A recent article by Maggie Shiels, a Technology reporter for the BBC News, proclaimed the news that "Google drops Wave because of lack of users". Reading through this, it seems a little strange to me. But it seems as if that because "Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked", says Google, they are going to phase out the site and integrate some of the developed technology into other Google projects.
Honestly, giving up on Wave seems premature to me. I have been able to use Wave for a few different classes, both for note taking and project managing, and it has been a very interesting tool. Yes, I agree with the assessment that for it to be successful, many people need to be signed up and using it. I think pushing it within both corporate and education environments should have really taken it off. Wave has this awesome real-time communication and collaboration aspect, and it does it all within a browser. It has character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes that users have made. It integrated other forms of communication and I'm really disappointed that Google is giving up on it. Perhaps it is because users required invitations, but that doesn't seem to be the case - I still have a good number of invitations that are sitting unused in my account.
I think this is indicative of the core problem with many information technology initiatives. This great technology exists, but people lack either the incentive or knowledge for how to use it to its fullest potential. So I don't think that the retirement of Wave is a technology failure, but an information one. If Google is going to "create innovations with the potential to advance technology" they're going to have to innovate better user communication and education along the way.
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On a side note, I've been thinking about something recently. I don't read the news as much as I'd like to these days. During my undergraduate studies, I read the New York Times every morning, took the copy with me throughout the day because I would likely reference it at least once either in a class or in conversation. For the most part I focused on political and international news, and "digested" almost all the news articles through that lens.
Today, the way I get news it quite a bit different. I skim the international BBC headlines online when I get into work, briefly scan through my Twitter feed for local and technical news, and during my lunch break I'll dive deeper into a handful of stories that catch my eye. These articles are almost always technology or information related, which makes sense considering my program. Seems to be the story of grad school so far - all this information I want to process and not enough time to do it.
I still don't know what Google Wave does. The way I see it, this stems from two things: one, there's no clear problem Google is trying to solve with this product that someone can explain to me in a sentence: "You know when X happens and you hate it? Wave solves that problem."
ReplyDeleteTwo, the invitations rolled out far too slowly. I was lucky to get one fairly early on, but shrugged at Wave's capabilities (see point one). I heard tell that someone OTHER than Google ended up doing a great YouTube video on how to use Wave...but I guess it was too little, too late.
I agree that Wave had the most potential in the education and businesses spaces -- that's why I still don't understand why it was never rolled out to Google Apps members -- but I don't necessarily think that they gave up too early. After all, it's hard to justify the time and man hours of a team on a project with very little user adoptions.
ReplyDeleteI do think that it needed to be better presented to the public and that its ideal use cases could have been better highlighted. I'm not sure if in its current iteration, Wave ever would have had "success" but as I stated in my Mashable post, I really think that many of the problems could have been stymied by better execution.
The good news is, you'll get to use the service at least through the end of the year. Have you checked out EhterPad, the company Google bought? There are a lot of clones available for free and I find that it is a fantastic note-taking tool.
Absolutely - that's why it's a user-education problem more than anything else.
ReplyDeleteI know only through experience (aka trial and error) why those technological characteristics help me as a user. Character-by-character typing? Fantastic for collaborative note taking. Revision history? Makes answering the question "what was it that we were talking about last week?" a lot easier.
It was mostly marketed with a shiny-cool-technology framework, rather than with the perspective of it being a useful-tool. I think that had then been able to frame it better from the user's perspective, it would have been a different story.
@Christina, I loved the EtherPad site. Thanks for the comment!
ReplyDelete