Menlo Park (ip-192.com): Google announced that it will no longer develop Google Wave. The collaboration tool was a real time web based service designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. The ability to modify waves at any point did allow users to create collaborative documents similar to wikis. Users could also link waves to other waves as projects developed.
Google plans to release most of the source code developed for Google Wave as open source software, allowing the community to develop its features through extensions.
"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," said Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, on Google’s official blog site. "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."
Google says that central parts of the code, as well as the protocols like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source. Google will work on tools to allow users to “liberate” their content from Wave.
“Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science,” said Hölzle. “We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”
Google first unveiled Wave at its annual I/O developer conference in 2009. The company says that despite huge internal excitement over the possibilities offered by Wave, users did not display the same enthusiasm.
"It's a very clever product. You never know why it didn't work," said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt at a technology conference in Lake Tahoe. "Our policy is we try things. Remember we celebrate our failure. This is a company where it is okay to try something that is very hard and not have it be successful."
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