IN 2009 Google Wave came splashing in (pardon the pun), bringing collaborative online working to the masses. Two years on, the Wave has gone, but will it be missed?

As a student regularly treated to the delight of organising groupwork with individuals who seemed incapable of being in the same place at the same time, I thought Google Wave would become my absolute saviour. It sounded perfect.

The promo video told me I could use it as a shared space, where I could discuss and work and communicate with friends and colleagues, through text and videos and photos and maps and all sorts of interesting stuff! Amazing!

So why did I never use it?

Maybe it was just to much to get to grips with? It seemed such an over-complicated tool that was trying to do so much, that if I weighed up the amount of time I would need to invest in learning how to use it, it would probably be quicker to do things the old-fashioned way.

Google’s most famous product is by far its search engine, and I believe this is due to the fact that it is so wonderfully simple. It doesn’t have any extra frills; just a simple bar to type in and one button to click “search”. So why is it that all other Google products seem to dazzle the user so much that they just end up giving up?

Google announced over a year ago that no further development would be done on the site, and now the message has come that it will be axed entirely on April 30, 2012. Even though I have been far from an avid user, I really feel it is a great shame to see the Wave go after so much energy and time has gone into it.

Wave is not the only Google product being killed off in the big “spring clean”. The official Google blog wrote on November 22 that Bookmarks Lists, Friend Connect, Gears, Search Timeline, and Knol are all getting the boot too. Time will tell whether Google Plus will be going the same way in the future, although I for one am still not impressed (see http://connection.codeworks.net/2011 /09/21/all-the-fuss-with-google/).

I wouldn’t say that Google should just stick to what it is best at. A company with such calibre and scope is bound to leap on a few red herrings. I guess it is just a case of keep on trying, until someone finally finds that “new Facebook”.

For those who would like to continue using Wave, Google have directed them to projects such as Apache Wave at http://incubator.apache.org/wave/ or Walkaround at http://code.google.com/p/walkaround/

Emilia Flockhart is a communications executive at Gateshead’s Codeworks, and is @emiliaf on Twitter