Yesterday Google announced that one of their social platforms, Google Wave, will be shut down. Google Wave was a great product in terms of being on the cutting edge with features such as bots, real time collaboration, playback and more. But with these strengths came many weaknesses.

As a designer and developer I see and use many websites on a daily basis and some of these websites are easier to use than others and Google Wave was on the “harder to use” spectrum of this list. Just to post a new wave took some thought, this may not have required a lot of thought but it did require some in comparison to e-mail or your favorite social media website and replying to a post was even more difficult. After a while I was able to catch on to the interface but by then I found little reason to use Wave besides as a gimmicky tool.

We have already started to see some of the great features from Google Wave make its way into other products such as Google Docs and Google Sites. I hope that Google learned a lot from Wave and that maybe in the future we will see the playback function move into Gmail where I think it belongs.

Let me know what you think about the death of Google Wave and what features from Wave would you like to see in other services.