Legal Research

The Demise of Google Wave

By Connie Crosby

On Wednesday in an Official Google Blog post, Urs Hölzle of Google informed us that Google Wave would no longer be developed:

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.

Hölzle goes on to give some hope that some of this initiative may live on in other ways:

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 can’t say that I am surprised. I have enjoyed using Google Wave with a few different groups on projects. Still, use never really went past experimental. There was not enough to compel people to return to the site. Even though it was billed as email reimagined, we are all too wired into our email to make a shift over like this. Even when Google introduced email updates about what was happening in the Waves, it was too little too late.

Did you use Google Wave? Will you miss it?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on August 05, 2010 (boomark / email).