Google announced a few days ago that they were killing Google Wave. Wave was a product that very few people used, despite it having been launched in a pretty high profile way. The technology community spent weeks talking about it, and Google pitched it as the “email killer.” I played with it shortly after the release and didn’t get it – the examples all focused on planning barbecues and it wasn’t clear how this tool was supposed to integrate with my day to day workflow.

A little over a year later, I’m really quite upset that they’re taking my Wave away. Because about six months ago (after they’d improved the technology a bit) I figured out what it was good for. Wave didn’t replace all email. It replaced entire chains of email. And in a software development organization like ours, that’s a very useful thing to be able to do. Most organizations have tremendous knowledge locked up in email. Someone asks a question, someone replies, someone else replies to that. In the end, a strategy is formed – but nobody wrote up a summary and anyone coming into the project later is out of luck. And in an inbox of thousands of messages, it’s pretty easy to miss one.

With Wave that changed. To take a concrete example, we’ve done a lot of work recently that involved integrating Cerner’s Millennium platform, particularly the PowerChart Electronic Health Record. That’s a challenge, and we had to build a lot of internal knowledge about how the system worked – both in general and about specific implementations. Cerner has some documentation, but we had to do a lot of experiments and talk to a lot of people. Encounter data proved particularly tricky. So we started a Wave – the first version of which was, essentially, “we need encounter data for these three things.” And then people commented and asked questions, and added content, and revised it, and in the end we’d had the same conversation that we would have had over email (or, even worse from an information capture standpoint, in a conference room) summarized into a very neat document that answered any question that anyone might have, and laid out our implementation pathway as well. We did the same thing for a number of other issues. In the end we had about fifteen Waves for that project, dealing with everything from design decisions to installation instructions to lists of sample data. They probably replaced a couple of thousand emails, and made documentation at the end of the project extremely easy. And because each conversation was separate, we could invite customers and collaborators to take part in particular Waves, rather than having to give them full access to a wiki (which was generally more work than people wanted to do, anyway).

So I’ll miss Wave. We’ve used lots of other tools to try and solve the same problem, including Google docs, wikis, and custom software, but Wave did the best job. The key was the messaging metaphor – once you started thinking of it as way of managing conversations, using the Wave to collaborate became quite natural. There were still some missing features (mobile access was hard, as was printing and exporting, since Wave allowed embedding of files, Google Gadgets and other hard-to-print artifacts), but the software was getting quite good. Google just promoted it to the wrong audience. It’s not a general use tool, it’s a corporate and small business tool.

Hopefully the best parts of Wave will turn up in other products. Until they do, we’ll go back to project wikis for collaboration.