Well it’s over. After 10 or so months, Google has announced it’s given up on Wave. It’s a shame really as it’s a product which caused a lot of excitement before it launched as it was a new method of working together… everyone can update a document and share information in real time!

When the invites first started getting handed out I was so desperate for one as I really wanted to try this amazing thing Google had created, I was lucky to win a competition (I forget who ran it sorry) although my (first!) invite was given to me by a friend, but I was the first in the office to get one so, like the good geeks we are, we got quite excited that we had our hands on Google Wave.

The excitement didn’t last long.

About as long as that sentence.

Because Google Wave is a sharing/co-operative product, and not many people having it back then it was kind of pointless.

Twitter was full of

“Have you got G Wave? My address is…”

Every so often, Google would release more and more invites and let those who have Wave “Share the experience with others”. So I sent out my invites to the rest of the office and waited for them to join.

I had also started a Manchester SEO wave by this point and found another problem with Google Wave. It’s performance.

As soon as you started to get a couple of Wave’s going things started to slow down which ruined the real time experience and just annoyed me as well as many other people.

In the MEC Manchester office we used Wave for a few days, not really for anything productive. Just as a means of communicating with one another (we all sit next to each other in an open-plan office by the way) and editing each others messages. Oh the fun we had.

After not very long at all people started dropping out of it… conversations would cease as when Wave’s got quite long it became hard to keep up with what was said where as anything could be replied to. No one really used the extensions because no one really understood them or wanted to take the time to understand them.

Few days later and “that” day came and no one used Google Wave anymore so we all went back to E-mails/MSN/Twitter and sometimes even speaking to one another face to face.

Over the next few months I popped into Google Wave to see if things had improved, which never seemed a right lot and my number of invites I could give out had grown again. Not that anyone wanted them at that stage, which was hard to believe considering when Wave was launched people were selling invites on eBay for £50-£100.

It is a shame, it was a good idea but Google Wave will never come to anything. For now at least it will remain so if you do use Wave it’s not going to vanish overnight.

And if you do use Wave, or have any general thoughts on it leave a comment below.