I wrote about Google Wave before and even asked people if they wanted invites. But yesterday, Google decided to stop its development. I’m not sure if I’d be sad or happy about it, I have mixed emotions.
Here’s the official statement from Google
We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.
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. 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.
I personally think it’s a product that is way ahead of its time and it was really cool to see such bleeding edge technology but sad that people didn’t know how to use it. (warning: MIDI sound autoplay by going to that site!)
Goodbye Google Wave … and thanks for the cake.
