How Google could have saved Wave

Google killed the Wave project on 04th August 2010, while promising to "extend the technology for use in other Google projects". "Wave has not", Google said, "seen the user adoption they would have liked".

Wave was an exceptional product, a revolutionary way to look at communication and documentation in today's world. As Lars Rassmusen, one of the brains behind the Wave said Wave was answer to the question - "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today". And it was not just that - wave was:

• how a word processor would look like if it was invented today;
• how a calendaring solution would look like if it was redesigned today;
• how people's text-chat would get logged if it was logged today, and;
• most importantly, how web-pages / web-apps would communicate with the server if the protocols were defined today.

The last bullet is important because Google Wave was not just a jazzy collaboration web-app but a platform in itself. "The Google Wave protocol [was] the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and [included] the 'live' concurrency control, which allow[ed] edits to be reflected instantly across users and services."

What was most important was the way Google Wave understood 'content'. When the Wave Team said - "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more." - they meant that:

• No document in Google wave is considered to be restricted to a single user
• Each 'action' on the document is indexed with - the user who made the change, the datetime stamp
• Wave does not restrict users to include only specific type of content in a document like text or images, in fact the wave protocol gave developers ability to create plug-ins in wave to include new forms of content (say a flash animation file) into the document. These gave the wave an extensibility to include content types hitherto un-invented

Given the amount of time/thought/effort which had gone into the Wave, I think Google made a mistake by killing the project so early. The Wave was a technology for the future, I am sure the protocol would be utilized in all future collaborative environments (and no environment of the future will be standalone! Everything will necessarily be collaborative!).

More importantly, Google had some tools at its disposal to be able to put the Wave to test right away. For example Google could have integrated Wave technology in GMail, this could have been done in 3 ways:

• Adding a 'Wave' tab in GMail, the way Buzz and Chat have been added (and we all know how much both these tools have gained from being 'bundled' with GMail)
• Allowing users to convert any email into a Wave (or rather storing it as a Wave). This would have meant that wherever email was used for real-time or near-real time (differed) collaboration (for example friends in 2 different cities creating a document), people would have preferred Wave over email.
• Storing all emails as Waves internally. This would mean that if I answered to an email as inline [click to see image], it would get stored in the Wave's inline format which stores timestamp/ user details. Those people using GMail or Wave compatible clients would be able to read the mail in that format, other would read it like they used to see the mail.

Of the above, the third is the most difficult to implement due to backward compatibility issues with other clients, but the first two could have been easily implemented.

A similar approach could have been taken to integrate Wave with Google Docs, so that users could convert their documents from GDocs format to Google Wave format allowing people to edit documents also in Wave format and using the Wave protocol to store the document.

Another Google property to use Google Wave technology was Google calendar - because Wave offers a much better way of inviting people, capturing responses real time while making changes to venue and time based on responses.

Finally, and the most compelling fitment-case for Wave is blogger and Google Sites - two tools meant for users to create personal websites. Google wave platform offered this amazing functionality to embed a 'wave' in a webpage. How would this have helped:

• First, in wave it was incredibly easy to insert video / images compared to traditional blogger / sites
• Second, if you edit some information in a wave, the wave would automatically get updated across all webpages / blogs where it is embedded
• Third, content in a wave is dynamic (compared to normal webpages) - for example - photos can automatically be viewed as a slideshow in a wave without any coding / javascript / widgets to be added to the webpage or any extensions in the browser.
• Finally, for webpages which were living documents such as software specs or user manuals, using wave would give the instant ability to 'playback' the changes. This would help people in understanding differences between different versions and updates made to the document.

Conclusion

Wave as I said is a revolutionizing technology, however, Google did a big mistake by launching Wave as an independent standalone web-app which did not have any integration roadmap to integrate with other services of the web. This was probably a mistake as big as what Joel Spolsky calls 'single worst strategic mistake' - rewriting code from scratch.

Google from the very beginning should have integrated Wave with its other platform products like GMail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites/Blogger. Even when Wave did not see 'adoption' as Google would have liked it - the best way to save it was to come up with an integration roadmap and slowly integrating the revolutionizing effects of the technology platform in other products which would also have prompted other players from using this technology in their products.

Unfortunately, rather than take any of the above courses, Google decided to kill the project. The only saving grace is the Wave codebase which will be available for other players to build upon or re-use. Lets hope that Wave codebase can be nurtured like the Apache Project! Amen!

Long Live Wave!

• launched on 28 May 2009
• killed on 04 August 2010