It will come as a blow to many academics that Google have recently decided to discontinue support for Google Wave, their real-time collaboration and communication tool. When Google originally announced Wave there were many in the academic community who were looking forward to having a platform for a mix of real-time communication and joint editing. With the addition of LaTeX widgets things looked really promising. Sadly, Wave didn't live up to it's promised potential. It did the job, but it didn't become the perfect tool academics were hoping for. None the less, I'm sure it will be missed.

There have been plenty of blog posts dissecting Google's decision and most seem to have reached the same conclusion. Google Wave tried to be all things for all people and instead ended up being confusing and hard to use. Waves are neither document nor chat, and they certainly aren't up to handling large amounts of LaTeX. When you're trying to write a paper or some other document you need an environment that will handle not just snippets of mathematics but the full typesetting power of LaTeX. For this niche use, Wave is little better than a wiki with support for inline equations.

Wave could be useful as a communication tool or, in less generous terms, a glorified instant messenger. It's real-time nature certainly makes this a possibility, but whenever I tried to use it like this I ended up overwriting things I shouldn't have. Sometimes being able to edit anything that has gone before isn't good idea. A conversation has a distinct linear evolution and this needs to be respected if communication is going to be clear.

So Google Wave is on it's way out, but I'm sure that it has pushed us further towards a good solution. There are similar products that are coming out of the woodwork now that Wave won't overshadow them. Hopefully people will take all the things that Google Wave tried to be and separate them into niche products that do their specific job well.

In the case of collaborating on a LaTeX document, I'd like to think ScribTeX has got that one covered.

ScribTeX is far from perfect and I have a hundred and one features I would like to add, but I'm very aware of making sure it doesn't become a tool for all possible uses. If it does, it will stop being focused on the one task it should do well - editing a LaTeX document. ScribTeX will never become a multitool for academics, but I'm sure it kicks Wave's ass at writing papers collaboratively.

I look forward to seeing which other niche uses can be extracted from Wave. The more focused tools there are, the less we need tools like Wave.