Google Wave, We Hardly Knew You

Wave, which was once touted as the email and social media killer by Google, has been phased out by the search giant. It will still be around, hovering on the web with its diehard users, but Google plans to let it die on the vine.

Somehow the billion-dollar bully of the Internet wasn’t able to put together a social networking success. Despite its commitment to the promotion and development of Wave, the product was always met by a collective shrug by the public. Google should be worried because its Buzz product is getting a somewhat similar reaction right now; when it’s not clogging up the GMail inboxes of curious onlookers that is.

So why was Wave, which allowed real-time email threads, playbacks and drag-and-drop sharing, such a big failure? It had the features that users were interested in, but despite coming out as social networking fervor was picking up steam, it never got any traction.

One of the biggest reasons was the exclusivity that Google used to first roll it out. Since Wave was first opened by invitation only, the initial excitement involved with getting an account was soon eclipsed by the simple fact that none of your friends were there to talk to.

And that type of exclusivity is a sign that Google still really doesn’t understand what drives social media.

For many, Google Wave was an empty room that no one had the patience to fill up. Why mess with waiting around and yelling your name into the darkness on Wave, despite its cool features, when you go log on to Facebook and talk with everyone you knew, share pictures, videos, links and — probably an overlooked key — ease of use.

Sure, when you signed up for Wave, you were given invitations to email to your friends. But if you were tepid and awkward about using the site, they would be too. Telling someone “Hey, let’s try Wave and see if we can figure it out” is a lot different than saying, “Dude, you need to get on Facebook so we can chat.” While such an invitation rollout strategy worked for Gmail it crashed for Wave.

Wave was innovative and slick, but in the end it was clunky and not-intuitive, which put it at a disadvantage when compared to Twitter, Facebook and other sites.

For its part, Google is doing what innovative companies should do: kill bad products and move on. According to TechCrunch, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said the company has a try, fail and keep creating mentality.

Wave may have been too ahead of its time, but most of all it was just too much of a closed system to matter to the public at large. The products Google has rolled out that have worked have been exceptional – Docs, GMail, Google Talk not to mention search. So for that, we should give Google some credit, they are smart enough to move on.