Aussie-built Google Wave goes to grave

Google is pulling the plug on its Aussie-developed Wave collaboration platform after just over a year in the market.

Google Wave is going to its grave, never really knowing what it was for.
(Credit: Google)

The company said on its blog on Wednesday that it is halting development on Google Wave, a real-time collaboration tool aiming to combine various forms of online communication.

"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," senior vice president Urs Holzle said in the blog post. "We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone 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."

Google debuted Wave in June 2009 to much attention, but there was much debate over what the tool would be used for.

Even the product's own developers seemed unclear. "It takes a little getting used to," Wave's software-engineering manager, Lars Rasmussen, told CNET around the time of its launch. "We're still learning how to use it."

Wave's primary feature was to let users collaborate in real time, using an inbox-like interface that resembled a mix of Google's Gmail Wweb mail service, and its Docs and Spreadsheets product. Each strand of messages, which could include text, links and photos, was called a wave. Google launched the product with an API for developers to build extra functionality in the form of extensions that users could turn on and off.

Wave remained in private beta for most of its existence. Two months after its announcement at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google allowed a group of 6000 developers in. Two months after that, it began letting in some 100,000 users for testing. The service fully opened to the public in early March of this year, taking a spot in the company's web-based office suite.

Via CNET