Google Wave, Poorly Understood and Underused, Dies in Infancy

Google Wave was announced to great fanfare at Google's I/O 2009 conference. It sounded promising, a melange of new-world communication protocols--somewhere between an email and a chat room, but more real-time than either. Could this be Google's killer social media app, overtaking Twitter and Facebook?

But the warning signs were evident from the start. Wave proved extremely difficult to explain. I found it impossible to describe what the service was in unambiguous terms. I found myself...