wave Goodbye

Remember, not so long ago, I thought that Google Wave was a really good idea for a collaborative tool?
Well, apparently I was the only one!
Google announced that they would no longer support the Wave (read only from Jan 2012, fully dead from April 2012)  - not really surprising as the "Google Gears" needed to run it have not been turning for some time. Google claim that everything Gears did is now done in new browsers - especially theirs ("Chrome").
I recently (virtually) attended a seminar by BT's Simon Thompson who suggested that people found the Wave just a bit too complicated to deal with. Apparently, once you get a group of people all joining in a conversation, adding views, responding to what others say, and including extra information in the form of files, pictures etc., when it is written down on paper, it all looks a bit of a mess. Not surprising at all, when you consider the amazing complexity of conversation, and the comparatively impoverished information portrayed in the written versions of language when compared to speech. Google! You should have asked a conversation analyst or a systemic functional linguist first!