And so another great Google experiment comes to an end. CNN reports that Google Wave is on its deathbed:

Google is pulling the plug on Google Wave.

Google intended the messaging program, launched in 2009, to be a near-replacement for e-mail, which it said had grown tired.

But on Wednesday, the company announced that it is shuttering the project by the end of the year because it didn’t have traction with consumers.

“Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” Urs Hölzle, a Google senior vice president, writes on the company’s official blog.

The real experts in the blogistan will be weighing in shortly with acute analysis on the cause of this sad outcome. But before they do, I figured I would get some shots in.

Google Wave was the one Google product that excited me after Google Maps. Google Earth – cute but what’s the point? Google Checkout – less icky than Paypal but how far can that go? Google Apps – little, though not too late. So on. But Google Wave was an attempt to solve a problem that faces anyone who uses email and messaging in a serious way i.e., anyone who predates the arrival of Blackberry. Keeping track of conversations, action items within conversations, expanding conversations to a larger group, and a host of other needs were the very target of Wave (though it had other goals as well).

Why then the failure?

I can offer no more than agreement with the consensus that it was altogether too complicated and complex a tool — and productive use of it required that one’s collaborators use it as well — but the one deficiency that applies to so many of Google’s products (such as the Gmail and Google Reader web interfaces) was ironically missing in Wave: Google’s arguably poor UI aesthetics. I am not going to once again link to the “41 shades of blue” New York Times article; suffice to say that Wave refreshingly abandoned that Google norm of HTML 1.0 styling, stark colours, and crowded elements co-existing with chunks of empty space. Widgetized boxes with drop shadows, pleasing shades of blue and green, a nifty scrollbar, clearly demarcated buttons and menus, and other sophisticated elements set Wave’s UI apart (let us ignore, out of respect for the dying, the use of Arial over Helvetica).

Google has noted that bits of Wave will be reused in other products. I hope they start with the user interface.