no one was looking for wave

And people aren't looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it's most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.

via dashes.com

Never mind the "Pushbutton platform" stuff that comes in the paragraph after, it's this paragraph that matters. No one was looking for Wave.

Regardless, kudos to Google for killing it so quickly. No matter how obvious it is that it needs to happen, killing children is never easy.

Comments

[Adam]

It was certainly an answer in search of a problem. Leaving the users to figure out quite what the problem was exactly probably wasn't Google's smartest move ever.

Still, I'm looking forwards to seeing bits of the tech surface in other products.

[Jonathan Peterson]

I was HOPING that wave was going to be a platform that managed identity, applying a single UI across IM/email/blog/wiki/facebook/twitter so that I could collaborate through pub/sub with all the various tools that I deal with, from one centralized place.

Once I saw that wave was a closed wall REPLACEMENT for those things instead, it was DOA. It wasn't going to be useful unless everyone I was working with on a project had an account. And even then it's just one more fragmented content machine for monitoring.

[Michael Sippey]

@jonathan -- I think that's what they were hoping for Buzz, no? Paraphrasing Haughey's tweet this morning, $5 that Buzz is done by the end of the year. We'll see if they can pull off anything with Google Me, but the Slide acquisition and the deal with Zynga feel just weird to me...