Drowning not waving

Google Wave we hardly knew you, much less used you or worked out what we were supposed to do with you. No Surprise then that Google announced last night that it was ending development of Google Wave due to, ahem, lack of “adoption”.

A little over a year after it launched, where one guy wave his laptop in the air (turns out he was drowning and not…) Google will cease development of Wave, but leave it live until the end of the year.

It certainly had its fans who liked the real time communication and collaboration it offered, the ability to share images and other media in real time, but they were few; too few.

According to Google: “But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

“Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”

The statement from Google all seems primed towards the future. Wave was a lame duck with some interesting social features in the wrong place. That’s true of Google Buzz as well.

Both appeared to be engineering led rather than user led. Both were created out of the premise “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and it turns out that, yes, it was kind of cool, but too much in isolation; too standalone to be really useful on a daily basis.

Google is a company with a lot of lego like social media bricks and it can not seem to find a way to make them work together….yet.

think about all the pieces it has built or bought, there are a lot – there’s Blogger, OrKut, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google Docs, Friendster, Picasa, YouTube, Gmail and microblogging service Jaiku. It’s like a bunch of toys strewn across a playroom floor. There are a lot of pieces, a lot of constituent elements of social media, that work well on their own but need to work together to produce a whole.

Over the course of the last few months the web has been full of rumours about something dubbed Google Me – a bonafide social media product from Google.

Last week we heard more about that as it was reported that Google was holding discussions with games developers to make their games available on Google Me. Google was linked with Zynga, Playfish as well as Playdom, which is being bought by Disney. This followed Google reportedly spending up to $200m buying a stake in Zynga, which makes Farmville and Café World, and whose games have been a big hit on Facebook are a seen as essential sticky social elements that you have to have.

In its statement last night Google perhaps hints further at its plans when it talks about integrating some of Wave’s real-time features into “other Google projects”.

In mid-July we heard that Google was looking for web users to take part in a “usability study”. News of the study suggests that Google has a working demo site that it wants to let users loose on. Putting users and the experience at its heart.

Ending developments of Google Wave looks like it is tying up loose ends, centring resources, and putting all efforts into Google Me. That certainly chimes with what Adam D’Angelo, the former Facebook’s CTO and founder of Q&A service Quora, posted in June when he said large number of people at Google working on it.

Further evidence comes in last night’s report of Google’s acquisition of Slide.com, which makes widgets for social networking sites (including Facebook),  for about $182m, according to reports on The New York Times and TechCrunch. That deal is being seen another key part of the Google Me jigsaw.

Google Me is clearly on the way, heralds of its arrival increasingly sighted, could come before year end, and this time after the failing to ignite a Wave or a Buzz Google has to get it right. It can only fail so many times in one space.

However, even getting it right guarantees nothing not with Facebook sitting pretty with 500m users and powering its way towards a billion. Question is when does that number, if it ever does, become unassailable.