This post is a little late, but I wanted to formally say goodbye to Google Wave. A service years ahead of its time with a few major short-comings that held it back.

When Wave was debuted at Google I/O 2009, it immediately caught my eye. Finally, a much needed update to the archaic system of email. The problem with email has always been that it is just a digital emulation of the physical postal system we have had for decades. A message is created, sent, read, and replied to with another message. After a few back-and-forth conversations, the original message gets lost in the quoted area, and multiple and sometimes inconsistent copies are left scattered around the participants’ email folders. The fix was easy and Wave nailed it. Host a single message in the cloud and let everyone edit and add to the same copy. The result is the equivalent of passing a note around between a group of people and everyone had the chance to write free form. This meant someone could comment on the specific section of the message they are interested in, making all additions contextually relevant and easier to understand. Wave’s Playback feature was the glue that kept the chaos organized. Playback gave a timeline to each wave, allowing the user to go back and see the conversation unfold, one step at a time. Extremely useful for a discussion that has become a borderline novel, or for bringing a new participant into a preexisting discussion.

So what went wrong? How could a service poised to bring email into the 21st century flop so badly? The biggest mistake Google made was simply not integrating Wave with standard email. If you have a Wave account, you can only communicate with other people who have one, too (“Wavers” is the term Google uses). The reason email is so popular and works well is because it is universal. It doesn’t matter what service you use or where you send the email from. As long as you have an address to send it to, the message will get there. If they had allowed Wave to be used as a replacement to Gmail, they would have seen a much higher adoption rate and higher usage.

Trying to explain Google Wave to a new user was a challenge all by itself, and that is the second hurdle that Google couldn’t get over. For the longest time, Google only had their 1 hour and 20 minute long presentation showing off every detail of Wave, but didn’t boil down to a decisive point. They were able to summarize the key features into an 8 minute video, but it was still too long to grab most people. New services like Wave should be conveyed in a couple sentences that really make people go, “Wow.” Wave was extremely extensive and feature rich from the get go. In typical Google fashion, many of those features felt half-baked and the overall user experience suffered. If Google had focused on the key features of Wave and implemented them with a higher level of polish, things might have turned out differently.

It’s not over yet. Development on Wave may have ceased, but that doesn’t mean all it had to offer is gone. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw features like collaborative messages and Playback in a future version of Gmail or in other Google apps. Google will treat the Wave project as a learning experience, and will hopefully come back with something everyone will love. Until then, I bid you farewell, Wave. It’s been a fun ride. Hope to see you again soon.

Note: On August 4, 2010 Google announced that development on Wave had stopped. They plan to keep the service active for existing users until the end of the year.