Damn Google Wave, I hardly knew you. After all the hype it is now gone. Google canned Wave about two years after they first showed it off to cheers. I recall watching the demo while on vacation and being blown away. The pieces that were shown were literally transformative in their execution. Too bad people just didn’t get it in a mainstream sort of way. Not that I really did after I finally got into the developers’ sandbox. If I am honest, I haven’t even logged into Wave in the last six months. It never made its way into my workflow and it never solved any sort of problem for me.

At the end of the day it failed to fill any sort of void for most people and I think that has to do with the fact that it wasn’t built to fill a void. It was built to be transformative and mind blowing. I am convinced that aspects of Wave will make their way into Google Docs, Sites, Gmail, and their other properties — you know, the tools that were built to do specific things. Imagine Docs with a Wave like panel that allowed teams to dialogue in real language while co-authoring something. That’s a feature I could use right now.

I am actually really impressed that Google killed it so quickly (and sad) … sort of restored my faith in the fact that they release stuff as beta and in this case saw it just wasn’t happening. I need to eat a little crow at how much attention I paid to it in its pre-release days, telling everyone how much this was going to change things. In the end it did a ton of stuff, just not for a ton of people. Again, seems amazing to me that Google could just kill it. Maybe that is the transformative lesson to learn here?