It is time to say goodbye to Google Wave, now that Google officially announced to stop the development of Wave promising to maintain the unique web collaboration tool until the the end of the year 2010. To clarify this: Google Wave is not dead -- yet. As many of Googles efforts in social tools the service runs as long as Google wants it to. Other discontinued tools are Google Answers, Lively and Dogdeball.

In the last months a lot of people wrote about why Google Wave failed. I think the mayor failure was to promote Wave with a big bang on the Google I/O conference 2009, followed by personal invitations. As many others I subscribed to be invited, looking forward to test Wave. Weeks later the invitation code showed up in my mailbox. I was pretty pissed off by Googles product policy and so my first attempt was to find out what does not work on Wave. I found a lot of errors, unfulfilled promises and the user interface was difficult to understand and adjust.

Within the following weeks I gave some beginner webinars. I was able to concern with Wave intensively and started to love it. Wave is a great collaboration tool, especially when several teams work together on different topics. Using it I learned the real technical flaws of Google Wave:

• Not very intuitive user interface for beginners
• Lose track of waves when there are a lot of them
• Use of Google Chrome to avoid browser crashes
• Bots and Gadgets running roit within waves

I still believe that Google Wave is a great tool for collaboration. Unfortunately the goals Google set have been to enthusiastic, showing a lack of understanding peoples needs. For shure I am not the only witness. Maybe Googles effort to sell Wave as an business solutions failed beacuse of this. Anyway I am shure that a lot of techniques and tools will appear in continued tools like Google Docs and Orkut. Now it is time to Wave Goodbye:

We tried to make it work, you in a cocktail skirt and me in a suit but it just wasn’t me
You’re used to wearing less and now your life’s a mess so insecure you see
Well I put up with all the scenes and this is one scene that’s going to be played my way

Take your hands off me
I don’t belong to you, you see
And take a look in my face for the last time
I never knew you,you never knew me, say hello, goodbye
Say hello and wave goodbye