Google Wave, announced at the Google I/O event in May, 2009 and fully launched in May of this year, is a real-time messaging platform whose time has run out. Google announced late yesterday that it is stopping development of Wave as a stand-alone product.
Google indicated that Wave did not receive the level of user adoption needed to justify continuing the product, although it did have a number of dedicated users. The service remains live for the time being. The announcement on the Google blog, posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations, indicates that the Wave site will be maintained at least through the end of the year, and that the company will extend the technology for use in other products.
In addition, the Google blog entry says that, “The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.”
Full information is on the Google blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html.
