When Google announced Wave, that innovative Email / IM / Collaboration product, I’d found it very exciting. I was happy to see in it many concepts I’ve been awaiting for a long time, notably a very nicely done “threaded inbox” paradigm. Still, after playing with it a little I began to refer to it in my lectures on Information Overload as “The jury is still out on whether this will reduce the overload or increase it”.

Well, the jury is back. A year later, Google announces it will phase out Wave. It just didn’t catch…

It’s tempting to claim it was ahead of its time, thus blaming the users for shortsightedness. The truth, I suspect, is that it wasn’t ahead of its time – it was ahead of the hardware, not the computer hardware, but the brain’s. The Wave interface was an explosive riot of information, color and visual detail; and the use model was likewise very overwhelming, with multiple conversations going on in parallel on the screen in many modalities. It was sort of like everyone shouting at once… while waving pictures and screening videos at the same time. Despite claims to the contrary, human brains are just not up to such a level of parallel input processing and multitasking. It was simply too much… or so I think; I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

This is a pity, because had Google limited the wizardry to just part of the functionality – say, a superb media-rich threaded email program without real time messaging and retroactive editing – it could have ended up with a very nice email client. Which they still might, since they say they will port some of the functionality to their other products.

Still, we owe the Google team our respect for what was a truly exuberant experiment in pushing collaboration to new realms. I can’t wait to see what they will think of next!…

Screenshot courtesy Marco Derksen, shared on flickr under CC license.