Goodbye Google Wave

It’s been over 12 months since I first tried Google Wave, and much has happened since that time. At first, it was compelling because Google promised they would “revolutionize the way we communicate”, and the open source nature of the protocol. In the first few months, I, as many others, struggled to find some good use-cases for this new platform, and stumbled around making silly robots but soon enough we found some good use for it.

For the past 6-7 months, Google Wave has been the platform for most of our day to day needs at Skalar. We’ve used it for project management, CRM, code reviews, brainstorming, knowledge base, issue tracking and so on. The last couple of months, we’ve even managed to get some of our customers and partners as active users.

What went wrong

Google Wave is brilliant in terms of communication and availability of the development team towards customers. It also provides the flexibility to be used (and abused) for almost anything you need – with a little imagination and patience. However, herein lies most of the “flaws” being pointed out by the people who didn’t embrace it.

When the beta-access started to roll out, nobody quite knew what to do with it, and being busy with other things and satisfied with their current collection of tools, they didn’t really give Wave a try. One of the commonly used arguments against Google Wave was that nobody of interest (customers, co-workers, average people (aka friends)) were there, and therefore it was no use to be there for you either. Instability and alpha versions of the web-client was probably the drop for those who never came back after their first visits.

However, Wave has changed rapidly over the past 12 months, becoming a more stable and refined platform. People can now be invited to and participate in a Wave without signing up for it, just by adding an email adress as you would normally to when sharing information with people. The web-client has improved a lot by adding wave-templates for common tasks, richer control over participants (yes, you can even remove people and give read-only permissions now!), gadgets have become more useful, and there are people with experience you can consult if you’re having trouble.

Sitepoint has a poll running now where 45% of the votes are against the shutdown, but these are mainly geeks that see the benefits of scrapping some of the old technologies like mail, the average user probably still wonders what google wave is/was.

No matter how much I, and 45% of sitepoint’s readers disagree with their decision, Google has decided to shut down wave early 2011. I still have a small hope that they will change their mind, but that’s probably not going to happen.

Wave lives on

Although Google is abandoning Wave, it is fully open sourced (except for the web client), and will therefore live on to some extent. There are some server implementations like PygoWave and RubyOnSails. And a couple of client implementations like WaveLook and the open sourced simple client from Google.

At their current state, none of these are production ready as far as I know, but hopefully they will get some momentum now that there’s a actual need for them.

Alternatives to Wave

What I’m looking for now, is a web-application that can cover all the stuff that Google Wave did. So far I’ve been checking out a couple of candidates, but none of them quite seem to have the flexibility that Wave had. This situation is like being given a Ferrari to drive for 12 months, then having it taken away. I want a new Ferrari-like car, but I don’t want to build it myself using bits and scraps from semi-good cars (lame analogy, I know, but you get the point).

What’s your take on the shutdown of Google Wave, and do you have some suggestions as to what application might be replacing it?