Google kills Wave service

Google announce it will pull the plug on its Wave service. In case you've never heard of it, Wave is a tool for real-time communication and collaboration, it received a lot of hype when it was first announced at the Google I/O conference in May 2009 but failed to capture the public's attention. Google says they'll leave Wave online at least through the end of the year, and they'll provide tools so users can "liberate" their content from Wave.

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.

More details at the Google Blog.