Waving Goodbye

It is time to wave goodbye to Google Wave. Some of you must have tried Google Wave. When Google Wave came out I was really excited about the concept and possibilities. Combining and integrating multiple communication streams into a single thread. Google wave is shut down now and will power off the servers April 30^th. So why did it die?

Good question. My opinion is it was ahead of its time and all the connectors weren’t there to make it work as it needed to. In business, and in our personnel lives we need a Google Wave like function. You send an email to a coworker, he IMs another coworker, who texts a customer to post on the Facebook page asking other customers to Tweet with the hash tag #WTH and you would like to see all of this activity in one connected thread, because it is.

Google integrated some of this into Google+ by letting you make one post and notify additional people who are not on the platform by email. I hope the reverse the funnel and allow us have a single aggregated stream to read everything we care about, Email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, 4Square, LinkedIn, Etc.

The Web was always about information. The biggest challenge in the early days was finding what you wanted. Today’s challenge is filtering out too much data and making the logical connections between linked data. We are going to hear more and more about this with the push of “big data” into the SMB channel. A small business can have huge data, and as more data like medical records gets digitized, linking and finding this data may need Google Wave like technology.

So I waving goodbye to Google Wave, welcome Google+ with open arms and look down the road to more data and more tools do deal with the “big data”.