s hop right on that one. As a writer the last thing I want is someone looking over my shoulder as I try and string thoughts together from disparate source so that they can make sense. Not likely. I can just imagine how Truman Capote, or Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would have reacted if they knew that someone else was reading what they were typing.

Instant Polls: that is so Web 1.0

I am sure that whoever through this one in there doesn’t have the first clue about the Web and all the tools that are already there because the idea of polls on the fly has been around for a long time – nothing new here.

The fact is that if journalism wanted to change the game they didn’t have to wait until Google Wave came along. Just about everything listed in this love affair of a post has either been available for some or is available without Google giving it some sort of kiss of authenticity.

If they wanted to advance journalism to a new era they could have done so long before Wave was even a ripple in a couple of Google engineer’s eyes.

Cutting through the LA Times hype over the Wave hype is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google Wave has been hyped as being the next great thing to hit the web. It is suppose to change the way we interact with each other and share information – all in a real-time fashion. When it was first announced I watched the videos and listened in on more than a few blog post conversations about this next great game changer from Google and I signed up immediately to try and be one of the lucky ones to get in on the early testing.

Well as you can tell from the news that dominated the web today both on Twitter and an increasing number of blogs Google opened up the floodgates for 100,000 lucky people to have a chance to play with the preview (read and alpha of an alpha). Like a lot of people I waited patiently for my invite to hit my inbox every time I would refresh my email client and like a lot of people it never showed up.

However I was lucky enough that a good friend managed to snag me a live invite, rather than one of those “take your place in line” invitations and have spent the last hour or so exploring what is suppose to be the brave new world of communication and information sharing.

Am I impressed?

Not yet. Not in the least. Sure the real time display of all the people in each of the waves you are involved in might be rather neat but I’m honestly not sure how long it will be before it gets old, boring and irritating. The other big problem I have is from the moment you log into Google Wave for the very first time because this is what you will find waiting:

Now what?

Look I don’t claim to be the smartest person in the world but neither am I the stupidest person either but my first reaction on see this was – now what?

You see, we don’t have a problem like that when it comes to starting up a new email client for the first time, or a new IM client for the first time, or even the majority of social media services for the first time – you use one and the rest pretty well follow suit. This isn’t the case with Google Wave because it is a totally new beast; and I’m sorry but a one single paragraph welcoming message isn’t going to help the confusion the majority of people will face with Google Wave.

It’s taken me the better part of an hour just to figure out the rudimentary ways you can use Google Wave so I can imagine an average computer user coming upon it for the first time will be even more confused.

Anyway this is just my first run through with it and maybe on subsequent testing when more people are around and more features come on line my feelings might change but like Steve Rubel asked in his post – what problems is Google Wave solving?

In the meantime I wouldn’t get too excited over Wave and wait until it gets a wider audience of active users because right now – to be honest – I’m not seeing anything that will turn our information sharing world on its head.

I’ll be spending a lot of time exploring Google Wave over the next few days with the hope that unlike Robert Scoble, who doesn’t have to high of an opinion of Wave, I will see what all the hype is about. I’ll be wrapping up that exploration up into a full post so you can have a better idea of what is coming your way – good and bad.

Google Wave – save your excitement is a post from: The Inquisitr

September 29, 2009 (Inquisitr Wire) — 6rounds, a product from GixOO Ltd., is the first video chat extension to be featured on Google Wave. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. Anticipated to be a useful tool for communication and collaboration, 6rounds is excited to be a part of this innovative product and platform.

Anyone who doesn’t have a Google Wave account can enjoy the benefits of the video chat platform at www.6rounds.com.

“Video chatting in Wave was a top requested feature,” said Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager at Google. “The 6rounds extension brings another level of collaboration to Google Wave and we’re excited to see how people use it.”

TheNextWeb.com says in a blog article, “In reality 6rounds has taken everything we’ve seen in the Instant Messaging space to the next level and delivers an unprecedented, emotionally engaging and fascinating experience which is so much fun, you have to try it yourself.”

As a cross platform environment, 6rounds combines webcam video chat, social activities and interactive zones to offer its users an exciting variety of experiences that they enjoy and share together live and in real-time. The 6rounds platform and the wave gadget will allow its participants to do a variety of shared interactive activities, including watching videos, reading news, playing multi-player games, listening to music, e-learning,
co-Facebooking, shopping together and much more.

The 6rounds platform can be easily added to any third party website or service. The video chat platform also offers an open API which will welcome developers and designers in all concentrations to create fun and exciting additions to enrich the experience and allow users to enjoy even more different activities and games with their friends.

6rounds video chat extension to be featured as part of Google Wave is a post from: The Inquisitr

Wednesday September 30, 2009 – mark that on your calendar folks and if you were among those that signed up right after Google Wave was announced it might be the time to keep a real close eye on your e-mail inbox.

This is because the first 100,000 people are going to be getting their invites to join the Google Wave preview around that time. It is also the day that Google will be moving Wave from its temporary sandbox to its new home at wave.google.com. This is according to the post on the official Google blog and of course the rising numbers of tech blogs announcing the news.

Even though Google is rolling out this early preview they are quick to let everyone know that it still isn’t ready for prime time. As well there are some key features that they still have to fully implement since much of the Wave team’s efforts since the original announcement back in May has been focused on scalability (a good thing), stability, speed and usability.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can’t yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can’t configure the permissions of users on a wave. We’ll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you’re just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

I know I signed up right after watching the original announcement video but I doubt I will be among the first 100,000 to get a shot at playing with Wave; but if I do I’ll make sure to let you know all about it.

Will you be a part of the 100,000 vying for a Google Wave spot is a post from: The Inquisitr

After being involved with computers, software and the web for the better part of the last twenty years I have I guess in a lot of ways become rather jaded at all the pronouncement that come our way. This is going to change the web, that is going to change the web, superlatives are constantly being thrown around. In the end though most of these have really been nothing more than improvements upon what we already have been using.

That could very well change with Google Wave.

I don’t say this lightly but from everything that I have been reading (and trying hard to digest) for the last few hours I have a gut feeling that Google Wave could very well be one of those rare cusp moments when the way we do things really change. Not only will it change the way we do things but that change stands a very good chance of being persuasive because Google will be making Wave open sourced and with an open protocol. This means that literally anyone will be able to become a wave provider. The only thing I haven’t been able to clearly understand yet is if separate Waves will be able to communicate with each other, at this point I can only assume so given the open nature planned for Wave.

If you want a clearer understanding of what Wave will be able to do I recommend reading Tim O’Reilly’s post at the O’Reilly Radar blog as he breaks it down pretty good. the short form though is imagine combining your contacts, e-mail, IM, instant interaction, drag and drop browser interaction, the ability to playback a complete conversation and do this all in real time through your browser. As O’Reilly puts it

Let’s say I want to communicate with someone. I start a wave, just as I might start an email message. The recipient(s) see an incoming wave, just as they see an email today. Where the magic starts is with replies. In email, you have the choice of including no context, only a portion of the message you’re replying to, or the whole thing. In the first case, you need to go back to the original message for context; in the second, you have wasted copies going back and forth. Come into the middle of a long thread and you may be replying to a discussion that has already moved on or covered the point you want to express. But what if there were only one message, shared in the cloud? Now, your comment on the second paragraph is attached directly to that point in the conversation. There are no redundant copies of portions of the message, as replies are seen in context.

While it is still early days and much of Wave is still being worked on this is what your browser desktop could look like (courtesy of O’Reilly Radar)

In the video I watch with the team behind Wave they might not have wanted to admit that this is a Twitter killer, in fact they went to great lengths to say it was an addition to it, but if I was Twitter; and quite possibly FriendFeed, I would be very nervous at this point. Once Wave steps beyond the developer playground stage I believe we will see a major shift in how the Web is used.

From a bloggers point of view this could one of the best things that happens as from the beginning Wave is being built so that we can include a Wave as part of a post which means any conversation in that wave about the post can happen real-time. This is all a part of the incredibly rich API that is being built in the Wave platform. Again from Tim O’Reilly’s post

The API has been used to build a bunch of cool extensions: Bloggy, a blog client, lets you make a blog post as a wave. When people comment, they join the conversation. Spelly is a spell-checker that uses the entire corpus of the web as its dictionary. Linky is a link-recognition engine that is clever enough to recognize that the link you just entered is a YouTube video, or a link to a photo, and give you the option to embed the target of the link into the wave. There’s even a twitter client – you can tweet into and out of a wave! And of course, buggy, a bug-reporting tool that can also be a participant in a wave.

My one problem with this is that it is currently all browser based and I am not a believer of living and breathing in the browser. What I do hope is that because of this rich API, and hopefully developer environment Google wants to create around Wave, that this could also transform our desktops. that however remains to be seen but damn it almost makes me want to crack out me old developer tools.

Now I don’t know what the timetable is for this to actually become something that we can start using everyday (I’ve signed up for notifications of this) but I can tell you I haven’t felt this excited about something happening on the web as I am about this.

Could this really be the wave of our web future?

There’s a tsunami coming to the web – Google Wave is a post from: The Inquisitr