Yesterday Google announced that one of their social platforms, Google Wave, will be shut down. Google Wave was a great product in terms of being on the cutting edge with features such as bots, real time collaboration, playback and more. But with these strengths came many weaknesses.
As a designer and developer I see and use many websites on a daily basis and some of these websites are easier to use than others and Google Wave was on the "harder to use" spectrum of this list. Just to post a new wave took some thought, this may not have required a lot of thought but it did require some in comparison to e-mail or your favorite social media website and replying to a post was even more difficult. After a while I was able to catch on to the interface but by then I found little reason to use Wave besides as a gimmicky tool.
We have already started to see some of the great features from Google Wave make its way into other products such as Google Docs and Google Sites. I hope that Google learned a lot from Wave and that maybe in the future we will see the playback function move into Gmail where I think it belongs.
Let me know what you think about the death of Google Wave and what features from Wave would you like to see in other services.
Yesterday Google announced that one of their social platforms, Google Wave, will be shut down. Google Wave was a great product in terms of being on the cutting edge with features such as bots, real time collaboration, playback and more. But with these strengths came many weaknesses.
As a designer and developer I see and use many websites on a daily basis and some of these websites are easier to use than others and Google Wave was on the "harder to use" spectrum of this list. Just to post a new wave took some thought, this may not have required a lot of thought but it did require some in comparison to e-mail or your favorite social media website and replying to a post was even more difficult. After a while I was able to catch on to the interface but by then I found little reason to use Wave besides as a gimmicky tool.
We have already started to see some of the great features from Google Wave make its way into other products such as Google Docs and Google Sites. I hope that Google learned a lot from Wave and that maybe in the future we will see the playback function move into Gmail where I think it belongs.
Let me know what you think about the death of Google Wave and what features from Wave would you like to see in other services.
About the Author
Andrew Maxwell
Senior Director of Software Engineering & AI Product Leader at GoDaddy. I specialize in building distributed teams and resilient infrastructures that prioritize the human element of software development.