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The terminally-ill Google Wave was less a curious beast than one came at a curious time.
Mid-2009 was the time when Twitter was really, really coming into its own. Facebook had become a behemoth that was rapidly moving from "can it beat MySpace?" to "MyWhat?". The big social media innovations of the previous few years were going mainstream, because their barrier to entry - a short status update - were so much lower than those that had preceded them.
People who had missed blogging, had missed Twitter, had missed the rise of social networks, were suddenly desperate to catch the next wave that came along, and to catch it early. Google is a big, huge powerful company stuffed with PhDs. Wasn't it logical that they would be the ones to bring the next big thing forward? When the first announcement and demo of Wave was a show greeted with cheers and waving laptops from developers, the path to a clear, but wrong, assumption was laid.
Last summer was a bizarre time for me. I'd spent years telling people that various things were going to be important - from blogs to Twitter - and generally, being ignored by most people. Now everybody was enthusing about something new. We had internal discussions about it. We had meetings and brainstorming sessions, and I really started to wonder if I'd just got too old, that I was beyond the edge, that I had nothing to add to the future development of social media in the company, because people saw Wave as important, and I didn't.
To me, Wave looked awfully like a solution hunting around for a problem. It was a bunch of cool technologies that had been bundled together into a product that made no sense. I've tried an awful lot of Web 2.0 style products down the years, and you get a feel for those that stick and those that don't - and this felt like one that wouldn't. I just tried to find the blog posts I wrote about Wave - and discovered that there weren't any. That's a pretty good sign that I didn't care.
Here's the thing: the impulse to look for the next big thing is a good one. But you need a touch of discrimination, and a couple of basic rules to understand if something has a hope of success. If you look at every successful social media innovation, it has met a basic, easy to understand need:
- I want to publish easily (blogging)
- I want to share my photos (Flickr)
- I want a better way of keeping up with my friends (Facebook)
- I'd like to know what people I'm interested in are thinking (Twitter).
"It's sorta like e-mail, or a document editor or live chat, all rolled into one" is not a clear statement of need in that way. Some people spotted this and clearly articulated it a year ago. In fact, Wave's attempt to do something brand new - to create a model of communication and collaboration that had no physical world analogue was the single most interesting thing about it - and I eventually convinced myself that Wave would succeed on that basis alone. I was very wrong. That was what doomed it. People need an idea, a metaphor to hang on to. Apple understands that. That's why so many interface elements on the iPad, from the Address book to the Notes app, are rooted in existing physical objects. If people can't grasp the basics of what this service offers in a few minutes, it's doomed. The shorter you can make that understanding phase, the more chance you've got of succeeding.
The other thing to bear in mind is, that for all the hype around Google and Apple right now, neither of them are innovators in the social space. In most cases, what they're both known for is doing existing stuff much better. There was search and e-mail before Google. There were mobile phones and (apparently) tablets before Apple. These companies just made them into something better and more useful. Their innovation is in refinement and experience, not in concept.
Twitter, Facebook, blogging, Flickr...none of these came from big companies. The majority of the major web innovations that have really taken off have come from small companies, or even tiny teams of innovators. Google was the wrong place to look. It's too big, it has too many interests and too little focus. It can't even integrate the start-ups it buys.
Somebody small may yet take the (open sourced) technologies behind Wave and do something really cool, really compelling with some of them. And rather I hope they do.
