[Google] Goodbye Google Wave

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On May 27, 2009, Google made a breakthrough announcement - a revolutionary new product called Google Wave. They described it as a radical new way at looking at communication from a modern perspective. It promised greater capabilities for real-time collaboration as a combination of email, chat, wiki writing and social networking. The service also allowed for developers to create custom extensions to expands its capabilities and make the game a heck of a lot more powerful. The sky was the limit really when it came to the platform.

I fought tooth and nail to get a beta invite so that I could start playing around with the service. Seriously, the lengths I went to in order to find a friend who still had invites for the initial closed beta was, well, crazy. And when I finally got my invite, I totally went nuts with the service and was wildly excited about the potential for the service. I could see how this would totally change project management collaboration online with other unique use cases such as running roleplaying games online.

But on August 4, 2010, Google decided to shut down Google Wave at the end of the year, citing lack of user adoption as the reason for axing the service. Of course this announcement broke my heart and I can't help but feel it's a tad too soon. It's only been less than three months since the service opened to the public and now they're already killing the service.

So of course I wanted to spend a little time to talk about it.

[Google] Not So Good a Week

This hasn't been one of the best weeks for Google given everything that's happened. Admittedly, I'm focusing on two major events for the week.

First off, after getting past the $500 share value mark, Google's stock came back down to earth after Barron's had projected the stock would go down. At the time of this entry Google stock is valued at 484.80 USD per share.



Also this week, the news came out that Google was retiring Google Answers as was confirmed by an Official Google Blog entry. Answers was one of Google's earliest services that allowed people to place a price on subjects they needed help researching. It'll be a shame to see it go and already people have started petitions to bring the service back like the Save Google Answers initiative.

It's unlikely that it'll work since clearly retiring Answers is more of a business decision that one out of whim.