About a year after a big announcement, a lot of hype, and … well, not really much else after that, Google have announced that they aren't going to be supporting Wave any more.

As I'm quite firmly in the technology-loving geek camp, I was one of those who were excited to hear about Wave when Google announced it, got excited when I got my beta invitation, excitedly told other people about what it was and why they should be interested, and then disappointed to see it get roundly ignored.

I still think it's a shame that it hasn't taken off — but I think it's a bigger shame that Google have abandoned it. It's clearly a long way off from realising its potential, but I don't think that means that it doesn't still have potential. Wave was the first online "thing" that I can think of that really moved past the idea of "how do we make X work in a digital version" (where "X" is a newspaper, TV station, record — whatever the pre-digital object of interest was) and instead asked "what can we do with "digital" that we couldn't do without it?" Marshall McLuhan talked about the way we look at new technologies 'through the lens of the past'— Wave was an idea of what the internet looks like without those glasses on.

But it's now officially a failure. Google are set to abandon it at the end of the year.

So here's what I think went wrong, and where Google look set to be heading next with the technology.

What was it?

On a technical level, Wave was a Google-hosted service, like Gmail, that anyone could join. (After the invitation-only beta, of course.) But it was also an open-source, self-hosted service that anyone could install on their own server. It was a communication platform. It was a collaborative working platform. It was a website. It was a widget that could be embedded into a website. It was a place for public conversations with entire communities, and private conversations, professional conversations, personal conversations, and conversations with robots.

It was a lot of things, which makes it hard to describe in anything other than vague, abstract terms. Perhaps it's better to look at what it is for.

What was it for?

Wave did a lot of things. And it did them better than many of the alternatives. It was better than email for managing large conversations, because of the way they existed on a server, rather than across hundreds of messages across dozens of inboxes. Better than Instant Messenger for real-time conversations, because it didn't require a dedicated application, kept everything on a (searchable) record and enabled you to see messages as they were typed (if you wanted to.) It was better than either of them for making conversations open and public. And it was better than a blogging platform for managing comments (as they could be embedded into a blog - or a number of blogs - and managed from a single inbox), and better than blog platforms or wikis for co-authoring documents, as they could be co-written, edited and discussed, all in the same place, and all in real time. And of course, anyone with programming ability could also write "bots" to automate Wave, and make it do things that other platforms simply couldn't do.

But "better than" isn't good enough. Betamax was technically better than VHS. Minidisc was "better than" CDs. Blu-ray is better than DVD. HD is better than standard definition- but none of these "better" approaches actually succeeded over their inferior alternatives. And "better" isn't necessarily better for everything; being able to work collaboratively is great, but when the finished product has to be printed out on paper, or sent out by email, Wave created an additional level of work that had to be done.

So it was for a lot of things, none of which jump out as being a key selling point. Perhaps looking at who it was being 'sold' to is a better way to look at it?

Who was it for?

When you're building something to sell, you have to think about who you are selling to. When you're building something to give away (remember, Wave was free), it doesn't matter so much.

Or does it?

For Wave to be useful - as with any sort of "social" service — you had to have friends actively using it. This takes time to build up. Consider Twitter- launched in 2006, but didn't really get any serious attention until the beginning of 2009. It took over 2 years to build up a) enough registered users and b) for the users to get active enough to create enough content for the service to start being valuable.

Heavy users of Wave were likely to be people who already have overflowing inboxes, RSS readers, and busy accounts on Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc. etc. to maintain. For Wave to be helpful, it would have had to take away traffic from one or all of them. But it didn't- it added another source of information that needed to be maintained. So without a way to combine and simplify at least one of those other services, it wasn't well suited to the heavy users.

Was it about collaborative working? I'm not the only person dying for something better than Powerpoint for collaboratively writing presentations- but something has to be good enough and widely accepted enough for everyone involved to be using it instead of the alternative, otherwise it makes the process more, rather than less complicated. So it had to be in use by everyone before everyone could use it together.

I'm still not sure what the one thing that Wave does really well- that is, so well that I think "we" should really be using it. I'm not even sure if "we" is me and my professional colleagues, me and my friends, me and bloggers I like and people who like my site… Given that it's up to the users to market anything as socially-driven as Wave, that's really not a good thing. We can't easily see what it is, what it is for, or who it is for.

Perhaps the excitement was the real problem- after the hype that nerds like me were raising, there was no way that Wave could live up to it, considering these kinds of factors, which meant that it was destined for failure as a brand - even if it was a technological success.

Still, it is a very cool piece of technology…

Google Me

What happens next is going to be interesting though. Eric Schmidt said some interesting things about the "failure";

"We liked the (user interface) and we liked a lot of the new features in it (but) didn't get enough traction, so we are taking those technologies and applying them to new technologies that are not announced. We'll get the benefit of Google Wave but it won't be as a separate product."

Rumours are that Google are working on a "social network" of their own; my first response to the Wave news was that they were probably clearing the decks (both in terms of their public brands, as well as their developers' projects) to make space for whatever it is that they are building. So no doubt, when Google release whatever it is that they are currently working on, we'll be seeing a lot of the technology behind Wave appearing in it.

What could it be though? With half a billion users (and still growing fast), Facebook has gone way beyond the kind of scale where users are going to be persuaded to move to another network. "Google Me" (if that is what it will be called) has to do something different than just present your friends status updates and latest photos.

"Social Search" is something that Google were working on in Labs a while ago which caught my eye. The idea was that you told Google who you are (ie. your profiles on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc, and any websites or blogs that you wrote), and Google would then identify who you were conencted to. This meant that if you were searching for something about New York hotels (for example) and one of your friends had posted something that was relevant but would normally be dozens of pages down the search listings, then Social Search would put it right at the top — because it was someone you were connected to, it was something that was especially relevant to you.

Since then, it has graduated from Labs… and vanished. My guess is that this is going to be a key part of what "Google Me" will become. Not another Facebook/Twitter/Buzz/MySpace/Linkedin etc, but something that pulls all of those things together.

Think about it- you might want to have a profile on Facebook that your friends see, and a seperate LinkedIn profile that your professional contacts see, and another one on MySpace that fans of your bands see — but that doesn't mean that you want to visit 3 sites to see everything interesting from 3 different (but probably overlapping) sets of friends. Add in Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, Gmail, Buzz, Google Reader, Windows Live, Xbox Live and whatever other websites or networks you are registered with and active on, and there is a problem there that someone like Google is very well placed to connect. Pull in all that information, categorise and organise it for you, and deliver it to you. And, on the side, also improve Search- the product that actually makes Google its money.

For the company whose goal is to "organise the world's information and make it accessible", that sounds like quite a good fit. Far better than Wave, anyway.