Google has launched the public version of its collaborative software Google Wave following a beta trial, but does anyone care?

Before it made the announcement at its annual development conference yesterday, Wave was an invitation-only service. Now anyone with a Google account can sign up to it; while the internet giant also plans to roll out Wave apps for consumers kitted out with mobile devices.

The launch has so far been accompanied with a rather subdued fanfare, and to many this lack of gusto speaks of an uncertainty and vagueness that permeates the concept of Wave itself.

Google Lab developers have been telling those interested enough to listen that the beta phase showed that users favoured using Wave for collaboration in business and news organisations and at conferences. Accordingly, Google will focus on this when it rolls the service out globally.

Apparently Wave is now stable enough for a mainstream audience and various features suggested by beta-testers have been taken on board and added to the service, such as email notifications of updated waves and access controls that make it easier for users to manipulate waves.

Still clueless? Yes, me too. I’ve moved on.

Just what the hell is Wave? And will enough people care? Therein lies one of Google’s problem. It’s clearly over-complicated and unfocused.

One comment on TechCrunch just read: “Is Google Wave a social network?” Is it? What is it? Those that are in the know speak in such vague, esoteric terms that they don’t shed any light on what Wave is… or does.

At one stage, even its developers admitted their ignorance. Last year at Google I/O, Google played a video that had people begging to be invited onboard. But it failed to tell people what they could do with it.

Developer Lars Rasmussen told TechCrunch: “That’s because we weren’t sure.” He admitted that it overwhelmed people. “But we know that now – it’s about groups of people adopting Wave.” Right, so Wave is about Wave is about Wave. That hardly clears things up.

What it does clear up is  that Google has developed something without a clear function in mind, and now it’s launching it with the claim that it’s a great group collaboration tool. But it doesn’t even sound convinced by that. This is geekery gone mad.

Wave’s birth reminds me of when Google Buzz entered the world – a service clearly designed to steal some of the glory being bestowed on Twitter. It hasn’t achieved this. It has a lot of users, but the fact is that anyone with a Googlemail account is automatically signed up, so that doesn’t count.

But Buzz has distinctly lacked the very characteristic its brand name is designed to conjure up – always a danger that: giving your brand a name that it may fail to live up to; it positively reeks of arrogance and ends up just looking foolish.

So Google obviously hopes that Wave will live up to its connotation of, er waves… of information I guess, the internet being the ocean, Wave being a movement within that ocean. Or something…

Trawling the comments that beta users have made on various sites, it is clear that some are impressed with Wave, particularly its potential as an internal collaboration tool.

But some criticisms pointed at its lack of integration into other Google apps, such as Google Maps. These are surely rumples that can be ironed out. But that’s hardly the point.

For an organisation that prides itself on simplicity – be it making the internet easier to navigate, providing a brilliant map service, giving people email that they don’t have to spring clean – Google has of late acquired a strange habit of developing stuff that people haven’t asked for; and more worryingly, that they can’t even explain. And that’s not a savvy business strategy, is it?

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