GOOGLE WAVE IS HISTORY

I remember when I first heard about Wave - a new product from internet giant Google. After watching the promotional video and reading about what all it would do I was excited lol. No more having to always sit in meetings that took 3 weeks to schedule because everyone who needed to attend are so busy. I believe Shené and I have perfected the use of the video chat to conduct meetings as needed between us and BLAKstar staff but we always had something missing. We needed an afforable (if not free) interactive application or software, where we could change the document or whatever we were working on in real time and all those with access to the chat could as well. Google Wave  was what we had been looking for - that and much more. It hooked us in with it's promises of real time editing features for what you were working on as well as it recorded everything with in the video chat so that people who could not make it to the scheduled meeting could come back hit play and watch what they missed, then add notes, changes, updates and their own video message and it would be there for everyone to see. Exciting right? Sadly it wasn't the easiest thing to do. The navigation of the application wasn't the easiest and getting it to do what it said it would proved to be frustrating at times. It was a great thought and I think someone will actually make this happen but the question is who?  Facebook?

MeaLee

Via CNN Tech
By Peter Cashmore Founder and CEO of Mashable

(CNN) -- Google this week abandoned "Wave," its much-hyped social collaboration tool. Wave was perhaps the prototypical Google product: Technically advanced, incredibly ambitious and near-impossible to use.

Its demise is the canary in the coal mine for Google's social networking plans: Facebook is destined to build the Web's next wave, as Google continues to tread water.

Wave was a testament to Google's technical prowess: A real-time communication platform that combined elements of instant messaging, e-mail and collaboration software. The only problem: With its many dials and switches, mastering Wave was the web equivalent of programming your VCR.

Read the rest of Peter Cashmore's article after the jump


Few users took the time to understand the product, and mainstream adoption proved unattainable.

It's the same fate that awaited Google's other recent foray into the social realm: Google Buzz. This Twitter-like service seemed smart in theory, but Google's inability to build simple and compelling social tools meant the service was perceived as a nuisance rather than a breakthrough.

All of which must have Mark Zuckerberg rubbing his hands together in glee. While Google is one of the few companies large enough to build a significant social network, Google Wave's demise is further proof that these efforts (rumored to be called "Google Me") are destined to fail.

Like Wave, Google Me will likely be a work of technical wizardry too advanced for us mere mortals to understand.

Google's failure to develop engaging social services is more disastrous than it might seem at first. Social networking is no longer just a time-waster for young people -- it now reaches all demographics and encompasses personalized search, highly targeted advertising and the red-hot social gaming trend.

As Facebook builds a user base of more than 500 million people, it also stockpiles the personal information required to provide more comprehensive ad targeting -- and a more personalized search engine -- than Google could ever hope to engineer through algorithms alone.


Google isn't unaware of this predicament: The company is throwing its resources behind a plan to escape its social networking slump. But short of a miracle -- an acquisition of Facebook nemesis Twitter, perhaps -- Google won't become a socialite anytime soon.