Google has killed the Wave product that was introduced in May of 2009 as a combination collaboration and communications service..
Announced on the Official Google Blog today, Google (GOOG) killed what many considered to be the next wave of Internet communications.
My first take on Wave was that it was the “spork” of communications services, perhaps combining things that were usually better left separate….at least easier to understand when they were seperate. That’s not to say I didn’t use it on collaboration projects. However, because of the complexity, it was hard to get other people to get into a Wave. Products like Basecamp from 37signals were much easier to understand.
Here’s Google’s October 2009 video demonstrating Wave (5 months after launch – which already indicates an issue):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo&w=600&h=375]
Google didn’t spend much time on Wave at this year’s Google I/O and developers’ interest was noticeably low.
Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow said that Google Wave didn’t see the type of User Adoption that Google would have liked.
But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a small but strong Wave following. Developers who were using wave will have an open service at least until the end of the year and can keep the code that Google used to build Wave.
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.
Perhaps the best demonstration of Google Wave is the Pulp Fiction Wave made by Whirled below (NSFW):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcxF9oz9Cu0&w=600&h=375]