Today at I/O, Google announced a host of new developer tools for the Internet of Things, including a new protocol called Weave designed to make it easier for devices to communicate with each other. It's a cool idea, but as one observer noticed on Twitter, there's one big problem with it. There's already a service called Google W__ve. It was beautiful and awesome and now it's gone, and all the Internet Things in the world won't bring it back.

I speak, of course, of Google Wave, the next-generation communication platform announced at Google I/O in 2009, released in 2010, and shuttered in 2011. You could drop in photos and videos, basically using the fabric of the web itself as a medium for communication, a bold take on how electronic communication might move past simple text on a screen. It was really cool, and I still miss it every day.

In fact, Google Wave has such a passionate and devoted fan base that it's overtaking Google Weave itself. If you search for "Google Weave" right now, Google Search will gently nudge you back to Google Wave, the one true "Google W__ve" product. Seriously, try it.

To be fair, after that you'll see a bunch of articles about Weave and Brillo in the Google News box, but the rest of the algorithm clearly hasn't caught up. It hasn't reached Rand Paul Rand levels of weirdness, but it's clearly on its way. What does it say when your discontinued products are more popular than the ones you just announced?

In fairness, Wave was an awesome, life-changing vision of the future of communication and Weave is an API for your thermostat, so maybe it's not a completely fair fight. Weave was also just announced an hour ago, so it hasn't had the same chance to build up a devoted following, including writers like me, who yearn for its return even now, as I'm writing this very post.

(P.S. Please bring back Google Reader. I'll do anything.)

Google I/O 2015: Introducing Brillo and Weave