Say hello, Wave goodbye: on the death of a loveable product

RIP: Google Wave, 2009-2010

Telling this story may do my reputation for any sort of knowledge about the tech world no good, but last weekend I bristled at a friend’s laughter at the ‘failure’ of Google Wave. Five years from now, I confidently predicted, Google Wave – and other implementations of the open-source Wave protocol – would be widely used worldwide, including by businesses.

Clearly, I was wrong. Google’s announcement this week that it’s pulling the plug on development of Wave signals the end of one of the briefest and brightest of all the company’s many abandoned projects. Google isn’t pulling the Wave site down, at least not yet. But with no new features and no new marketing, a young product will inevitably wither on the vine, especially after being so publicly abandoned.

You can’t blame Google – Wave really had, as Google’s statement put it, “not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” But why did this powerful new service prove so unpopular?

The common diagnosis is that Wave was simply too powerful, and it did too many different things. As one blog put it, they’d “been using Wave since October and many of us are still confused about what it’s supposed to do.” Users didn’t see it as a replacement for anything in particular, and stayed away.

This view is essentially right, but it understates the problem. Plenty of services succeed without a single killer purpose: lots of people couldn’t see the point of Facebook, given that its individual functions – messaging, photo sharing, and so on – are all done better by standalone services.

The truth is that Wave really only did two different things – but that users saw them as incompatible.

First, and most apparent when you use it, Wave is an integrated online/offline messenger. You can see which of your contacts is online, and chat with them instantaneously, like with a traditional instant messaging service. But if the person you want to contact is offline, you can contact them anyway, safe in the knowledge they’ll see your message when they log on, much like with email. The benefits of email and IM, combined in a single service with a single contact list, is an attractive and long-overdue idea.

The second use of Wave was document collaboration. You could paste a piece of text into a Wave, and both edit it simultaneously, each seeing each other’s edits, commenting on the text, rolling back changes where necessary. It was a hugely powerful tool for document collaboration, and contained useful publishing tools like the ability to embed a wave on a website.

A smooth, integrated online and offline messenger and a powerful document collaboration and publishing tool. Two great, worthwhile and marketable services. But here’s the problem: they don’t belong in the same system.

Not just because of user ‘confusion.’ The truth is that Wave’s editing powers ran totally contrary to its messaging abilities. Think about a conversation with a fellow human being: you’re not preparing your words for publication, you’re saying them then and there. If you say something wrong, or something you didn’t mean to say, it’s out there. You can’t edit it as if it never happened. You can correct it, or qualify it, but both participants in the conversation recall the original remark.

Similarly, you can’t edit an email you didn’t mean to send after the person has read it. If I go back to an email I received last week, I know that email will be exactly as I left it – although it might have been followed up with another.

It’s a fundamental tenet of human conversation: what’s said is said. You can take it back, you can modify it, but the person you’re conversing with will have heard you the first time. It’s part of engendering trust.

Document collaboration is totally different. The two people are working together on something to be seen by a third party. That third party isn’t to be aware of the process of argument and negotiation that completed the final document. So it’s vital to be able to edit anything, and everything. But when the the third party sees the finished product, all that needs to be stripped away.

By combining these two separate functions – conversation and document collaboration – into a single system, Wave undermined the user conventions established for each. First, it made conversations editable. I could go back to something I said – or even something you said – five minutes ago and edit it, giving the conversation that followed a different meaning or simply rendering it meaningless. Reading the discussion back, you’d think we were both mad or drunk.

Second, Wave made conversations publishable. With one click, one member of a previously private conversation could  publish the whole conversation on a blog or website. The overall effect was to provide a communications medium that didn’t feel safe.

Of course, Wave had safeguards built in – if a previous message in a conversation was edited, for example, the changes were clearly marked. But the conceptual leap required for users to be comfortable with the concept of editing past parts of a conversation outweighed the advantages of being able to do so – which, frankly, were few.

The future

What’s frustrating is that a few simple additions could have solved these problems. A simple ‘new wave’ pop-up screen could have let users choose if they wanted to start a conversation – with the editing and publishing functions turned off – or work on a document, perhaps with a regular conversation happening in a bar to the side.

Indeed, this may well be what the wreckage of Wave is used to create. Google say they intend to “extend the technology for use in other Google projects.” There are already two services that would benefit from the addition of some of Wave’s features.

First, Gmail, and its associated Talk IM service, could benefit from further integration, so that emailing someone and IMing them become less distinguishable.

Google Talk, unlike most IM services, does save messages you recieve when you’re offline and show you them when you log on. It also saves old conversations in your Gmail account. But the whole thing is clunky, and you still have to decide whether to IM someone or email them.

(Google Talk could also be enhanced by Wave’s most technically impressive feature – the ability to see what the other person is typing as they type it. But as many users seem to have hated this function as loved it.)

It’s Google Docs, though, that probably stands to benefit more. Google’s office alternative is already a pretty good collaboration tool – documents can be shared between people, and changes tracked and rewinded, and documents published on the web in various formats. But simultaneous editing by two people in Docs is limited – each users’ changes and comments can take a few minutes to appear on the other’s screen.

Furthermore, the idea of combining messaging and collaboration in a single portal – albeit not a single protocol – seems a good one. Google Docs offers a chat system for collaborators on a document, but it’s very limited.

So here’s my hope for what the legacy of Wave might be. First, A crisply integrated Gmail/Gtalk service, with a constantly-visible bar listing your online contacts; with emails from online contacts popping up much as IMs do, and IM conversations stored in the same format as email conversations.

Second, a radically enhanced Google Docs, with each user’s changes showing up instantly on other users’ screens, easy review of changes, and with a permanently-visible sidebar allowing instant, IM-like chat with your collaborators. The two services would be linked by a one-click option in Gmail conversations to open a blank collaborative document.

The importance of users

It’s tempting to fit Wave into an increasingly familiar narrative – of users choosing less powerful but familiar systems over technically advanced services. Any tech enthusiast who’s ever despaired over the public’s preference for the iPhone, with its restricted apps and (until recently) lack of multitasking, over more powerful Android or WebOS phones will probably feel similarly about Wave.

But the truth is that the users who shunned Wave were right to be confused: Wave was trying to combine two tasks which users are right to see as fundamentally separate.

On balance, the Wave experiment will probably prove a worthwhile one for Google – at a stroke it reminded the world of Google’s sheer technical prowess, and gathered enormous amounts of publicity at a time when Facebook was dominating the headlines. But the real potential is for Wave to give rise to vast improvements in products -Gmail and Docs – which are already used by millons.

There is another possibility, though. Google designed Wave to be open-source. Their intention was that Google Wave would utlimately be just one of many compatible Wave providers, just as Gmail is just one email provider.

So far, open-source Wave development has been focused on add-ons for Google’s product rather than additional providers. But with Google Wave headed for switch-off, the potential is there for the open-source community to take the basic protocol and run with it, offering easier-to-use interfaces and adding safeguards such as the facility for regular, un-editable and un-publishable conversations.

And they could wire in integrated support for another aspiring open communications standard launched recently: Apple’s video-calling tool FaceTime. Wouldn’t that be something?

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